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Last year, former Oculus CEO (and current company advisor) John Carmack threw the gauntlet to the Meta metaverse’s short-term plans. At the 2022 Meta Connect conference, Carmack said last October that he hopes to have his helmet on, “touring the [virtual] in theaters or touring the theater as an avatar in front of thousands of people receiving broadcasts on multiple platforms.”
Carmack’s vision failed to materialize on Tuesday, as Carmack’s jerky, clumsy avatar delivered one of his hour-long unrecorded lectures into a deserted virtual reality space, broadcast as a plain old two-dimensional Facebook video.
“I said last year that I would be disappointed if we didn’t have Connect in Horizon this year,” Carmack said as a presenter. “Here, that’s not really what I meant. Being an avatar on the screen in a video for you is basically the same [just] Be on videotape.”
This set the tone for the presentation in which Carmack said that “there are a bunch of things I’m angry about” regarding the current state of the current Meta VR hardware and software. While this distress has been mitigated somewhat by talk of recent improvements and hope for the future of VR, Carmack seemed generally frustrated with the direction Meta as a whole is taking its VR endeavours.
Prioritize quantity over quality
Take Horizon Worlds, for example, the first social Meta product in the Enterprise edition of Metaverse. On the one hand, Carmack said watching Mark Zuckerberg’s Connect presentation in a Horizon room with a few dozen other people on Tuesday offered “real advantages” over watching the same presentation on a laptop screen… in the middle of his crowded office.
On the other hand, it is a far cry from his vision of “a arena-wide platform with thousands of avatars circling … hundreds at least in the great halls … in a world quite evenly shared”. Carmack said he wants to “be there with a live audience in a virtual space where anyone who wants can stay afterward and talk for as long as they want to.”
“Last year I said I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have Connect in Horizon this year… Here, that’s not really what I meant.”
John Carmack, former technical director of Oculus
Carmack said that if you can create a truly virtual conference space like this, “you can just give people a free headset and stay ahead” compared to the problems of hosting an in-person conference. Carmack said that this kind of large-scale shared world is a difficult technical challenge, and while Horizon “definitely can’t handle it now… it’s not an insurmountable challenge.” [challenge]. “
Carmack also mentioned “a general mockery of avatar quality earlier this year,” an apparent reference to a sketchy avatar of Mark Zuckerberg that went viral in August after Meta shared it online. This reaction caused “a lot of people internally [to be] Paranoid about showing anything other than high-quality avatars.”
But Carmack has expressed some skepticism about this pressure for avatar loyalty. Expressed his preference for spaces filled with lots of low-detail avatars in the Meta push of this genre Almost realistic avatars that consume a lot of CPU 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 lean toward improving quantity, not quality.”
While Carmack said he’s happy with the current state of the Avatar Meta, he noted that his Connect demo is taking place in a “custom version of Horizon” designed to ensure his avatar’s level of detail never goes down. He’s also turned off the Quest Pro’s vaunted face-tracking features because, with the current state of the software, “there’s at least a good chance I’m doing something very embarrassing” in a very public setting.