Us social media company Facebook announced on Monday that it plans to hire 10,000 highly skilled people in European Union countries over the next five years to build a new virtual reality-based Internet platform called Metasomes. Facebook sees this as the way forward.

Facebook said in a statement that recruiting "senior professional engineers" is one of the most urgent tasks in the company's nascent plans to build a meta-universe with Europe at its core. The statement gave no details of how hiring in Europe would be carried out.

'The meta-universe is a new phase in virtual connected experiences,' the statement said. 'The core idea is to bring online interactions closer to real ones by creating a stronger' virtual presence. '

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is an active proponent of the metasomes, deliberately positioning the company to move beyond social media to become a major player in the metasomes. In July, he said he believed That Metasomes would be the "successor" to the mobile Internet and that Facebook would go from "a social media company to a Metasomo company" in about five years.

Facebook has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality in recent years, developing hardware products such as VR headsets, augmented reality glasses and wristwatches. In 2014, Facebook paid $2 billion for Oaklus, which specializes in vr headsets, and has acquired vr video game studios in recent years.

The metasurses, a concept rooted in science fiction, are supposed to blur the line between the virtual and the real world, allowing users to have an immersive, sensory experience in a virtual world, as well as engage in a wide range of creative and social activities as virtual identities.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, people are less connected in real life and more connected digitally. The more time people spend in virtual space and interacting with each other, the greater the demand for virtual worlds. The concept of the meta-universe is more interesting in this context.

According to AGence France-Presse, Facebook is not the only company working on a metasverse. Inpe, an American gaming company, raised $1 billion earlier this year, part of which it plans to use to build the meta-universe.

"Metasverse is not owned and operated by a single company," Facebook