The Metaverse: Serious Platform or Hype?
Janpha Thadphoothon
This is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass (include) everything that we do to reflect (show) who we are and what we hope to build I am proud to announce that starting
today our company is now Meta.
Our mission remains the same. It's still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands --- they're not changing either and we are still the company that designs technology around people.
Hey...and welcome to connect today we're going to talk about the Metaverse starting with the most important experience of all connecting with people.
Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space. It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually. It has things that are only possible virtually and it has an incredibly inspiring view of whatever
you find most beautiful.
Hey are you coming yeah just gotta find something to wear
all right perfect
oh hey Mark hey what's going on what's up?
whoa, we're floating in space uh-huh who made this place it's awesome,
right? It's from a crater i met in l.a uh this place
is amazing.
baz that you, of course, it's me you know i had to be the robot man i thought i was supposed to be the robot, whoa
I knew you were bluffing. Hey wait where is Naomi? Let's call her. Naomi, hey should we deal you in? Sorry, I'm running late but you've got to see what we're checking out. There's an artist going around Soho hiding ar pieces for people to find
3d street art, that's cool send that link over so we can all look at it
This is stunning okay that is somethingn that's awesome wow I love the movement. Wait it's it's disappearing this is
amazing hold on I'll tip the artist and they'll extend it wow
privacy and safety need to be built into the Metaverse from day one. You'll get to decide when you want to be with other people when you want to block someone from appearing in your space or
when you want to take a break and teleport to a private bubble to be alone.
you're going to be able to bring things from the physical world into the Metaverse almost any type of media that can be represented digitally. Photos videos art music movies books
games. you name it.
Lots of things that are physical today like screens
will just be able to be holograms in the future.
You won't need a physical TV. It'll just be a one dollar hologram from some high school kid halfway across the world and
you'll be able to take your items and project them into the physical world as holograms in Augmented reality too.
One part of this is horizon home which is our early
vision for a home space in the metaverse horizon home is the first thing that you'll see when you put on your quest
headset.
Today there are already a bunch of options to choose from and in the future anyone will be able to create one we've just called it home until now because it's been missing something very important.
People soon we're going to be introducing a social version of home where you can invite your friends to join you as
avatars you'll be able to hang out watch videos
together and jump into apps together.
Then there is horizon worlds which is where
you can build worlds and jump into them
with people horizon is designed to make it possible
for everyone to create and we're already seeing people build some really interesting experiences from creating
new games together to throwing surprise parties and VR that family and friends around the world can join over the last year and a half a lot of us who work in offices have gone remote
and while I miss seeing the people I work with I think remote work is here to stay for a lot of people, so we're going
to need better tools to work together let's take a look at what working in the Metaverse will be like imagine if you could be at the office without the commute you would still have
that sense of presence shared physical space those chance interactions that make your day all accessible from
anywhere.
Now imagine that you have your perfect work set up and you can actually do more than you could in your regular work set
and on top of all that you can keep wearing your favorite sweatpants and as we focused more on work and frankly as we've heard your feedback more broadly.
We're working on making it so you can log into quest with an account other than your personal facebook account.
We're starting to test support for work accounts soon.
And we're working on making a broader shift here within the next year I know this is a big deal for a lot of people not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences and I get that especially as
the Metaverse expands and I'll share
more about that later.
But i'm genuinely optimistic about working in the Metaverse we know from the last couple of years that a lot of people can
effectively work from anywhere but hybrid is going to be a lot more complex when some people are together and others
are still remote so giving everyone the tools to be
present no matter where they are whether it's a hologram sitting next to you in a physical meeting or in a discussion
taking place in the metaverse that's going to be a game-changer
I think this could be very positive for our society and economy
giving people access to jobs in more places no matter where they live will be a big deal for spreading opportunity to
more people dropping our daily commutes will mean less time stuck in traffic and more time doing things that matter and it'll be good for the environment we plan to continue to either subsidize our devices or sell them at cost to make
them available to more people we'll continue supporting side loading and linking to PCs so consumers and developers have choice rather than forcing them to use the quest store to
find apps or reach customers and we'll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible so we can maximize the overall creator economy while recognizing that to keep investing in this future we'll need to keep some fees higher for some period to make sure that we don't lose too much money on this program overall
after all while a growing number of developers are already profitable we expect to invest many billions of
dollars for years to come before the Metaverse reaches scale today we're introducing the presence platform which
is a broad range of machine perception and AI capabilities that empower developers to build uh mixed reality experiences on quest 2.
Now you want to tell us more about the presence platform
yeah we've said before that realistic presence is the key to feeling connected in the Metaverse and the presence
platform's capabilities are what's going to deliver on that promise things like environmental understanding content
placement and persistence voice interaction standardized hand
interactions in fact let's start with hands.
I mean the human hand is an engineering marvel and bringing hands into VR was no easy feat. It requires a lot of collaboration against product design research, but we
continue to improve that product, finding new ways to navigate with gestures and interact with VR. So, today we're introducing the interaction SDK a library of modular components that
will make it easy to add hand interactions to your apps.
That's pretty exciting but next year we are releasing a new product that will push the boundaries of VR even further
we've co-named it project Cambria so this isn't the next quest it's going to be compatible with quest but cambria
will be a completely new advanced and
high-end product and it'll be at the
higher end of the price spectrum too.
Our plan here is to keep building out this product line to release our most advanced technology before we can hit
the price points that we target with quest. All right. So let's talk about some of the new advances here yeah sure there's a ton of new tech going into Cambria. For example, your avatar will be able to make natural eye contact and reflect your facial expressions in real time.
This way, people you're interacting with will havea a real sense of how you're actuall feeling.
It does mean building more sensors into a form factor that's "comfortable to wear" for a while and because we want VR to be for everyone we also have to make sure avatars represent a diverse set of human facial features and skin tones as well as paying attention to things like glasses and beards that might get in the way of some of the sensors so that's going to be a big step forward for social presence and i'm really glad that we're focused on making it inclusive from the start now what about unlocking more mixed reality experiences.
I mean imagine working at your virtual desk with multiple screens while seeing your real desk so clearly that you can pick up a pen and write notes without taking your headset off.
Or you know you're doing a workout with a virtual instructor in your living room. It's going to be so cool we're already seeing
the potentials of these kind of experiences today as people are building for a pass-through Api, but with Cambria we'll be taking this to the next level with high-resolution colored mixed reality pass-through.
We essentially, combine an array of sensors with
reconstruction algorithms to represent your physical world in the headset with a sense of depth and perspective, but the ultimate goal here is true augmented reality glasses and we've been 'working on that took.
And today I want to show you an experience that we've been
working on for project Nazare which is the code name for our first full augmented reality glasses.
Here you'll see you're chatting with friends on Whatsapp and planning a game night you can select a game and then as you walk over your kitchen you can easily just put your game on to the table and you're off that's the kind of experience that augmented reality will unlock.
There's a lot of technical work to get this form factor and experience right we have to fit 'hologram' displays projectors
batteries radios custom silicon chips, cameras speakers sensors to map the world around you and more into glasses.
That are about five millimeters thick,so we still have ways to go with.
nazareth but we are making good progress
