In late October, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta would be the new name for the US tech giant. It gives a less-than-subtle nod to the metaverse, which Zuckerberg identified as the future of the organisation and tech-enabled social networking more broadly. At the same time, Google Trends saw a surge of online interest in the topic (see below chart). The metaverse is a familiar concept to the Pi Labs investment team and wider PropTech ecosystem. Generally, the metaverse is broken into two key concepts: augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Today, we’ll focus more on AR.