The new generation of Quests you're looking for isn't coming.
Written by | Shen Zhihan
Edit | Jingyu
01
「And one more thing……」
During the Opening Keynote session of Facebook Connect 2021, Zuckerberg made a not-surprising decision: in order to give the public a full understanding of Facebook and the vision of betting on the metacosm, the company will change its name to Meta.
"I believe the metacosm is the next chapter of the Internet, and it also opens the next chapter of our company." Facebook was born in a special era. When the Internet was emerging as an entry point into a "new world," Facebook changed the way people "connected."
Today, Zuckerberg is no longer the hairy boy who just left the campus and wore pajamas to meet investors. Apparently he thinks he sees the next "future". Facebook last appeared in the public eye as "Facebook", and the "like" icon representing past achievements has been removed from Facebook headquarters. In the future, Meta's work is divided into two parts: "Family Barrel" social products, and the platform for building the future.
You really can't define Facebook in terms of "social media" anymore.
Zuckerberg wants to build a new "digital world." In August, Facebook launched the Horizon Workrooms platform beta: log in with an Oculus device to participate in meetings virtually. In the future, Meta will bring together more 2D applications, such as Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Dropbox, etc. This year Meta will add Messenger to the Horizon platform, and with Quest, you can call friends in Horizon and further break the boundaries between "virtual" and "real".
In Zuckerberg's view, the metacosm is a perpetual, real-time, and unrestricted (multi-terminal) environment. "Think of the metaverse as a physical Internet where you don't just watch content, you're in it."
Meta fantasy, suppose you swipe your phone and see a good friend at the concert and send you an "invitation to join". At this time, you bring AR as if in it, the concert is over, and the two people in different worlds have agreed to go to the "meta-universe afterparty", where you have purchased party clothes for "Avatar" (digital stand-in) and the "digital version of the collection" NFT that just concerted.
Buy NFT | in the metaverse Facebook
The wind of the metaverse blew again and again. Even so, there is not even a very precise definition of the metacosm. So an hour and a half keynote, Zuckerberg tried to give as many examples as possible, what exactly can people do with the metacosm?
02
Ecology: Build
As a blockbuster game on Quest, Beat Saber earned more than $100 million on Quest alone. Since Population: One was released last year, it has become the most active game on Quest. San Andreas from the Grand Theft Auto series will also be for Oculus Quest 2 (starting in 2022, Oculus Quest will be renamed Meta Quest. ）
Zuckerberg gave more ideas about the metaverse, and it was not enough to have games alone, but also fitness, office and so on. In response, Meta will launch a set of accessories for use with quest2 next year for the new sweatproof handle of the Touch controller, while solving the problem of wiping sweat when exercising. For more upcoming game features, Oculus will be hosting a dedicated game showcase next year.
For example, playing chess with friends, table tennis, fencing, surfing, games not only mean large-scale immersive experiences, but also means the use of AR and holographic projection, every entertainment and sport in life will be different.
Playing chess with your off-site friends | Facebook
You can build your home in Horizon Home. It's a meeting place when friends come; when you're alone, you can arrange your work tasks and design your workspace as you please. Just as computers and mobile phones have taken over your entertainment, work, social life in the past, Zuckerberg hopes that in the future, a VR/AR device will remain the same, or even take over everything.
The team is testing Quest for Business, which allows you to log in to Quest2 with an office account instead of a social account and collaborate with colleagues to access Horizon Workrooms. Quest for Business also gives companies access to the dedicated platform features they need, such as account management, mobile device management (MDM) solutions, SSO integration, and more.
However, the construction of the metaverse's huge ecosystem cannot be completed by Meta itself, and in its vision, it is possible for developers to build a variety of applications through "underlying technology".
Zuckerberg once said, "Right now, our focus is on helping to grow communities and expand the number of people involved in the metaversity and virtual reality."
For example, the Spark AR community has 600,000 creators who create AR effects through spark AR tools. AR effects are very popular in Facebook's "family barrel" product. Facebook said spark AR has continued to become the world's largest mobile AR platform.
This time, Zuckerberg announced the launch of the Presence Platform platform, including the Insight SDK, Interaction SDK and Voice SDK. The Insight SDK helps build mixed reality experiences based on the user's physical space, and "the sense of reality (in the field) is the key to feeling connected in the metaverse." The relevant person in charge said. And the Interaction SDK provides developers with ready-made gesture interactions; the Voice SDK opens up voice control capabilities.
03
Hardware: Entrance
In addition to ecology, Zuckerberg believes that the metaverse core must first have the right equipment as the entrance. But the speculation that a new generation of Quest hardware did not appear.
Meta is just selling off, and it's working on high-end VR code-named Project Cambria. Functionally, it will have features that were not available in VR before, allowing your Avatar to maintain natural eye contact and communication with other users, accurately reflecting your facial expressions and letting others better understand how you feel.
Project Cambria makes Avatar expressions more realistic | Facebook
Another focus of enhancements is the mixed reality experience, with new sensors and reconstruction algorithms giving Cambria the ability to represent objects in the physical world with depth and perspective. New optics are used to improve visual fidelity. Of course, this also means that Cambria is more expensive than the Quest2.
In addition, Meta also announced the first AR glasses, code-named Project Nazare. The AR glasses ultimately wanted to be the size and weight of the glasses that people treat every day. Zuckerberg didn't give a time to come out, "It will take years for holographic displays, projectors, batteries, radios, custom chips, cameras, speakers, and sensors that map the world around us to be integrated into glasses that are about 5 millimeters thick." But what can it be used for? Users put on their glasses, click on the Whatsapp app in front of them, you invite friends to the game, and they're projected onto you.
However, Meta has only just begun to solve the technical problems that need to be solved in the pursuit of presence (presence) in the metaverse. Take "Avatar", in the future, our digital avatars in the virtual world will certainly be more than just "pinching a face". Meta shows a video showing how hard it is.
"The rendering and relighting of the hair and skin shows the fidelity that the 3D digital stand-in ultimately needs to achieve, and the individual pores on his skin can be seen."
3D Avatar | Facebook
"And how precisely the cloth moves when the hand touches and stretches the cloth of cloth..."
Arguably, Zuckerberg imagined what he understood as a local aspect of the metacosm— albeit in CG form. Its path is to focus on the layout from the three aspects of hardware entrance, underlying technology, and content ecology. However, Meta also has a long way to go.
It's not easy to throw away the social media empire he's built, but Zuckerberg has to.
Just a few days ago, The Verge published an article saying an internal document shows that Facebook's teen users in the U.S. have fallen 13 percent since 2019 and are expected to decline 45 percent over the next two years. The number of young users aged 20 to 30 is expected to decline by 4% over the same time period. Worse, the younger the user, the less often they use the app. The message of these numbers is blunt that Facebook is losing its younger generation.
On the other hand, at regulatory hearings and media interviews, internal "whistleblowers" from Facebook continue to provide people with strong materials about the social giant's internal indifference and inaction to external social influences, and even deception, which gives more evidence to the regulators who threaten to use antitrust blades to "dismember" the Internet giant.
Changing the name and stressing a distant but bright future is clearly necessary for both Zuckerberg and Facebook.
*Image credits Facebook
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