Meta, the new parent company of Facebook, announced a new local collaboration with the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation to promote innovation and identify promising opportunities with significant potential on society and the economy.
As part of the collaboration, a variety of projects will be built in Israel, including a program for start-ups and developers from the fields of virtual reality and augmented reality (AR/VR), the establishment of a developer community, investment in research and more.
The partnership is one of a series of collaborations that the company is forming on four continents with more than 10 partners to advance its vision for the metaverse, helping people connect, build communities and grow businesses.
Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media giant was changing its name to Meta as the company’s vision expands beyond communications to a new world of virtual reality.
“The ‘metaverse’ is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you, Facebook said in the announcement. “The metaverse isn’t a single product one company can build alone. Just like the Internet, the metaverse exists whether Facebook is there or not. And it won’t be built overnight. Many of these products will only be fully realized in the next 10-15 years. While that’s frustrating for those of us eager to dive right in, it gives us time to ask the difficult questions about how they should be built.”
Along with the name change, the company also said it would invest $50 million in global research and collaborations to ensure that the next phase of technology is developed responsibly and calculated.
“The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation is the beating heart of the Israeli ecosystem and is proud to be a platform that creates value for companies and entrepreneurs,” said Efrat Duvdevani, CEO of the Peres Center. “We are excited to lead together with Meta the construction of the new digital world with the help of research and the creation of a virtual and augmented reality community, in order to build a better tomorrow for all of us.”