Facebook’s new headset coming out soon will have eye tracking. In VR eye tracking can enable lots of cool things like foveated rendering or characters that notice you are looking at them.
Eye tracking data is also an advertiser’s dream. They can glean all kinds of information about what draws attention, try different ads and see which ones people will look at, etc.
It’s also a potential privacy minefield. And wait until people start scoring you on what you look at in an environment. I can imagine a huge number of traits and characteristics that could be gleaned from watching where a person looks in various scenes.
The problem with such a strategy is that, like with Google, all media is still going to refer to them as Facebook. When’s the last time you heard about Alphabet doing something?
It’s less about existing users not recognizing the company. It’s more about going into new markets without the Facebook brand name dragging them down.
Because one reason not yet mentioned about the name change is the one Zuckerberg himself said. They’re wanting to work on the “metaverse”, which is basically a augmented or alternate reality where you go “inside the Internet.” If he names his company “Meta,” they get free advertising every time the word metaverse is mentioned, and they sound like they must’ve been the originators.
It’s why I propose we go back to the older terms for it. Maybe Cyberspace, or CyberVR.