Facebook on Thursday announced that it has officially changed its company name to Meta. This rebrand was confirmed at the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference by the firm’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. This comes to hit the nail on the rumours that had been circulating for the past two weeks or so.

According to Facebook, the new name is meant to reflect the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media. The new brand name is accompanied by a new logo, inspired by the sci-fi term metaverse, describing its vision for working and playing in a virtual world.

“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

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This comes at the back of the firm’s efforts to form a team that would work on the metaverse.

It also follows years of Facebook’s venture into various devices. This includes Portal video-calling devices, the Ray-Ban Stories glasses and the Oculus line of virtual-reality headsets. The company has stated that augmented and virtual reality will be a key part of its strategy in the coming years.

As said by Zuckerberg, the company’s goal is a long way off, as elements of the metaverse potentially become mainstream in the five to ten years. The company expects “to invest many billions of dollars for years to come before the metaverse reaches scale,” Zuckerberg added.

“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said. We are bound to see some more interesting hardware from the company some of which were announced during the event.

But as it stands, the rebrand seems to be working as Meta’s stock price rose by more than 3% after the announcement.