Carmack: “There’s a group I’m angry about” in VR

Last year, former Oculus CEO (and current company advisor) John Carmack throw the glove For the near-term metaverse plans. By the 2022 Meta Connect conference, Carmack said last October that he hopes to be in his headset, “walking around the [virtual] Halls or I walk the platform as an avatar in front of thousands of people receiving the feed across multiple platforms. ”

Carmack’s vision did not materialize on Tuesday, as Carmack’s jerky and awkward avatar gave one of his autographs, hour-long unwritten conversations amid a deserted virtual reality space, broadcast as Normal 2D video on Facebook.

“I said last year that I would be disappointed if we didn’t have Connect in Horizon this year,” Carmack said as the presenter. “This right here, that’s not really what I meant. Being an on-screen avatar in a video for you is basically the same thing.” [just] Being on video. ”

That set the tone for the presentation in which Carmack said “there is a group I’m angry about” regarding the current state of the current Meta VR hardware and software. While that anger has tempered somewhat with talk of recent improvements and hope for the future of VR, Carmack seemed generally frustrated with the direction Meta as a whole is taking for its VR efforts.

Pushing for quantity over quality

Take Horizon Worlds, for example, the first social media Meta product in the company’s version of metaverse. On the one hand, Carmack said watching Mark Zuckerberg’s Connect presentation in his Horizon room with a few dozen other people on Tuesday offered “some real benefits” from watching the same presentation on a laptop screen in the middle of his crowded desk.

On the other hand, this is a far cry from his vision of “a arena-wide support with thousands of avatars wandering around… at least hundreds in large rooms… in a completely uniformly shared world.” Carmack said he wanted “to be present with a live audience in a virtual space where everyone who wanted to stay afterwards and talk for as long as they felt like it.”

“Last year I said I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have Connect in Horizon this year…that’s right here, that’s not really what I meant.”

John Carmack, chief technology officer of Oculus

If you can achieve a truly virtual conference space like this, Carmack said, “you can just give people a free headset and keep moving forward” compared to the hassles of holding a conference in person. Carmack said that this kind of large-scale shared world is a difficult technical challenge, and although Horizon “definitely can’t handle it now… [challenge]. “

Carmack also mentioned some “public cynicism about the quality of the avatar earlier this year”, apparently referring to A low-detail Mark Zuckerberg avatar went viral in August After Meta shared it online. This reaction caused “a lot of people internally [to be] Paranoid about showing anything but high quality avatars.”

But Carmack has expressed some severe skepticism about this pressure for symbolic fidelity. He preferred spaces filled with lots of low-detail avatars over Meta’s push for this genre Semi-realistic “rarified avatars” Which consumes a lot of processor power to allow crowded virtual rooms. “We have a limited amount of resources on our headphones here, and in many cases the cloud view will not save us,” Carmack said. “I definitely tend to improve in terms of quantity rather than quality.”

And while Carmack said he’s happy with the current state of the Avatar Meta, he noted that his Connect demo was taking place in a “custom build for Horizon” designed to ensure a level of detail on his avatar that never fell out. He’s also turned off crowd-tracking features on his Quest Pro headset because, in the current state of the software, “there’s at least a good chance I’m doing something very awkward” in a very public place.