Hours after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his company’s strategy to solve political backlash over the social network’s election meddling efforts, the social media giant changed its virtual reality naming system to be more generic.
According to a tweet by blog Mocking Meta, a coding language for making virtual reality games, the social network dropped its proprietary name R&D VR to make it easier for developers to think of it as any other form of virtual reality.
The move may have been in part designed to mitigate a backlash after some in Silicon Valley criticized Facebook for naming its virtual reality division the Oculus team, which they thought implied it was owned by the company and not a separate entity.
“I wish they’d call it Oculus over on ‘social media,’” said one game creator on Reddit. “We often needed to explain why Oculus wasn’t Facebook.”
Facebook has had a hard time defining itself in a market that competes with the likes of Google and Snapchat. We all know it’s the Facebook. How else can it be? We’re all familiar with the platform name, but what exactly is it?
No matter what it’s called, Facebook has been the subject of recent controversy. As CNN reported in April, the social network has spent the last few years trying to calm regulators and members and protect users’ data. But the company is making more changes to its user and revenue models. Facebook made its first non-advertising ad debut this week.
Zuckerberg reiterated those changes in his keynote speech at Facebook’s F8 developer conference this week. In his Facebook post announcing those changes, Zuckerberg wrote: “We’ve taken our time and built a system that we hope will be effective, but there’s a lot of work to do.”
Zuckerberg also announced the launch of Portal, a device for smartphones. Portal, which is positioned to be the product to replace TVs, has a touchscreen and speakers so you can have voice control.
The list of new features on the Portal site includes the ability to watch live video while FaceTimeing, if you want to ask Alexa a question or start watching a movie.
Zuckerberg explained why Portal was similar to a TV, but not one for the home: “It’s like the TV on the side of the coffee table, but it’s in a room, it doesn’t spill coffee on you, it’s got great speakers and you can watch video chat with other people, like, the ones I had in my apartment in Cambridge when I was living there, or you can talk to the person across the country who’s so busy that you really can’t talk to her directly.”
This piece was originally published by the tech site The Verge.
