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Mark Zuckerberg has not forgotten the metaverse. The leader of Meta presented this week the new virtual reality avatars, which use scanning technology to build 3D models of the user’s face. The result is impressively realistic.
“I just think it’s really magical,” Zuckerberg said in an interview for Lex Fridman’s podcast, published Thursday. “This gets to the core of what the vision of virtual and augmented reality is, of offering a sense of presence as if you were there with the other person, no matter where you are in the world,” commented the Facebook founder.
The interview was not done face to face. Or yes, but no. The two were hundreds of kilometers apart. “But it feels like we’re in the same room,” an emotional Fridman insisted several times. The sample video alternates the real images of both with their new avatars, part of the project Pixel Codec Avatars which Meta launched in 2021.
Zuckerberg resumes the discussion about the metaverse just after Meta Connect 2023. During the multi-day event, the company presented the Meta Quest 3 —his mixed reality glasses— and other news about artificial intelligence, a technology that at times calmed Zuckerberg’s insistence on the metaverse.
The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 set the tone for big technology companies, including Meta. But the metaverse, on its own, was no longer generating excitement. Last year, Meta recorded operating losses for about $13.7 billion in Reality Labs, the development department of your virtual universe.
The project has generated so much disbelief that a company shareholder firm asked Zuckerberg, in a public letter, to cut the investment. “Meta needs to get in shape and focus,” said the letter, published in October 2022.
Zuckerberg unveiled his first avatar for the metaverse in February of last year. Immediately, it became a meme. He was a caricature of himself, in front of a virtual version of the Eiffel Tower. The easy joke on social networks. Since then, it has presented other versions that attempted to improve this first attempt.
A Meta graphic artist even said that they had designed approximately 40 versions of Zuckerberg’s face during 4 weeks, before Meta Connect in 2022. But the result was not that different.
Zuckerberg explained that, for the interview with Fridman, they both took 3D scans of their faces. “Instead of our avatars being cartoonish and instead of streaming a video, what we did is scan ourselves and a lot of different expressions,” he said.
From this, they built computer models for each one. In addition to being super realistic, it is more efficient, compared to the bandwidth needed to stream a full video or an immersive 3D video. The system, “when you have the helmet on your head, sees your face, sees your expression and can basically send a coded version of what you’re supposed to look like over the cables,” Zuckerberg added, while wearing a Quest Pro.
When will the new avatars be ready?
It will likely be a while before the new super-realistic avatars are publicly accessible. Zuckerberg said that Goal was still working on simplifying the scanning process. The goal is to make the scan possible by simply waving the phone in front of your face for a couple of minutes. The CEO of Meta explained that the process currently takes several hours.
Zuckerberg stressed that his intention is to achieve more than just an immersive video call. “What you can do in the Metaverse, which is different from what you can do on a phone, is do things where you are physically there, together, and participate in things together.”
He talked about games and meetings, but that all the applications and use cases still needed to be built around these possibilities. And he blurted out: “But, I don’t know, I think the next few years are going to be pretty wild on this.”
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