Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Avatars in Mark Zuckerberg’s Horizon have so far hovered above ground with bodies ending at waist
A year after changing its name, the company formerly known as Facebook has revealed its plans to give the metaverse legs – literally.
Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality project is getting a raft of additions including a $1,499 (£1,356) “pro” headset, integration with Microsoft Office and the sitcom The Office, and, yes, the ambulatory appendages.
Continue reading...Venture capitalist Matthew Ball’s new book explores the three-dimensional virtual world that is set to supersede the net. What might this alternative digital reality have in store for users?
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball first wrote about the metaverse in 2018 and his essays have become essential reading for entrepreneurs and tech watchers who are attempting to understand or profit from the network Mark Zuckerberg and many others are anticipating will supersede the internet. Ball is former head of strategy at Amazon Studios and his first book, The Metaverse: How It Will Revolutionize Everything, is published later in July.
What is the metaverse?
It is a persistent network of 3D spaces. Almost everything online today – all applications, digital operating systems, webpages – works on common protocols and technology that connects them. The metaverse is a 3D elevation of the online world, which spans augmented reality – unseen virtual simulations in the world around us – as well as much of consumer leisure and socialising.
I’ve witnessed the VR space grow from its infancy, back at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. I was there when Mark Zuckerberg came in to demo the tech, and it completely changed the way I looked at VR. Here’s my memory of February 13, 2014:
It was easily the most important VR tour out of the thousands I gave at the lab. We built demos, prototypes, and most importantly, ran social science experiments. We also got to meet a lot of really powerful people, but meeting Mark Zuckerberg was different.
Before he arrived, his personal bodyguards did a walkthrough of the space to make sure it was secure. After they arrived, we asked our guests to demo a few scenes: walking a plank, flying through a city, chopping a tree, and looking at their avatars in a virtual mirror. Initially, I was worried that they would be unimpressed. During the plank demo, the floor opened up to reveal a huge pit, Zuckerberg instantly put his hand on his heart in shock. These worries subsided and I felt proud to have elicited such a visible reaction from Mark.
However, the tour was far from perfect. The tracking that day was more jittery than normal, and I ended up recalibrating it a few times throughout his visit. It really wasn’t a good look. We built the lab with custom infrared tracking, and sometimes I couldn’t predict how the system would perform on any given day. It was still early days for that tech, and we hoped Mark would be sympathetic as an engineer himself.
In the demo room, Jeremy Bailenson gave a charismatic pitch, while I sat on the other side of the glass, pulling the strings of everyone’s VR headsets. This “Wizard of Oz” system let us control the demos, instead of giving visitors full control of their virtual worlds. In the midst of the tour, I had a strange realization. Here I was, controlling exactly what Mark Zuckerberg was seeing, feeling, and experiencing. Normally he’s the one in control of our virtual experience.
I could manipulate Zuckerberg’s senses, and his brain would have to work hard to convince himself it wasn’t real. In that moment, I wielded an incredible amount of power, and I absolutely hated the way it felt. Who was I to push the buttons of someone else’s brain? Soon after the visit, Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2.3B. In retrospect, Zuckerberg might have only visited us as part of his diligence on that deal, confirming that nobody out there had better VR tech than what Oculus was working on.
More importantly, I wondered if Zuckerberg had pondered how much power he had unwittingly handed to me, the driver of his VR headset. Did he know how easy it was to puppeteer someone in VR? Was that why he wanted to acquire Oculus in the first place? Over the years I’ve reflected on this moment a lot, and I’ve come to think that it’s very likely that Zuckerberg realized all of this, likely before even I did. What’s cooler than Facebook in two dimensions? Facebook in three dimensions.
That Oculus acquisition was a major catalyst in making VR go mainstream. It launched our digital spaces forward in ways we don’t yet understand. I feel honored to have been there for that moment, pressing the brain buttons of the man who had built systems which had already pressed mine. I hope for all of our sakes, he wields this power responsibly.
Cody Woputz worked at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University from 2010-2016 and the views shared here are his alone. He is a technologist that specializes in using real-time 3D engines to push AR/VR in responsibly novel ways. He is currently a Co-Founder at Receipts and holds an MS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. If you’ve got a SteamVR headset you can check out some of the experiences Zuckerberg saw by downloading Stanford’s Virtual Becomes Reality for free on Steam.
This story originally appeared on Twitter and is reprinted here as a guest post with permission from Woputz.
Every so often Meta hosts an “Inside the Lab” roundtable where it showcases early technology it’s currently working on, usually on a very specific research field. Today’s was Inside the Lab: Passing the Visual Turing Test focusing on a very important part of a virtual reality (VR) headset’s hardware, the display. Trying to tackle a range of challenges, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Scientist of Reality Labs, Michael Abrash and several others unveiled three prototype headsets currently being developed.
Prototyping quite often relies on trying to solve a singular problem, be that resolution, weight, size, durability, clarity or any number of other issues. Whilst the Meta Quest 2 does offer a good VR experience, it’s by no means perfect, with areas that can always be improved upon.
Ensuring a user’s eye sees the best image possible is of utmost importance and Meta is trying to solve that in a number of ways. The first VR prototype shown was Butterscotch, looking like a heavily modded Oculus Rift.
This was built to address VR resolution, more specifically providing retinal resolution in VR. With 60 pixels per degree (ppd) being the benchmark – one which TVs and mobile phones have long surpassed – so that the headset can depict the 20/20 line on an eye chart. “This is the latest of our retinal resolution prototypes, and it gets us to near retinal resolution in VR — 55 pixels per degree. And that’s two and a half times the resolution of Quest 2,” says Abrash on Butterscotch.
While you might expect this to have been achieved via a new panel this wasn’t the case because: “there are currently no display panels that support anything close to retinal resolution for the full field of view of VR headsets today,” Abrash continues. “So what the Butterscotch team did was they shrank the field of view to about half that of a Quest 2 and developed a new hybrid lens that would fully resolve the higher resolution.”
As you can see from the above images, Butterscotch does achieve excellent clarity but it’s still a bulky, far from a finished prototype.
Even bigger and bulkier than Butterscotch is Starburst. With fans on the top and a pair of side handles, Starburst is Reality Labs’ prototype HDR VR headset. Yes, you read that right, this is what High Dynamic Range in a VR headset currently looks like.
HDR will be a crucial addition as it helps to increase that sense of realism and depth to an image. To do this VR headsets need lots of light to play with, with brightness referred to as nits. Meta’s peak brightness goal is 10,000 nits but as TVs have yet to achieve this number – Samsung’s 65Q9 range can hit 2,000 nits in HDR – that goal is still a way off. When it comes to current VR levels the Quest 2 maxes out at 100 nits.
Packed into the Starburst prototype is a bright lamp behind the LCD panels. This helps Starburst reach an impressive 20,000 nits, creating what is likely one of the first 3D HDR VR displays. You probably wouldn’t want to use it for long though: “to be clear, [Starburst is] wildly impractical in this first generation for anything that you’d actually ship in a product. But we’re using it to test and for further studies so we can get a sense of what the experience feels like,” says Zuckerberg.
As the last two headset prototypes look many years away how about something which looks slightly more production-ready. Described by Zuckerberg as: “the thinnest and lightest VR headset that we’ve ever built,” the Holocake 2 certainly looks the part of a futuristic device and it’s already capable of running PC VR games!
That might be impressive in a prototype headset but what’s even more remarkable is Holocake 2’s thin profile. VR headsets are thick because the displays and lenses need to be a certain distance apart so that your eyes can properly focus on the imagery. To achieve this slim design Meta has developed two new technologies; a flat holographic lens and polarized reflection.
When it comes to the holographic lens Zuckerberg explains: “Holographs are basically recordings of what happens when light hits something. So just like a holograph is much flatter than the thing itself, holographic optics are much flatter than the lenses that they model, but they affect incoming light in pretty much the same way. So it’s a pretty neat hack.”
As for the polarized reflection, this method of optical folding reduces the space between the display panel and the lens. Both of these technologies have been combined with specialized lasers rather than LEDs as the light source. There’s only one problem, finding a laser with the performant size and price that you need for consumer VR headsets. “We’ll need to do a lot of engineering to achieve a consumer viable laser that meets our specs — that’s safe, low-cost, and efficient and that can fit in a slim VR headset,” Abrash notes. “As of today, the jury is still out on finding a suitable laser source.”
If any of these prototypes look familiar its because Butterscotch and Holocake were teased by Zuckerberg and CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in 2021. No sign of the Meta Quest prototype previously mentioned.
Finally, there’s Mirror Lake. This isn’t even a prototype at this stage merely a research concept the Display Systems Research (DSR) team at Reality Labs rustled up. This is pie-in-the-sky thinking, coming up with a ski goggle-like form factor combining all the varifocal (Half-Dome) and eye-tracking and other tech Reality Labs has been working on.
And there you have it, all the prototype VR headsets Meta has currently revealed and the challenges it’s trying to solve. While Holocake 2 might be on the near horizon the next headset from Meta is Project Cambria, expected to arrive later this year. For continued updates on the latest Meta VR devices, keep reading gmw3.
Meta says its ultimate goal with its VR hardware is to make a comfortable, compact headset with visual finality that’s ‘indistinguishable from reality’. Today the company revealed its latest VR headset prototypes which it says represent steps toward that goal.
Meta has made it no secret that it’s dumping tens of billions of dollars in its XR efforts, much of which is going to long-term R&D through its Reality Labs Research division. Apparently in an effort to shine a bit of light onto what that money is actually accomplishing, the company invited a group of press to sit down for a look at its latest accomplishments in VR hardware R&D.
To start, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke alongside Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash to explain that the company’s ultimate goal is to build VR hardware that meets all the visual requirements to be accepted as “real” by your visual system.
VR headsets today are impressively immersive, but there’s still no question that what you’re looking at is, well… virtual.
Inside of Meta’s Reality Labs Research division, the company uses the term ‘visual Turing Test’ to represent the bar that needs to be met to convince your visual system that what’s inside the headset is actually real. The concept is borrowed from a similar concept which denotes the point at which a human can tell the difference between another human and an artificial intelligence.
For a headset to completely convince your visual system that what’s inside the headset is actually real, Meta says you need a headset that can pass that “visual Turing Test.”
Zuckerberg and Abrash outlined what they see as four key visual challenges that VR headsets need to solve before the visual Turing Test can be passed: varifocal, distortion, retina resolution, and HDR.
Briefly, here’s what those mean:
The Display Systems Research team at Reality Labs has built prototypes that function as proof-of-concepts for potential solutions to these challenges.
To address varifocal, the team developed a series of prototypes which it called ‘Half Dome’. In that series the company first explored a varifocal design which used a mechanically moving display to change the distance between the display and the lens, thus changing the focal depth of the image. Later the team moved to a solid-state electronic system which resulted in varifocal optics that were significantly more compact, reliable, and silent. We’ve covered the Half Dome prototypes in greater detail here if you want to know more.
As for distortion, Abrash explained that experimenting with lens designs and distortion-correction algorithms that are specific to those lens designs is a cumbersome process. Novel lenses can’t be made quickly, he said, and once they are made they still need to be carefully integrated into a headset.
To allow the Display Systems Research team to work more quickly on the issue, the team built a ‘distortion simulator’, which actually emulates a VR headset using a 3DTV, and simulates lenses (and their corresponding distortion-correction algorithms) in-software.
Doing so has allowed the team to iterate on the problem more quickly, wherein the key challenge is to dynamically correct lens distortions as the eye moves, rather than merely correcting for what is seen when the eye is looking in the immediate center of the lens.
On the retina resolution front, Meta revealed a previously unseen headset prototype called Butterscotch, which the company says achieves a retina resolution of 60 pixels per degree, allowing for 20/20 vision. To do so, they used extremely pixel-dense displays and reduced the field-of-view—in order to concentrate the pixels over a smaller area—to about half the size of Quest 2. The company says it also developed a “hybrid lens” that would “fully resolve” the increased resolution, and it shared through-the-lens comparisons between the original Rift, Quest 2, and the Butterscotch prototype.
While there are already headsets out there today that offer retina resolution—like Varjo’s VR-3 headset—only a small area in the middle of the view (27° × 27°) hits the 60 PPD mark… anything outside of that area drops to 30 PPD or lower. Ostensibly Meta’s Butterscotch prototype has 60 PPD across its entirely of the field-of-view, though the company didn’t explain to what extent resolution is reduced toward the edges of the lens.
The post Meta Reveals VR Headset Prototypes Designed to Make VR ‘Indistinguishable From Reality’ appeared first on Road to VR.
You’d expect social experiences to be at the forefront of Meta’s virtual reality (VR) drive but one thing that’s always been missing is the ability to directly hang out in the home environment. During Connect in 2021 Meta announced Horizon Home – rather than Oculus Home – which would eventually add that social aspect. That’s going to arrive in the Quest’s v41 update which CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated today.
With Horizon Home, the whole premise is that rather than having to use a separate app to convene with friends in VR or just use voice through the party feature Quest users will be able to gather in one environment and see each other’s avatar. From there they’ll be able to jump into a game or app, making the whole experience far more seamless.
To showcase the update today Zuckerberg invited climber Alex Honnold where they watched his 360-degree film The Soloist. This is a heart-pounding, death-defying ascent up the Dolomite mountains, free climbing up sheer rock faces.
“Met up with legendary climber Alex Honnold in the new Horizon Home — launching with Quest v41 update to bring social presence into your virtual home as soon as you put on your headset,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post. “Invite friends to hang out, watch videos together, or jump into apps right from your virtual home. More options to customize your home space currently in development. Also, check out Alex’s 360 film The Soloist VR where he takes you 1000 ft up free climbing the Dolomites!”
The announcement hasn’t specified when v41 will arrive but considering Meta rolls these out monthly and v40 landed almost a month ago, Quest users will likely see the feature arrive in the next week or so. As always it’ll be gradual, so you might need to wait until the end of June to test the new social feature out.
Another step towards Meta’s metaverse vision, as further updates are announced gmw3 will let you know.
Chances are still that if you ask a family member, friend or contact what their thoughts are on the metaverse, Facebook’s name is likely to come up. Remarks on Zuckerberg’s viability as a digital leader might even follow. But whether we like it or not, social media’s biggest mogul is still regarded by many as an unofficial showrunner in the emerging space, using the company’s rebrand as a way to tightly covet the term “metaverse” and all it encompasses.
Unsurprisingly, Meta’s recent announcement that digital creators on Horizon Worlds (the company’s dedicated metaverse application) will be subjected to a 47.5% cut has been met with public backlash. It’s easy to be angered by these figures if we compare them to significantly lower cuts and creator fees placed by other outlets (such as NFT marketplace OpenSea or decentralised metaverse platforms Decentraland and The Sandbox). After all, many of the favoured tenets of a more decentralised internet include fairer compensation and a more enticing economy for creators — features that Zuckerberg himself has even promised.
This precarious announcement seems to have come straight after a rough first quarter of the year, where we’ve seen Meta lose upwards of $2.9 billion USD and experience significant blowback in the wake of its many controversies. As we dive into a greater breakdown of Meta’s new fee structure for creators, reflect on the social media giant’s most recent quarter and take a deeper glimpse into its penchant for capitalistic gain, we’ll explain why we think Meta’s sizeable virtual asset cut is destined to fail.
With Horizon Worlds, Meta is aiming to build an economy and open up metaverse commerce — creating something that can be compared to the systems currently available in platforms such as Rec Room and Roblox.
According to Meta’s official statement: “The metaverse — by nature of its not being limited by physical space — will bring a new level of creativity and open up new opportunities for the next generation of creators and businesses to pursue their passions and create livelihoods.” Moreover, the company insists that: “Creators and entrepreneurs will have more freedom to find a business model that works for them… For example, someone could make and sell attachable accessories for a fashion world or offer paid access to a new part of a world.”
Interoperability and cross-app capability are still a far cry away, however. So far, it seems like items will only be compatible with the worlds in which they’ve originated, all while still being positioned to help creators monetise their items on the platform. “What the creators can do as part of building their world [is to] attach behaviours that trigger monetisation, which means that we actually don’t know all the things they can do to monetise,” Vivek Sharma, Meta’s VP of Horizon, recently told CNET.
While creators will be offered the opportunity to make and sell assets in Meta’s Horizon Worlds platform, their earnings will be cut short significantly — as the company plans to take an overall cut of up to 47.5% on each transaction. Included in this cut is a 30% “hardware platform fee” for any sales made through the Meta Quest Store, coupled with a 17.5% fee charged by Horizon Worlds. To also incentivise engagement with VR, Meta claims that it will be adding a monthly performance bonus for creators. Similar to Instagram’s current monetisation strategy, this approach will follow a unique set of metrics.
While Meta cites these new rules as simply “tests”, they’ve also suggested that these approaches could continue to change and evolve. While there is a promise that assets will eventually be made more interoperable and capable of being carried across apps (Sharma alleges that Meta “wants to do this in a way that will scale eventually to cross worlds, into shared spaces and beyond”), it’s still quite unclear how the marketplace will be managed or what this roadmap might look like — particularly when it comes to figuring out whether items can one day live beyond Meta’s parameters.
In all, this news has both angered and excited those in the Web3 community. One Twitter user wrote: “If Meta wants 47.5% of NFT sales, they’ve gotta talk to the IRS — because I don’t even have that after taxes.”
Sharma has since responded to the friction, defending the sizeable cut as a “pretty competitive rate in the market.” He also added: “We believe in the other platforms being able to have their share.”
Earlier this year, Meta experienced a historic plunge in its stock price — with over $230 billion USD in its market value erased (the largest-ever one-day loss for any US-based company in history). Due to privacy changes made by Apple, the company also readied itself for another continued loss in the billions. The slump in stock price also caused Mark Zuckerberg to lose a whopping $30 billion in personal wealth.
In contrast with other Web3 platforms, Meta also failed to launch its own cryptocurrency and achieve a “deep compatibility” with blockchain. With a goal of empowering “billions of people” and hoping that 1.7 billion users would be able to create digital wallets, too much resistance from regulators led to the project ultimately failing and being shelved. Since then, however, reports have revealed that Meta hasn’t given up on entering the crypto space — having filed 8 trademark applications earlier this year (including applications for crypto tokens, crypto trading, blockchain software, wallets and crypto exchanges).
In 2022, Meta isn’t the only Big Tech company to come under pressure. As policies have tightened at the US Federal Reserve to decrease the industry’s rich valuations following years of ultra-low interest rates, the NASDAQ — which is primarily made up of tech and other growth stocks — fell by more than 9% in January. This was the biggest monthly drop since COVID-19 first struck the market in March 2020.
And while Big Tech companies were credited with driving gains for the wider market throughout the course of the pandemic, analysts believe that the market has now shifted. According to Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network: “There’s a general sense that what’s been moving the market higher is not going to take us to the next level. The question is where is the next growth engine coming from.”
As more metaverse worlds continue to rise in popularity, this raises an important question: should these worlds be open or closed? To clarify, a closed metaverse can be defined as one governed by a central authority (like Meta) that takes ownership of lands and items sold within its platform. On the other hand, an open (or decentralised) metaverse is one that allows users to buy and own metaverse land and items as NFTs, in addition to an ability to exchange them for cryptocurrency.
Comparatively, decentralised platforms and marketplaces appear to take much smaller cuts from creators. OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace in Web3, currently only takes a 2.5% cut from each transaction — whereby creators usually take anywhere between 2.5% and 7.5%. LooksRare, another popular NFT marketplace, only takes a meagre 2% — while BinanceNFT charges only 1%.
While critical of Meta’s large virtual asset cut, many Web3 community members have also seen this move as an unintended push towards decentralisation. “Facebook charging 47.5% for every NFT sale is the best thing to ever happen to us,” one person tweeted after the news was released, implying that Meta’s massive fee would ironically help steer more users towards open, decentralised platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox.
Other users, however, have expressed clear anger at the social media giant’s announcement, calling it “the enemy of decentralisation and freedom in Web3.” Following Big Tech’s reign of increased profit during the course of the pandemic (Facebook reported an increase of 10% from targeted advertising during COVID-19 lockdowns), it’s hard not to see this move as doubly harmful to online creators and small businesses who may seek out opportunities in Web3.
If we take a long, hard look back at Facebook’s history and online trajectory (including its encounters throughout its pre-Meta days), it isn’t out of left-field to suggest that the social media giant has been primarily fuelled by greed and profit.
At the time of writing, Zuckerberg owns the four most downloaded mobile apps in the last decade: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Sources have long since accused Zuckerberg of seeing company acquisition as a means of neutralising potential competition and preventing users from ditching Facebook for alternative platforms. For instance, the social media tycoon’s initial acquisition of Instagram followed a general likening to Facebook’s features and revocation of other leaders’ rights (including those of company founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who eventually left the platform after Zuckerberg took control).
In late 2021, internal documents known as “The Facebook Papers” were published by an international consortium of news outlets, following their access to the materials once they were made available by U.S. Congress (and now-revered whistleblower Frances Haugen). This assemblage of documents, according to the Financial Times, included “thousands of pages of leaked documents [painting] a damaging picture of a company that has prioritised growth” over other concerns.
The Associated Press, another news outlet reporting on the matter, summarised the documents as such: “These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence.”
Following Haugen’s release of the documents, Jessica J. Gonzalez, co-CEO of advocacy group Free Press Action, remarked that the whistleblower revelations “confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years” — that the real problem behind Zuckerberg’s empire is actually the business model in which he’s used as a means of governing his platform all along. One that subsists almost entirely on greed and capitalistic gain.
Even as far back as 2010, Zuckerberg began touting his belief that “privacy was no longer a social norm”. And in the following years, Facebook users have been unwittingly trading their privacy for a seemingly more enhanced online experience. Studies have suggested that an estimated 4 in 10 users use social media accounts to follow their favourite products or brands, while 28% of online users claim that targeted ads on social media have effectively brought new services or products to their attention.
On the other side of the curtain, our online data has been regularly harvested and fed to algorithms — serving as raw material for advertisers to make better predictions about what will generate the highest levels of profit. It’s a process called surveillance capitalism — and it’s allowed Big Tech companies to claim our online activity and turn it into their own proprietary knowledge for capitalist gain. In other words, our online personas have, in essence, become products themselves.
Author and tech analyst Shoshanna Zuboff refers to surveillance capitalism as “the dominant economic institution of our time”. Furthermore, “this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of human engagement with digital information” and “today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximise data collection.”
This brings us to another important question: if a company should have no shame in monetising the very marrow it can milk from its users, then what’s stopping it from doing the same thing with any assets they produce?
Let’s circle back to the main subject — which is Meta’s proposed virtual asset cut for creators in Horizon Worlds. How might this approach be setting the company up for failure?
For one, many will know that Meta’s big cut isn’t the first instance of Big Tech greedily clawing funds away from small creators. For years now, Apple has come under fire (even from Mark Zuckerberg himself) for charging developers a 30% fee for in-app purchases made through its dedicated App Store.
Funnily enough, Zuckerberg has even raised Apple’s App Store fee as an example of what he claims he doesn’t want to repeat with metaverse creators. “As we build for the metaverse, we’re focused on unlocking opportunities for creators to make money from their work,” he said back in November 2021. “The 30% fees that Apple takes on transactions make it harder to do that, so we’re updating our subscriptions product so now creators can earn more.” In typical fashion, however, Zuckerberg has done just about anything but place the best interests of creators at the forefront of his roadmap.
Like many of its other visions, Meta’s promise to build the metaverse has also been largely rhetorical and not fully clear. The company’s rebranding, name change and acquisition of Oculus have proven Zuckerberg’s seriousness about growing the VR ecosystem and developing a metaverse-building strategy. However, massive losses to the company’s Reality Labs Division and relatively low adoption rates of VR still indicate that the company isn’t quite dominating the space.
A steep decline in Facebook use has also been a recent concern, with a reported 45% of users allegedly dropping from the platform. With competitor apps (not yet acquired) such as TikTok dominating the market — particularly with Gen Z users — Meta appears to be losing any hope of having a dedicated user base that will seamlessly migrate into the metaverse.
Other moves have also indicated Meta’s lack of clarity in winning the metaverse category. It recently shut down a project to build its own VR/AR operating system, instead choosing to build on the Android platform. The company is also opting to use Qualcomm chips in its upcoming augmented reality glasses, as opposed to utilising its own internal design. Unlike Apple, the company hasn’t embraced vertical integration and carved out its own adoption of particular hardware and chips that will ensure maximum performance. And so far, Meta has been unwilling to open its operating system to other manufacturers — an advantage that has historically allowed Microsoft to dominate the PC market over the last few decades.
While the Meta Quest 2 is currently the best-selling VR headset at the time of writing, this success is forecasted to change once other companies start releasing their own dedicated devices. Apple is likely to produce a high-performance headset that will be equipped with LiDAR technology — a feature that may allow it to one day dominate the headset market.
So, is Meta a premium supplier of technology? Or will it serve as a trailblazing metaverse platform? The problem is that we still don’t know. Combine all of these shortcomings with a very steep fee and you have a particularly muddy strategy that’s likely to fail.
Other major tech leaders have also voiced their lack of belief in Meta as a leader in the emerging metaverse space. Reggie Fils-Aime, former president of Nintendo of America Inc., recently spoke about his stance on Meta in an interview with Bloomberg: “Facebook itself is not an innovative company,” he’s bluntly stated. “They have either acquired interesting things like Oculus and Instagram, or they’ve been a fast follower of people’s ideas. I don’t think their current definition will be successful.” Conversely, Fils-Aime has also expressed his belief that smaller companies will play a much larger role in creating successful metaverse worlds.
Keeping in line with Fils-Aime’s projection, Web3 presents a more creator-focused and community-driven approach to online content creation. Allowing creators to have greater ownership over their digital goods will let them move away from expensive, centralised platforms that are no longer serving them.
Meta is cutting back or postponing some projects in its Reality Labs division and halting hiring for some positions.
Reuters first reported earlier this week that Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth broke the news to Reality Labs staff in a weekly Q&A session, according to a summary of his comments viewed by Reuters, with more specific changes to be announced within the week. We independently reached out to Meta about the report, and a spokesperson reiterated to UploadVR they’re “evaluating key priorities,” not planning layoffs “at this time,” and “so far, Meta has hired more engineers in Q1 than all of 2021.”
While Meta’s Reality Labs revenue grew 35% year-on-year in Q2 2022 ($695 million, compared to $534 million Q1 2021), costs grew 55% as well, up to $3.7 billion from $2.4 billion in Q1 2021. During a recent earnings call, CFO David Wehner said the growing costs were “driven by employee-related costs, R&D operating expenses and cost of goods sold.” While those numbers may appear big at first glance, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave warning ahead of time by signaling a $10 billion loss in overall 2021 profit related to the company’s VR/AR investment, while also warning he expects that investment to “grow further” for the next several years.
Despite the increase in costs, revenue from Quest 2 continues to grow and Meta plans to expand its consumer headset offerings building out from the standalone platform. A high-end consumer headset, codenamed Project Cambria, is slated for release later this year. Two new Quest headsets and a subsequent iteration of Cambria may be in the works for 2023 and 2024 as well, according to a recent report from The Information. The company also opened its first brick-and-mortar consumer store this week, selling Quest, Portal and Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses.
While Meta isn’t alone among platform-building tech companies that seem to be preparing to weather a “market downturn“, Zuckerberg’s investment in realizing VR and AR technology remains significant and we’ll be curious to see how the company focuses its efforts going forward. In June, for example, the poorly rated Venues app will disappear as events move inside Meta’s broader Horizon Worlds effort.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked a bit about the company’s upcoming high-end VR headset Project Cambria today and what it can do. The headset is still basically under wraps, however Zuckerberg showed off a bit of the experience of using the device, giving us a good look at Cambria’s color passthrough function, which allows it do some pretty convincing augmented reality tasks.
Zuckerberg released a video on his Facebook profile today where he sat down with Jesse Schell, founder and CEO of pioneering VR studio Schell Games.
Schell Games is currently developing what Zuckerberg described as a “hypothetical follow-up to I Expect You to Die” using Project Cambria, which is due to launch sometime this year. Instead of being sealed off from the physical world, like a typical VR headset might, Cambria’s color passthrough allows for augmented reality interactions using your own living room as the backdrop.
In a separate video (seen below), the Meta CEO tries on Project Cambria, tightens a back-mounted ratcheting knob, and plays an experience called The World Beyond, which focuses on mixing both virtual and physical spaces and using hand tracking for input. The full-color version will only be available on Cambria, Zuckerberg says, however Quest 2 users will be able to try it soon on App Lab, the experimental app library.
Schell Games is developing its I Expect You to Die-style AR experience on Meta’s Presence Platform, a suite of SDKs that, starting today, will allow any interested developer to build more advanced mixed reality applications.
Speaking to Schell, Zuckerberg talked a bit about the headset’s various sensors. It includes “a bunch of new sensors,” Zuckerberg says, including high resolution, outward-facing cameras that allow for color passthrough experiences as well as depth sensors which will no doubt help with room-tracking fidelity and establishing spatial anchors.
Schell also spoke a bit about the studio’s experience working with Cambria’s color passthrough:
“I’m really excited about the color passthrough, because the black and white passthrough […] gives you sense of where you’re going, but when you have things actually in color, it’s a lot more exciting. It seems much more real, particularly when objects are blending. They key is, when you get the lighting right on the virtual objects so that they match up with the ones that are in your scene, you have these [magic moments] when you’re not sure what’s real and what’s real and what’s not, and you kind of have to take the headset off and check for a second for what is there and what isn’t there.”
In the chat with Schell, Zuckerberg describes Project Cambria as having a “somewhat tighter formfactor than Quest 2.” Although gaming and fitness is likely to be an early focus, Zuckerberg says the headset is also targeting work, which he says will be better for productivity, co-creating things with other headset users, and having meetings virtually.
There’s still no precise launch information yet. As confirmed by Meta, Project Cambria is said to be priced “significantly higher” than $800, which likely positions it more for developers and prosumers. Recent reports however contend that Meta will be releasing Cambria in September, and three more VR headsets by 2024.
You can catch the full 27-minute chat between Zuckerberg and Schell below:
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Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders that they should buckle up for the long haul because the company’s steep investments in XR and metaverse technologies aren’t expected to flourish until the next decade.
Today Meta gave its shareholders a quarterly update, in which the company overviewed its latest earnings and expenses.
For Reality Labs, the company’s XR and metaverse division, revenue was up 30% year-over-year, from $534 million in Q1 2021 to $695 million in Q1 2022.
However, costs associated with running the Reality Labs division rose even more, up by 62% year-over-year, from $1.83 billion in Q1 2021 to $2.96 billion in Q2 2022.
This growth in costs wasn’t unexpected. Meta told investors last year they should expect the company’s XR investments in 2021 to total $10 billion… and to grow even more from there.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been asking for investor patience in his vision for XR and metaverse technologies for years. Back in 2017 he was already prepping investors for a long haul, saying that in order to reach mainstream tracition, XR would need a 10 year trajectory from the year the company acquired Oculus—a timeline that pushed out to 2024.
But in Zuckerberg’s eyes that timeline may have slipped considerably.
Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call, during a lengthy, unscripted response to a shareholder question, Zuckerberg said that he didn’t expect the company’s metaverse and XR investments to really flourish until the 2030s.
So we have multiple teams in parallel that we’ve sort of now spun up [to build XR and metaverse tech]. This goes for VR as well as augmented reality and the other work that we’re doing and is sort of driven by the success that we feel like we’re seeing in the markets and the technology is starting to be ready to really ramp up.
So those [operating losses for Reality Labs], we’re experiencing today. I mean, having those teams operating is something that you see weigh on the results and is one of the reasons why I think the growth rates and expenses have been so high, and I think we’ll continue investing more over some period. But at some point, we will have all those product teams fully staffed for a few versions into the future and then the growth rates there will come down.
But it’s not going to be until those products really hit the market and scale in a meaningful way and this market ends up being big that this will be a big revenue or profit contributor to the business. So that’s why I’ve given the color on past calls that I expect [substantial revenue from Reality Labs] to be later this decade, right?
Maybe primarily, this is laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030s when this is like—when this is sort of more established as the primary computing platform at that point. I think that there will be results along the way for that, too. But I do think that this is going to be a longer cycle.
To be fair, the company’s initial ’10 year trajectory’ included only a vague idea of the metaverse—something that, despite still being somewhat nebulous—has come into clearer focus in the eight years since Meta acquired Oculus and set out to build ‘the next computing platform’.
Meta arguably didn’t take its first stab at trying to figure out what the metaverse might look like until 2016 when it began seriously experimenting with social VR in what would ultimately become Facebook Spaces, the company’s first social VR app which launched in 2017.
Even so, progress has been slow. Facebook Spaces was shut down in 2019, to be superseded by Horizon. But Horizon—which was first announced in 2019—didn’t launch until the far end 2021… and it’s still only available to a limited audience.
For shareholders seeing Meta spend $2–$3 billion on Reality Labs per quarter… it makes sense why the company is being regularly questioned about its steep spending. Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the investments won’t really flourish until the 2030s surely isn’t going to help matters.
To that end, Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that the company’s plan is to use revenue from its non-XR businesses (Facebook, Instagram, and the like) to fund its aggressive and forward-looking spending. For investors to stick around for the long haul, Zuckerberg is going to need to continue to emphatically sell his belief that XR is the next computing platform and explain why shareholders should stick around for the ride.
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