Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #398

The Fridman - Zuckerberg VR interview really convinced me of this, if you haven't seen it, check it out, it's incredible ▶ this video

Have you seen some of the virtual reality from FB? I think it's getting close to the point where it's just as good as talking to someone in person, with the obvious benefit that not everyone has to be in the same physical office. ▶ this video

I think VR can enable human connection where it otherwise isn’t possible due to distance. Of course, it isn’t a full substitute for in-person interaction, but it doesn’t have to be either or. We can have a great remote connection via VR and still exist in the real world. Check out this podcast[0] between Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg where they meet remotely via the metaverse. [0] ▶ this video

Perhaps this qualifies: Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #398 ▶ this video

I think the tech in that paper was demoed for this podcast: ▶ this video The big roadblock to commercialisation for the moment is the original capture — for the paper they used a 110-camera capture rig under ideal lighting conditions. In the above podcast Zuckerberg mentions that in the future people will be able to use their phones to do that same capture, but I don’t think that tech is coming next year. I wonder if there’ll be an interim period where people who want high-quality avatars will have to book an appointment.

The biggest lesson I took away from all of these hype cycles is how unpredictable they are in their arc. Some trends like AV seem like they were going to take over the world, but they died down as quickly as they rose when we realize how hard safety is. VR seem like it was dead with Google Glasses and Meta. But recent releases show that the [vision of VR is more real than I thought]( ▶ this video ). Apple releasing their VR definitely provides more legitimacy to the idea. Technology is always hard to actually implement in the real world. I think have expectations that the world would flip over with new innovations in a matter of months. But it actually takes years of hard work to get people to adopt it. The internet and mobile phones are good examples where the promise was clear but the journey being universally adopted was not easy. * * For the internet, you have the massive struggle of web standards, getting implementations web browser to align, and achieving acceptable performance. Internet Explorer still haunts the dreams of many web devs. It's remarkable how many fully featured web apps there are like Onshape and Google Maps. * For mobile phones, they require a massive amount of technology investment and unit economics to get the price cheap enough for normal people. It's amazing how wireless technology gotten to the point where we can stream videos on phones.

Lex Fridman talked to Mark Zuckerberg about this just a few days ago [0]. It didn't sound like Meta is has good answers for how this should be done. So it seems unlikely that they'd be significantly more than 6 months into research like this (as the tweet chain says). It seems like Meta is exploring AI avatars, but for much more practical, menial tasks. [0] ▶ this video