(NEXSTAR) – Iceland’s folklore often speaks of elves, but the country produces some world-class trolls, too.
A new tourism campaign from Visit Iceland is satirizing Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse aspirations, and even features a Zuckerberg lookalike touting the (actually tangible) realities of the “Icelandverse.”
“Hi, and welcome to this very natural setting,” the video’s host tells viewers from inside his modern, minimal room. “Today, I want to talk about a revolutionary approach on how to connect our world without being super weird.”
Wearing an all-black outfit and sporting a close-cropped hairdo just like Zuckerberg’s, the host goes on to demonstrate the “immersive” nature of the Icelandverse, which features water that’s “wet” and skies you can see “with your eyeballs,” among other natural phenomena. There are also actual “humans you can connect with,” he claims.
“The Icelandverse is a world with possibilities so endless, it’ll be here forever,” he says.
The mockery didn’t end there. The campaign — called “Inspired by Iceland” — describes the Icelandverse as “an immersive open-world experience millions of years in the making, that will allow people to be present with each other in captivating real-life spaces.”
Fans of the campaign took to Twitter to share their amusement, with many calling it hilarious and one even lauding the video as “a tonic for the toxic internet.”
Zuckerberg had shared his actual announcement concerning Facebook’s metaverse plans in late October, along with news that Facebook, Inc. would be rebranding itself as Meta in line with the company’s latest vision.
The concept of the metaverse, however, has been around long before Facebook even existed. Often described as the successor to the internet, futurists and tech experts have envisioned the metaverse as a place where our physical realities converge with various virtual experiences in a shared virtual space.
Zuckerberg, in an accompanying video, explained his intentions with Meta, claiming the company was aiming to build platforms that would let users do “almost anything you can imagine” — or at least interact, work, shop, and play games with the aid of Meta’s virtual platforms.
“You’ll move across these experiences on different devices — augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms,” he explained, in part, in an open letter.