NEW DELHI: As he embarks on creating a parallel digital ecosystem through the Metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg — founder of the world’s biggest social media company Meta that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — said India and Indians will play a key role in development of the virtual world over internet.
Giving details about the “next chapter for the internet”, Zuckerberg — in the eye of a storm over data privacy and data control — lent heavily on Indian engineers and content developers here for its creation. “I’m really excited about the role that India will play in building this future and that’s because India’s talent pool, the engineers, developers and creators, and your whole vibrant startup ecosystem are playing a huge role in shaping the future — really, we already are here,” Zuckerberg said as he spoke at Meta’s ‘Fuel for India’ programme.
He said India is on track to have the largest app developer base in the world by 2024, and has one of the largest AR (augmented reality) developer communities, something seen as crucial in building next frontier of digital ecosystem.
Metaverse refers to a combination of multiple technologies, including virtual reality, augmented reality and video where users “live” within a digital universe.
“The reason why India is so exciting to me is two things that combined together make for something special — the entrepreneurial spirit combined with the scale of what can happen... That is what is fuelling a lot of the internet economy in India already, but it also makes me so optimistic about the future here,” Zuckerberg said.
He said the online gaming sector in India has seen a lot of growth over the past few years and the group’s investments in gaming have been growing as it moves towards the metaverse. He also counted investments in companies such as Unacademy (education) and Meesho (commerce) as “important use cases… towards the future that we’re building”.
Facebook believes that metaverse will succeed the mobile internet as we see today, and finds a lot of use cases in areas such as education, entertainment, e-commerce, enterprise and immersive experiences. “It’s this immersive internet or embodied internet where you’re in it rather than seeing it… Well, I think that the metaverse is going to shape almost everything that we do on the internet today and more.”
