As far as I can tell from the material Meta has released, they have an incredibly ambitious vision for the metaverse. Essentially, I believe they want to create glasses that you wear, that allow you to see other people in your space, wherever they are. So you could have a conversation with three friends in your living room, as if they were there, while they could be on different continents, making physical location irrelevant.
Now, I am not sure if they will get there, but they are investing heavily in the tech required (AR screen tech, SLAM, 3d body reconstruction etc), and even partial success could be enormous. Having spent a lot of time in VRChat, seeing people and interacting with them up close has something very powerful, even if if is just the beginning of the technology. I am very excited to see where it goes in any case.
One thing I don't get is why there is a such high regard of visual input. I mean, we can speak to our friends since the telephone age, and we can see them on screen too since maybe the 90s. Is there a huge demand to actually see them IN THE SAME ROOM?
I really don't think so. But maybe future generations have different ideas. I think VR can make a lot of difference in training (e.g. medical training) but it's not consumer stuff.
A lot of people find asynchronous and text-based communication to be unpleasant. This maybe isn’t the most common sentiment on a tech news discussion forum, but probably describes much of the population. I think the internet’s potential to help people socialize is really hobbled by the text form factor of social media, chat, and discussion forums. Video and voice calls are richer, but they aren’t good a good way to meet people.
I’ve found that VRChat makes for a more pleasant, natural, deeper experience than phone calls or video chat. For me, it really replicates the experience of hanging out with people in real life.
Part of it is that it has the thing where you stand next to the people you are talking to and you can move around and talk to someone else when the conversation ebbs and flows. You can go to smaller spaces where you know everyone, or bigger places with friends of friends.
This mitigates the problem with video or phone calls where you have to sort of mutually agree with the other party that you want to talk and when you are done talking. Instead, you can more naturally flow between different conversations. You can go to a crowd and meet new people, you can go on adventure with your close friend, or go hang out at your regular haunt.
There are a lot of problems with the service, though. One of the big ones is that the onboarding experience is shitty for new players. If you don’t already have friends who play, you’ll just end up with 14 year olds screaming obscenities at you in a public world.
Personally I find video (Facetime/Duo/etc) to be more immersive than audio-only when talking with someone. If there's a similar leap in perceived connection with some AR/VR gear then I'm all for it.
Video chats with more than 3 people start to suffer from an inability to have multiple conversations at the same time. Physical distance of a couple feet and visual queues like the direction of a speakers face allow that in 3d space. Maybe someone can overcome this in 2d? I haven't seen it yet.
I was on a casual call with ~10 people recently and the way only one person could speak at a time was so unfortunate. Really killed the experience compared to chatting in person.
Check out kumospace. Start up with a really fun, functional solution to this problem. Maybe just a novelty generally but for a remote happy hour it was a game changer.
I don't know! I do know that I vastly prefer meeting people in person, compared to talking on the phone, and I think it is the same for a lot of people. I prefer it so much that I occasionally spend hundreds of dollars on airplane tickets to travel to see friends and family and attend meetings in person.
There is clearly something different in in-person interactions that makes me do this, and if Meta or someone else can replicate part of that experience I believe that could be very valuable. Think even of the environmental implications - so much energy is spend moving people around, imagine if AR platforms could reduce the number of trips by even a small percentage!
Seeing people in the same room with a pair of glasses is the same vision for the metaverse that has existed for decades, there is nothing new or original about that part of Meta's vision.
The best choice they made was to sell a balanced Oculus (high-res and decent battery with low-power compute) as a loss leader rather than continue down the tethered high-powered Rift path.
AR screens, SLAM, 3d reconstruction has well over a dozen well-funded companies gunning for the same result. Several companies are going to lose hard, similar to Magic Leap's recapitalization.
On that note, I wonder if a pair of wide angle cameras could be used to create a reasonably convincing three-dimensional live stream via FaceTime. With VR glasses, participants in the call would be able to see each others surroundings in 3D space.
This sounds more immersive, and less goofy than the metaverse. It also seems like a feature that Apple could reasonably deliver with their rumoured glasses.
Colour me highly sceptical. Can they ever solve for latency? Playing a video game with rollback code is one thing. Trying to give me the nuance of a conversation with the latency of our global network is a fool's errand.
This all sounds great... If it worked. VR has been around since the 90s with impressive demos which fail to captivate audiences for one reason or another.
In terms of tangible results, Meta may as well have pivoted to autonomous vehicles. The only way this pivot makes sense would be if they had actually delivered a headset people wanted.
One great aspect of that vide: What event is reasonably full, but has people respecting a human-sized empty space next to you so your hologram friend can have a place to exist?
Now, I am not sure if they will get there, but they are investing heavily in the tech required (AR screen tech, SLAM, 3d body reconstruction etc), and even partial success could be enormous. Having spent a lot of time in VRChat, seeing people and interacting with them up close has something very powerful, even if if is just the beginning of the technology. I am very excited to see where it goes in any case.