Facebook parent company Meta isn’t content with keeping its Metaverse spiel to the digital world. Alongside a physical Metaverse Store, the company is opening Metaverse Academies drained to train the next-generation of virtual world designers.
What are Meta Metaverse Academies?
Announced on Sunday, Meta is partnering with French digital training company Simplon to create its first wave of academies. Situated in France — hence the French partnership — the first set of academies will be housed in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Nice.
In the first year, Meta plans to have 100 students trained in the still-undefined Metaverse skillset. The training will consist of two roles: specialist immersive technology developers and support and assistance technicians.
Essentially, one half will be trained to create Metaverse worlds and content; the others will be trained to be virtual helpers. Considering Meta’s already established assistants do very little to combat sexual harassment, racism and more in the Metaverse, those helpers sorely need training.
Training in both of these fields will be completely free. As the first wave of new Metaverse academics, students will not be charged for lessons, although accommodation and other things are seemingly not included.
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The first students will focus on diversity
With the Metaverse being planned as a global platform for people of all backgrounds, the first Metaverse Academy students will be diverse as well. In fact, Meta already has stats for this.
For the first wave of students, Meta claims that at least 30% will be women. Additionally, the company is working to make sure that students are from diverse backgrounds, including different races, countries, gender identities and sexualities.
Of course, we won’t know exactly how diverse the lineup of worldwide Metaverse devs will be. Perhaps it will be limited by the fact that the first generation of Metaverse Academies are exclusively situated in French cities. Actually, that brings us to our next point.
How about training them in The Metaverse?
Meta’s insistence of making key Metaverse activities a real-world activity proves just how pretentious its plans are. With CEO Mark Zuckerberg believing that the technology can be used for everything from playing games to teaching classes, you’d think the Metaverse Academies would be based in the virtual world.
After all, in the virtual world, everyone can learn together with one teacher. Isn’t that one of the key reasons Meta is pushing this technology so hard?
It is rather hilarious to see that Meta is seemingly scared of using its own Metaverse for the purposes it’s designing the Metaverse. Yes, it’s unfinished and buggy, but you’re training the next generation of developers. Won’t they see these issues and improve upon them?