Carmack Unscripted | Hacker News Reader

Carmack Unscripted

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I wonder if the majority of people designing/pushing these huge systems of weird cartoon avatar interaction systems... are a tad bit on the spectrum (Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms....) but a side effect is the uncanny valley of these weird avatars being pushed by these teams at Meta/FB. It feels more 'creepy' to me talking to a cartoon 'uncanny-valley' representation of a person rather than just seeing their actual photo/video feed.

reading this post on "Avatars, Anthropomorphism, and Autism Spectrum Disorder"...

> A 2016 study looked measured the neural responses of children with ASD and neurotypical children when shown unfamiliar human and robot faces. The test showed that the targeted responses were present for both for neurotypical children, but only for the robot faces for the kids with ASD. “Together, these studies provide some evidence that individuals with ASD may typically process anthropomorphic rather than human faces

https://codebaby.com/avatars-anthropomorphism-and-autism-spe...

I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else. Performance on headsets is a challenge on pretty much all of these apps, from VRChat to Rec Room. I also think a lot of people that look just at the pictures don't realize that presence in VR adds a lot and can compensate for some loss of graphical fidelity. It's like how the first 3D games were quite blocky and a lot less refined than the best 2D games of the era but just the ability to move your character and the camera in 3D compensated for the bad graphics, to an extent.

But why the fuck do I need this when I can multi task using screens. It just feels that once they do their final state multiverse and force us inside, we ll still have multiple screens and workspace area to organize.

The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...

Not everyone has space, not everyone wants to spend tons of money (generally the same people who don't have space) on 5 displays and the OS config to make 5 displays work. Some people travel a lot for work. There will always be enthusiasts like the people who spend absurd amounts of money on fancy mechanical keyboards, but once VR resolution becomes good enough for work, anyone who wants/works better with large screen real-estate or travels for work a lot will just dump monitors.

BTW if you're actually interested in this, Carmack talks about this and the state of the Oculus around ~ 56 min in the linked video.

While I agree with most of your comment (I don't have space — it's ridiculously expensive! Wouldn't mind another monitor but it's also a bit expensive…)

> absurd amounts of money on fancy mechanical keyboards

Fancy mechanical keyboards aren't really expensive? (compared to monitors, or space, or even really VR headsets…) Most of the people I know who have them also have them because RSI. That forces you into being an enthusiast whether you want it or not. But a single trip to the doctors saved and the keyboard pays for itself.

But they're also just better keyboards too.

Oh I don't mean the keyboards are expensive. I mean the folks that collect keyboards.

> and the OS config to make 5 displays work

I find this tendency funny. It's kinda crazy we keep building new very hard innovative software to avoid needing to fix boring software.

I bet vscode will never support multiple monitors, even in vr.

>The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...

Our massive real estate issues that are pricing people out of having enough space to live in the last decades, have less to do with the population growth in the world in this time frame and more to do with immigration and economic and building policies that must see the asset prices always go up by significant margins to "beat the market".

There's also the issue of location and internal and external migration where given a constant worldwide population, everyone is migration to the handful of cities with jobs, infrastructure and QoL, pushing prices up. I've seen this in my home country that saw a massive population decline yet a massive increase in real estate prices proving that the price of housing is not determined by taking the number of houses in the country and dividing it by the number of people in the country giving us the supply/demand ratio determining the housing price factor, as not people are competing for real estate but piles of money are, since it's also a speculative investment vehicle, and so the bigger piles of money are winning, regardless of the total houses to people ratio.

I've gone a bit off topic but my point is that the struggle for affordable living space is real and is gonna get worse despite the world population not increasing that much, as in traditional capitalist fashion, the banks, companies and people who already have wealth and assets will use it as leverage to aquire more of it, pushing the prices up, at the detriment of those trying to enter the market now with less capital.

TL;DR: The housing situation has nothing to do with population growth trends but everything to do with growing piles of money competing for a pie that's relatively fixed in size. This cannot end well.

because it cost nothing to change a screen into 10 of custom size like you are in a nasa control room? why in the world would I buy 4 monitors when I can have it virtually. This is the beginning of the death of the monitor market

> This is the beginning of the death of the monitor market.

no. no it is not.

for one thing, people are always going to need to view screens when they are not at home or at work.

screens have a VERY long way to go before you can reproduce the clarity and just sheer number of pixels available to display clear information to the eyes in VR.

even if eye tracking is used, and even if you only render where the user is looking, the virtual monitors must be legible, and VR headsets are nowhere near that kind of pixel density, yet. they're fine for rendering scenery and walls and avatars, and conveying motion, but if you want to read a screen of text on one of your five virtual monitors without leaning in and making that monitor consume much more field of view, you're going to need LCD displays for headsets which have 10x the resolution in both X and Y than are available today. maybe only 7x.

and there will always be afterbirths like me who get motion sick instantly, and for a full 24 hours minimum, in VR no matter how good the experience is.

I'll keep my monitors, thanks.

> I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else.

VRChat avatars have personality. On hardware now 6 years old.

People are reacting to the lack of personality, not the lack of immersion.

On PC hardware. This looks like it was built from the ground up for Quest and have a ready to customize one for each user instead of a painstakingly hand crafted one created in blender.

Most VRChat avatars need PC to run and still cause instability on lower end PCVR setups. Quest can't even render them half the time.

IIUC, users have to specifically upload a mobile version for VRC on Quest to display an avatar, rather than it trying and failing by chances. It's files missing or present difference.

Hm interesting, when I'm in VRC on Quest I see low poly avatars (haven't compared with the exact experience on PCVR mostly because if I have the Quest on I'm going to use the Quest) so I figured it was some sort of graceful degradation, but guess I'm wrong.

I don't think those avatars have enough human likeness to really trigger the uncanny valley effect.

I think it is weird for a different reason: it looks like 1990s tech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

As best I can tell the push for this comes from the top and no one who knows better is stopping him.

The push for low fidelity, as usual, and as mentioned in this very talk, is the limited power of these mobile systems pushing dual 2k displays at 90Hz.

The issue is not in polygon counts, but artistic qualities. There would be PS2 games that would look more comfortable and/or convincing than this.

But running at 120fps at basically 4k resolution while scanning 5 camera inputs on the same low power mobile CPU? I think not.

And remember these scenes can be modified by users and are loaded as needed.

This is not like a precooked scene in a computer game where designers spend weeks fine-tuning the lighting model.

I notice pretty much all quest apps use ambient lighting only which gives them this fake look. Some nice spotlights would do a world of good. But I guess anything better than this is just too expensive for the system.

I'm pretty confident this has more polygons and higher resolution textures than a gameplay scene in Final Fantasy XII. Those models had 256x256 textures and 1500 polygons total per character. Just the glasses virtual-Carmack is wearing are probably pushing 200+ polygons when they could be 3 quads and a clever texture. I was going to think maybe they wanted to avoid using transparency in their textures, but he's standing in front of a large virtual glass door.

But still I agree with the other commenters, they should have gone MORE cartoony and more simple. This is just a simultaneously creepy and goofy middle-ground.

It's not the number of polygons that is the problem, its how they are arranged.

They need to hire an better Art Director.

They could take some polygons out of the glasses and give the characters legs at least!

Update: They are a actually doing a lot there. The lips and eyebrows are moving. It has skinned animation. When I started in the industry we were designing characters that would inanimate without skinning, everything was static like a wooden puppet.

See the keynote for the resin for the lack of legs, and the new avatars coming soon.

Mii avatars probably have even less polygons and use simpler shading and they look a lot better to me.

You actually don’t get the “uncanny” feeling from this? Compared to non-Meta avatar systems and game graphics? Are non-gamers less susceptible to it? Is that how these avatar systems goes through the front door???

I'm very much a gamer but I don't think this is so bad, no..

I’m more than a touch aspy myself which makes this faux-biting rebuke that sounds cool in only my head a bit meta: but nerds figured out how to sell tech stuff to normies quite some time ago.

Zuck hasn't.

Of all the things to criticize Mark for, being bad at making money seems a weird one.

Not being bad at making money, but selling something other than eyeballs is a vastly different proposition.

He’s certainly good at making money but consistently horrible at keeping nerds around.

(Shrug) He owns John Carmack...

What has he successfully sold to consumers?

Their own lives

Advertising and alot of it.

I dunno? If you consider paying in privacy or mental health and getting webshit sun return to be "buying something", then Zuck is probably humanities most successful salesman...

Sure he has! He keeps them in rage-loops so he can show them ads and manipulate politics

It looks like they're trying make corporate Memphis art meets DreamWorks movie character design into just the standard avatar. Insanely goofy.

The biggest games are Orcs, Humans and a Lot of Brown (the Riot and most of the Blizzard portfolios). Or Toon With a Lot Of Purple (Overwatch, Fortnite, many Playstation titles). Or Brown (Modern Warfare, PUBG, CS:GO, R6). Or anime. Or photoreal (Unreal engine titles excluding Valorant & Fortnite, RDR, Cyberpunk...)

When you reach 100m users, the ideas get limited. C'est la vie.

I initially thought the same, but using even the current gen avatars for multiplayer on the Quest 2 feels great and is surprisingly convincing. The speech to mouth movement detection looks natural and combined with the body language being accurately represented with reverse kinematics I felt like I was colocating very realistically.

I suspect its just easier and faster (in terms of cpu and network throughput) to translate human facial expessions to a digital represebtation and apply it to lofi animated character than using something more hi def.

>Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms...

does it?

> weird cartoon avatar interaction systems

Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars. There would be no interaction! You'd spend all your time rendering.

> photorealistic avatars.

It's coming, to, of all things, Second Life. Second Life is adding "puppeteering", and this works with head tracking, face tracking, and full body tracking. Users have been working on VR viewers. (The client is open source.) It's all very experimental, but there is a meeting in Second Life every two weeks[1] where all of this is demoed. Some of the attendees are rigged for full body tracking, and, with good quality Second Life avatars, which have far more detail than Meta or VRChat, and can do facial expressions, they look reasonably good. It's striking how someone with a full rig dominates a meeting without even trying. They're so much more present than the people sitting at keyboards.

Hardware is a big problem. You need a good gamer PC to run all this and get the full effect. And a VR headset. And tracking gear. This is a real problem in the era of the $99 Chromebook. It's not getting cheaper, either. The first NVidia graphics card that was good enough for this was the NVidia 1060 with 6GB VRAM, in 2016, introduced at $250. It still costs about $250 to get that level of GPU power from NVidia.

People who really want to be looked at - performers, influencers, etc - will need a full tracking rig. The audience doesn't.

[1] https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/6509-introducin...

> Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars.

You mean like... video?

These deep down in the uncanny valley stuff is usually done by assigned neurotypicals, not autistic. Autists are usually good at staying out of it.

Please stop perpetuating this harmful stereotype about people with ASD.

Maybe if Zuckerberg himself didn't look so much like a plastic lizard, his avatar wouldn't be so creepy.

I'm sure some PM somewhere in Meta is proud it's using that horrid avatar instead of an actual video. But ooft, it looks so goofy on what seems to be a serious conversation.

Their whole metaverse bet seems weirder and weirder by the day.

I completely agree, this absolutely horrendous for a visual presentation. A wii like character, no proper lighting, floating with no legs and the subtle fidget moving of the limbs, lack of facial expression and flapping mouth that hardly mimics the sound. What did facebook spend all their money on?

I'd rather see video or even a still picture of Carmack than this monstrosity.

A proper Mii would have been better. They are purposely cartoonish and can’t move in human ways.

This is trying to be vaguely human in hand and lip movement and it looks like bad marionette.

Hopefully it gets better but right now I’d rather just listen to the audio.

They should have licensed the graphical style from South Park, and they'd have a hit on their hands.

I’d be asking for more meetings at work if this is what I could look forward to.

The immediate comparison I think of is VRChat, which does literally everything on that list better and has by comparison a shoestring budget.

Doesn't run on the Quest, for one. You're comparing a stand alone experience to a PC experience, no?

VRChat has had a Quest app for a while. It has limits on avatar/world complexity because of the limited processing power, but is otherwise an identical experience, including plenty of cross-platform avatars and worlds.

And the camera pans around, which John said is driven by someone on the production team... but, there is nothing to see there. I guess the motion is introduced to keep us from falling asleep?

He says he didn't use the new face tracking because it glitches out too much, so it was using the old auto generated face expressions. Big WTF.

Wouldn’t it be great to read an honest postmortem report, a few years from now?

I happen to have a time machine. "After Zuckerberg retired to run for prime minister of the newly united Irish state, we conducted some serious soul searching. Turns out the only CEO in the valley with anything approaching taste was Steve Jobs! Gosh, who could tell at the time? Certainly not us."

It does look goofy, doesn't it? Like an elaborate joke. I'm not trying to shit on people's hard work, but it all looks so, I don't know.. bland and not interesting AT ALL. Like Second life meets that playstation thing, but even worse somehow.

I'll happily spend an evening watching vrchat shenanigans or 2.5D vtubers but this thing just goes so far beyond 'corporate inoffensiveness squeezed the soul out of it'. It's like the developers actively disdain their own work.

Sometimes good work needs to be shit on in a constructive way.

This is bloody awful quality in visual quality and marketing. You want to show something that works well. This... this does not "work", let alone well.

Games have Art Directors.

From the evidence, Meta doesn’t have any.

Meta actually does have several really great art directors who’ve done great work in other industries.

However talking to the folks there, it’s very much an engineering project manager led environment, and there’s just no value on good art direction.

You can have the best of the best but you need to put them to good use, and Meta clearly isn’t.

That sounds truly painful for all the creatives involved. They must be either sad or disengaged. This is obviously a whole different ball of wax than making a copy of TikTok or whatever else they decide to clone, so you just cannot set priorities or judge quality the same way.

It’s sad on a creative level but from a career perspective, many of my friends (from when I worked in film) are earning multiples of what they earned previously, and are doing less work at the same time.

So it’s easy to just give in and do the lowered task at hand rather than fight for the high end work they were hired to do.

It seems more likely to me that they have art directors, they're just the same ones that design the weird corporate advertising art with the tiny heads. It's very "safe" for lack of a better word.

Safe works when you're selling productivity software, but not when the product is (partially) the art/design/environment.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...

Meta just need to partner with Microsoft to integrate it with Linkedin.

Then it's will turn into the one true cringe generator.

“I am so proud and honored and humbled to announce that my avatar now has three glowing rings over its head!”

“Please help me celebrate my Metaversary…”

“Nobody truly appreciates how hard us weebles work to get our Zuckabadges. Next time you see a weeble, give it a ‘/clap’!”

Oh sweet lord this will be horrific.

Funny, but work anniversaries at FB are literally called “Metaversary” after the Meta rebranding.

Also, your colleagues are your “Metamates”. I’m not even kidding.

It's sad when reality exceeds satire. "Veep" seems like a mild documentary now.

Didn't they already to try to copy linkedin once? I forget which string of names it was under. Something work face business link book ish.

I "used"(found excuses not to use) this at a previous job at a mid size software company.

It was literally just a private instance of facebook. 95% of the posts were basically fluff posts from HR. No content of any substance. So basically linkedin, but less useful, because everyone on there was in the same company and so there was no real networking effect to it either.

I didn't stay at that company very long, for a multitude of reasons.

It’s actually unsettling to me how committed they are to such garbage.

I’m hoping this is just an expensive example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy because otherwise it’s perplexing and eerie.

Zuckerberg is surrounded by yes men/women. That's the only explanation I can think of. I watched a few of their videos. The video with him talking about Zoom integration with Meta and splitting off in groups with avatars, etc. Does anyone really want to work like this?? The entire benefit of remote work is that I don't have to deal with this BS. Please stop trying to force these weird extroverted fetishes like avatar huddle groups and awkward virtual whiteboarding sessions onto remote work. We have 2d whiteboarding apps that already work!

The overall bland soulless corporateness of it all is creeping me the fuck out. These presenters are all 100% dead inside.

Skipping the commute, longer in bed, home cooking, and not having to share a toilet with the phantom sprayer - there are other benefits to remote work.

Phantom sprayer! oh man that is hilarious

> It’s actually unsettling to me how committed they are to such garbage.

Facebook missed the boat on owning an OS or phone, so their only hope in protecting access to their apps is by owning a brand-new platform.

Which means that the company is all-in on VR, regardless of whether or not the result will be any good.

But it's like Putin bombing the people he needs to convince to join him while grinding the youth out of those who had already joined: how frustrating it must be for both people's advisers to tell them to stop throwing good money after bad and frigging pivot away before all that remain are ashes and a footnote in some biography.

It's just a SWE job, not being press-ganged to fight a war against your relatives.

Also, most of us will never work on anything that anyone will ever give a shit about.

Even if this particular project fails, this is mildly more interesting than yet another CRUD app.

Yeah, the list of stuff I've worked on over the years is long and boring. I'd happily work on this for Facebook salary and stock.

People aren’t happy when a company decides to to 100% in something for years, but they aren’t happy either when they keep dropping products (stadia)

We just want them to be 100% in on things we think are perfect, pretty simple really. :P

False dichotomy.

How? How many large companies are investing so much resource in novel ideas for years without seeing much back?

I watched a bit of the conference and they may start to pivot. They were talking about how whatever it is they were building is going to have browser integration.

It's whiplash how Meta VR is putting out demos that look 20 years old, while Meta AI is putting out demos that look like they're from the future.

https://makeavideo.studio

One of Meta’s moto is “we’re only 1% there” or something to that effect. I could imagine that it’d be really cool if they did that every year and it gets better and better and then we look back at the first ones and see the huge progression. I’m excited personally

It's very distracting. Plus I appreciate being able to see peoples faces as they express themselves and ideas.

I dont even care: im fine with 20 chat windows with history I can cycle through as they illuminate...

Anything the VR stuff is doing feels like a "good on paper" awful distraction.

Part of the problem would be that you can’t have video of a person’s face while they are wearing a headset as far as I know. I expect that to remain a technical blocker even as the graphics horsepower of the headsets increase over time.

Use some fancy AI to create a real time deep fake of your face.

To be fair, a video of a VR event is way different than being in VR for that event. A comparison is a video of people watching a movie versus actually watching that movie, except more extreme. VR is far more visceral, at least when done well. A video review of, say Half-Life Alyx, is no comparison to actually being in it.

Now, that said, Meta's seems to be floundering a lot for its actual art style, there is no doubt about that!

Did you listen to Carmack? It's addressed immediately. He's specifically making a point about what is currently feasible and mentions how he wanted it this way since the last Connect (and said as much last time).

This level of quality is fine for low-end headsets like Quest. All game engines should be able to increase rendering quality on high-end systems. It's a mystery why they don't do this.

Compare to this Carmack conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4

He dumps on the technology constantly in the video. I don't think any PM is happy watching this lol.

My company's Slack was dying laughing at how negative his event was within the first 10 minutes. And then towards the end he says "and now I'm gonna be grumpy" and we were sent reeling.

Favorite quote was "one of my internal posts was reported and taken down for not being sensitive enough."

I mean I really don't want to shit on Meta but ...

is this parody? The quality of this is really really bad, almost ps2 level bad

Using this for presentation is really unwise.

Holy cow and he said this was a CUSTOM BUILD to maintain frame rate! So it can’t even push this level of graphics normally. For what it showed I’d expect about 600 FPS. And the arms are jittering..Wtf?

This VR world is running on a headset (Basically a phone), not a beefy computer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32505204.

Bone Lab[1] also runs on the Quest and looks infinitely better.

[1]: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/4215734068529064/

That looks like a really cool game :D. Carmack mentions a couple of things that might explain the difference in graphics at 20min.

TLDW: Horizons is optimized for UGC and being dynamic. Horizons stuff isn't built in modelling tools by professional modellers.

I get that, but Bone Labs is developed by a small indie studio. It's hard to believe Meta can't make a decent looking VR experience with the amount of resources they have available. Point is, the hardware is clearly capable and is not the reason why their metaverse looks bad.

To be fair, the actual latest stuff does look much better [1], it looks like Carmack is using an older build.

I think one of the things that's being overlooked here is scale. I've made VR Maps which pushed fidelity and the problem you have is the size absolutely explodes. Meta is intent on having automagically generated unique avatars for each user, the size of which at the scales of Meta would become astronomical.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvfV-iGwYX8&feature=share&si=EMS...

If they made it like a game it seems like they probably could make the experience better. I have no knowledge of 3D modelling, but a focus on UGC seems like a big impediment to higher quality assets.

Who knew you could fit all of Hell inside one headset?

Seriously, who wants these VR systems? Have we evolved to the point where giant tech companies no longer require customers? Even the high end-VR games I've played in the mall aren't as convincing as a standard PC/Console game. From what I've seen a mere 260k VR units were sold in 2022. Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.

Where are the lines around the corner? where are the reports of sold out VR headsets? I haven't been able to buy a GPU for years, but I'm willing to bet I'll find a discounted quest if I go looking.

I would love an answer to this. They look like bad mobile games because it has to run on mobile hardware. Interactions, latency etc. are all worse than on some average PC game.

You could just log into, I don't know, ARMA III server as a department and host your meeting there instead of this torture.

Even on the PC-connected headsets (Index, Vive, etc.) where the graphics are infinitely better, the games are still really meh. It feels like a solution in search of a problem. Once the novelty of "ooh, 3D and position tracking" wears off, the games themselves feel like tech demos... even the best VR games pale in comparison to your typical "very positive" rando indie game on Steam, of which there are hundreds.

You know how Nintendo sold a bazillion Wiis and Switches even though their hardware is pretty subpar? They had solid, fun games with charisma and charm.

The VR world, meanwhile, has... uh... disembodied techbros floating in a shrink's office with you? I really respect Carmack, but... what the hell, man?!? Any of his old indie or id software games were SOOOO much better than this Meta crap.

The whole thing feels like a sunken cost fallacy where some True Believers keep making new headsets, but they're not fundamentally getting better... still stuck in dorky-gimmick land.

> Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.

The bet isn't that the Quest or any extant VR headset _is_ the iPhone, the bet is that some successor of the Oculus could be the iPhone. Facebook is hoping they can either capitalize on it directly or hold the patents to skim the cream off of whomever does.

The current headsets are more like PalmOS -- pretty cool, but not yet cool enough. They're for geeks and enthusiasts. If my silly analogy holds, we're currently waiting for Nokia and Blackberry to show up and miss (but make a lot of progress along the way), and then we'll get an iPhone around ~2028, and the bet might pay off.

So Facebook drops billions per year to be palm pilot? What incentive does anyone have in this org to deliver an actual product/customer value? How do we know VR isn’t a bet for the 2030s?

If this was a small labs net spending a few million a year… then I’d buy this, but we’re looking at a bet the farm situation.

I will die on the hill that PalmOS was primarily a marketing failure. They were always primarily thought of basic personal organizer devices, but the Palm Tungsten and Zire lines (Starting around 2003) had very strong multimedia and gaming functionality.

World is bonkers... can someone elaborate what is happening @ FB and other Silicon Valley companies where people seemingly went crazy? There are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating a metaverse like thing with stunning detail, but this?

I suspect micro-dosing is showing its effects. Cant find any other rational explanation.

Nah, this is more like I'm pretending to be an idiot... and this pattern appears at even more and more outlets.

The direct technical explanation for the fidelity gap here, as has been stated elsewhere in the comments here, is that Meta's metaverse VR tech runs off of a smartphone chip. Performance is thus very limited. Further compounding this limitation is the fact that since it is VR, the application has to render the world twice every frame - so rendering capability is ostensibly cut in half. The result is bland, low-detail, flat-looking (and in this case jittery and glitchy) graphics.

I think this gap could easily have a hand in preventing the Facebook metaverse from reaching mainstream appeal. We've had gorgeous graphics in games and virtual worlds for quite a long time now - just look at what Crysis achieved fifteen years ago. To the average consumer who doesn't care about the technical limitations and issues behind the product, this is like rewinding the clock twenty years.

As far as why Zuckerberg is so hyped on it - your guess is as good as mine. Just seems like a really misguided attempt at creating a new platform/ecosystem that they control entirely and can monetize.

> There are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating a metaverse like thing with stunning detail, but this?

John Carmack is spent.

Richard Garfield also created Artifact.

Niantic also created Wizards Unite.

Markus Persson made some videos of some kind of Stargate Universe spaceship game with a programmable 16 bit computer. It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.

There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops!

> are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating

It's just super really fucking risky. It's not this, VC thing where you are just putting out winners over and over again.

There are no Marc Lore types in gaming. There's no exit strategy for Marc Lores of gaming. And if you don't have any idea what I'm saying or talking about at this point, if you're like, who the fuck is Marc Lore, you are not comprehending how far you are from understanding the challenge of making these games with huge audiences that last for years.

You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.

The mistake wasn't taking a risk. Better Zucc make video games than a payment system or a crypto trading platform or a spare room rental company. The mistake is that John Carmack is a dick.

> It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.

My recollection was that a bunch of people were really excited, a bunch of people were like, "What is this?", and then Notch basically just lost interest and wandered off. I think he's one of those people that needs externally imposed structure and doesn't know what to do with himself now that he's super rich.

Oh man, are you high? :DDDD

---" There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops! ---"

Examples of these big flops please.

Creating a big title is a team effort. You can shove your top designer if he doesn't have a proper team. Ex blizzard guys, almost all of them failed, why? Because they jumped out, believed they were hotshots, but their team/general game idea was lacking. Also look what happened to David Jaffe without Sony's backing...

If you have the money, but don't know jackshit about games, and you don't have a Steve Eisman quality bullshit detector, what are you expecting? Btw there are a lot of excellent indie titles that trump big titles while made by a few individuals, but only a fraction of gamers know about them, because they don't have the money plus marketing machine needed to bring them to a wider audience. Pour your zillions there or hire me, give me a shitton of money, power to kick people in the balls and you'll get your 10x return, lol.

Plus how is this relevant? All I'm saying that the tech is ready, can be made, there are perfect VG examples that can be used as a VR/MV setting, but what Meta showcased is a letdown.

> You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.

Given this, where is the YCombinator for games? Why isn't someone funding 100,000 ConcernedApes and ToadyOnes in an attempt to cash in on the next Stardew Valley? Serious question.

The ROI on making games is still negative, the industry runs on unpaid dream-chasing. Same reason there's no YCombinator for rock stars.

The "Ycombinator of Games" was Kickstarter at one point, but there have been few major successes from that. Unreal Grants, Steam, Patreon, and itch.io are today's best analogues.

Personally, I don't think a Ycombinator model for games would be appropriate unless you think MMOs/GaaS are the only things worth playing.

I can explain it, but you won’t like it:

* Entire economy is right now controlled by FED and mega funds like Blackrock. What Engineers or public think is at the moment is unimportant, entire shift to Metaverse is directed by these mega funds / mega investors.

* So, people that control the economy desperately want Metaverse to happen.

* The reason is that they believe Metaverse will give much needed bread circuses to citizens and keep them happy during the incoming calamities like climate change.

* Moreover, they can easily forcefully strap low income workers to VR/AR glasses and control them more effectively during the work.

* Though there are couple of major problem with this plan.

* Most of the companies working in this area is just interested in suckering the investments. This is very similar to blockchain startups.

* Public won’t be very interested in AR tech, and forcing AR top down will actually create genuine social issues.

I am not going to disagree with any of this, really appreciate this angle. I'll add that from Stratechery type concepts, Warren Buffet wisdom and the like, companies need a moat and in these platform providers its all about the walled garden. If the metaverse were to be the next big thing for sure, you'd want to be the one to capture it. I wonder if FB consulted with the Big 4 or BCG ilk to have the greenlight to go down this road, I'd find it humorous.

Hell, it's hard to believe/digest. Anyway, it seems forced, that's for sure. The 3D glasses/TV madness had similar traits back then. If this turns out to be true, then I'm wondering what will the company who succeeds creating a compelling Metaverse will get in return. :O

Am I the only one being put off by the talking avatar thing? It's in the way. I don't think it works.

It looks like a wii avatar from 15 years ago and the motion tracking is all jittery, FB is trying to win the VR market with this garbage?

It's like the Wii avatar playing a VR version of itself and thinking "wtf I don't look like that, this is terrifying"

This is doing a disservice to the vr market as people will think this the best it has to offer.

It's sort of pointless if you have to just watch it in a video like I assume we all are. I think it would be better if you were in there in the room with John (using a VR headset). Personally I'm listening to it in the background from another tab.

Yea, I actually found the avatar in the video was worse than just audio. It was just enough motion to distract my eye, while being pretty valueless in terms of communicating anything.

I ended up listening in the background, but opened up a new blank tab to hide the motion.

Sure it works. It just doesn't work for Facebook, which is on Failure #3 now. Here's an intro to VRchat by some VR natives.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UBmmpt5iJ8

Highly distracted. First time I’ve listened to John Carmack without being able to concentrate easily.

As someone who’s always looked up to carmack, unless he’s forced to do this against his will, i find it disappointing he would promote this failing meta product.

I recommend watching last year's speech by Carmack. It gives a little perspective as to why this was targeted to be a virtual session.

He is not a fan of how Meta pushes the Metaverse, "Money is flowing and enormous wheels in the company apparatus are turning" and he wants to salvage that financial energy to push technology in some meaningful way. (Pushing down audio latency on the Quest 2 was such a talking point). This shows what Meta's tech is capable of, mask off, no per-rendered CG advert and I think that's a good thing.

Besides that, afaik he is largely detached from that project now and only does once a week consulting, with the main focus being his pursuit of AGI.

Doesn't change of course how embarrassingly bad Meta's money invested vs results achieved are.

edit: Fount the spot I referenced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo at 15:10 onward

His job is basically to make it work. A lot of his points are about the current deficiencies and how he thinks he can make something compelling with more work. Everything from lag to loading times to poor integration between the two virtual environments to features he thinks would make the experience compelling.

He’s working at meta one day a week i believe, i dont see how he can improve things. Also how much room for improvement is there for a mobile phone with a builtin vr goggle? Basically thats what the oculus is. Even carmack said there is only this much you can achieve on such a platform. Now if somehow they’d squeeze in more hardware then that could work. Or a dedicated console and stream content via wifi (wireless pc vr works quite well on oculus, albeit the headset isnt that great).

He's not just drinking the kool-aid, he's an exec in the kool-aid company hoping to build kool-aid factories and put a pipeline to a spigot next to the water faucet in every home

Wow... thanks to the person that posted the YouTube link, because I have Facebook blocked. Carmack was good to listen to, but the pan in when they turned it over to him /felt/ laggy, like you could see frame rate jitter, and the entire thing was out of sync. I'm generally pretty bullish on VR for entertainment and collaboration long-term, but this honestly felt like going back 20 years ago. I've had more realistic and smoother experiences in MMOs with voice chat.

The frame rate is fine in person, with these avatars. I think the delay/low FPS was on the 2d capture side. But sheesh, that should have been worked out.

Same experience with the Quests about 2D capture. If you allow video capture to kick in, rendering resolution is lowered, the devices struggle to maintain proper frame rate, Asynchronous reprojection kicks into high-gear. It's really a hardware limitation of those mobile SOCs, but pretty embarrassing none-the less.

While this "metaverse" thing is worse than some "crypto NFT AR" scams I do appreciate that Facebook invest into VR R&D heavily and hopefully at some point in future some other company will benefit off their investment. I guess it's great they give funding to people like John Carmack instead of spending these money on lobbying another anti-consumer garbage.

I’m seeing a lot of R&D solely focused on giving them the chance to extract rent through future silly things like buying artificially scarce houses in fbs metaverse. I’m barely seeing any “giving back” type research like AT&T created with their research in the internet.

Their end-game is very much obvious, but honestly they are so bad at it... I doubt they will manage to actually build anything successful to extract any value out of it. The reason why Facebook Metaverse is so cringey is because they have no clue how to make games or anything like it. The "real metaverse" already exist in Roblox, Fortnite and few other popular games that every teenager socialize in.

At the same time thanks to Facebook any average Joe can easily get consumer-ready VR hardware for around $400. We just really dont have many companies behind VR except for Valve and they're simply dont have enough manpower to create mass-market hardware.

My point is that we must appreciate those engineers who persuaded Zuck to spend money on VR hardware and research. Yeah their attempt at "metaverse" is laughtable, but investment into hardware is priceless.

It looks like their AR/VR publication list is here: https://research.facebook.com/publications/research-areas/au...

For publications in general: https://research.facebook.com/publications/

> I’m seeing a lot of R&D solely focused on giving them the chance to extract rent through future silly things like buying artificially scarce houses in fbs metaverse

An example from FB please?

Meta does plenty of FOSS work as far as giving back in concerned. But artificially scarce houses? How about a source for that.

hwers's comment lacks some context, but there is some truth to it. Consider Carmack's comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo @33:50 onward "A closed platform doesn't deserve to be called a metaverse, or does it?"

Making money in the Metaverse is a pillar of what makes a virtual world an actual world. (Ignoring of who does the money making for now) Scarcity is an integral part of it. Skins, models, rare items. In the virtual world it all scarcity is artificial by definition. Just like with second life and the linden dollar making it to real exchanges. Second life sold worlds as some kind of virtual realtor in the past, VRChat's users sell custom created skins and rigged models today and Meta wants to be the platform facilitating that tomorrow, but on a grand scale.

I also highly applaud Meta's contribution to FOSS btw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq5yyzSiAw

This is embarrassing for Carmack and I'm surprised he agreed to this.

He’s Audi 5000 to work on AGI, right?

Not 100% true. He stated on Lex’s podcast that he is part time (1 day/week AR/VR) with the rest of his time on his new AI startup

He just entered the Desert of the Real. Leave all that has a meaning behind.

Imagine if all of this money and brain power went to designing pleasant civic spaces where we could meet each other face to face.

The idea of a future where everyone is at home with screens strapped on their face, talking to their bubble-friends in a simulated tree-lined park while the outside world turns increasingly hostile is pretty sad.

Serious question: Has anybody else noticed that it's gotten very hard to talk to other people face-to-face lately? I feel like I'm expected to be an anonymous and obedient dopamine dispensing machine for the other person. Even worse, I've also noticed myself doing the same; getting home and then realizing I spent the whole conversation bragging or ranting while barely letting the other person speak. It's like the odds of having an even back-and-forth interaction is <20% post covid.

> in a simulated tree-lined park while the outside world turns increasingly hostile is pretty sad.

To the extent it ends up saving on jet travel and commuting it could make the outside world less hostile (delaying the onset of global warming). I don't think it is there yet in this iteration obviously.

The developer of Doom is building the corporate Metaverse.

You guys are pulling my leg, right?

In the Metaverse, no one can pull your leg because they forgot to code it. :D

Every single one of my childhood heroes has committed suicide before my eyes by doing stuff like this. I always considered them having some solid morals and being wealthy enough would make this improbable but boy I was wrong. Oh well, they can't kill the old memories, yet.

To be honest Carmack have a good reasons to work on it even if it means work for TheEvilCorp: first of all if you listen to him he is truly interested in advancing VR tech. So he doesn't do it just for the money.

Also I guess he run out of money when Armadillo Aerospace has failed and at least before he talked like he want to make second attempt in space industry and this will require a lot of money.

Carmack shut down Armadillo Aerospace before it got to that point. I don't recall where he spoke about it, but he has talked about this in the past.

Good for him then, but AFAIK he is still very much into space and I hope he'll have another chance even if it's gonna be funded by money Facebook gave him.

PS: Might be something changed by now, but I hope not. I really need to check latest podcasts / interviews with him.

Yes, it's very unfortunate that he is associated with Facebook now :| Such great technology, that I'll never use until other companies are able to catch up.

The idea of using any sort of VR tech that Facebook controls literally disgusts me. Can't even imagine the amount of information they will control on people with such things...

The Vive is just as good as the Oculus (VR games with a decent gaming PC hooked up is a much better experience than the all in one stuff that's running on mobile hardware).

I'd also look out for the PSVR 2 when that releases - just as walled garden as Oculus but it's not Facebook.

He has been, and continues to be, a huge jackass. You're just seeing his true form.

Is it just me or is the audio balance set a bit too far to the right? It makes it uncomfortable to listen to this with headphones.

I noticed this as well.

Why… why is he bottomless? (He’s represented by a Wii-like avatar. When camera angles change from close up to medium shot he’s just a floating torso in a living room set)

Maybe they couldn't figure out how to stop the legs from flailing around and obscuring his face.

This isn't too far from the truth. Carmack is known for giving presentations lying on his back with his legs up in the air. this simply wouldnt work on an avatar with legs. Kudos to Meta for recognizing this before giving an embarrassing presentation.

My guess is because of height variance, crouching, misaligned floors, difficulty doing IK in a lifelike way given all those.

They could maybe hire some engineers and, I don’t know, have them work on that? Every other game in the world seems to have figured out a solution.

They did. They announced and demoed the new avatars in the Keynote, and explained why the current avatars are legless. But as with all things new, everyone is just too busy shitting on their own misunderstandings, rather than actually paying attention. :P

If they have to explain it maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place? I hate these "didn't read the article and felt the need to comment anyway" just as much as the next person. But this is a presentation and they have to assume people may skip to the middle, or have sound muted, or whatever. I honestly don't care, but I'm 100% team "I will ask why there are no legs and it's not on me to do my research on this".

Your point is very well taken and I am mildly ashamed. In my own defense I mentioned that it was the one talk by him I have been unable to concentrate on due to this very problem. but thank you for doing my homework for me.

Fair enough.

"Every other game in the world"? Few other games are VR with human avatars and involving so much variation in real time.

VR Chat seemed to do a far better job 8 years ago

They did? They have both better avatars [1] and life like ones too [2].

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvfV-iGwYX8&feature=share&si=EMS...

[2]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hvfV-iGwYX8&feature=share&si=EMS...

At least give the man a ghost bottom, would make the floating less awk :/

Because if he had legs, he might also have genitals, and you’re not allowed to do that on Facebook’s Metaverse.

Fools! Don't they know pornography drives all new technology? This is dead in the water.

That reasoning aside, there are an infinite number of ways to solve this that would be less "weird" to look at than simply nothing. Even a simple colored half sphere would be better than just nothing.

this comment is gonna age poorly

One of the big announcements in the Keynote was "legs" so apparently all avatars have been legless.

Legs are hard.

The headset he’s wearing can’t see his legs reliably. It’s just the physics of what can be seen from there.

Add to that, inverse kinematics to lock the legs to the floor is expensive to compute (when you’re dealing with such a small frame budget)

They did announce legs support in the keynote though.

Its not exactly IK compute. It has more to do with it looking decent than the pure compute. There's no shoulder hip or leg tracking so its really not easy to figure out what the legs should be doing.

I never thought inverse kinematics would be the explanation, and it’s totally obvious in retrospect. Thank you so much. TIL

There were some "harassment" issues with legs.

Really? Can’t tell if satire...

Why even have the video? The lips aren't in sync, the movement stutters. Its horrible to watch.

In person, there's very low latency thanks to all the engineering effort, as he mentioned. I don't understand why the capture was so incredibly terrible.

He actually mentioned there is still too much voice latency in person and he wants to fix it at the firmware level. Sad part is he's said the same thing about audio latency on Android for the past 5 or 6 Connect events going back to GearVR. The company must be completely dysfunctional. They hired a whole custom OS team and abandoned the project rather than fixing low-hanging fruit.

The in person experience shows “still too much”, which is nothing like in the video, and very usable. These are separate things.

These devices weren't designed to stream video, end of story.

I can't even see how long the video in my firefox, and no jumping around. I would personally fire the people responsible for this right now, bad idea and bad implementation. But seems Zuckerberg is obsessed over this failure...

I think it was because it was a live transmission.

I'm listening to this in a separate tab, not watching the video, and I feel like I'm missing absolutely nothing for not watching a floating Carmack Cartoon torso that occasionally blinks.

I'm convinced that as long as "metaverse" is a thing that involves putting on a nerdy pair of goggles to participate the whole concept is going precisely nowhere with the general population. Its like 3d TV: no one has any interest in putting special hardware on their face to participate in things like that.

The thing that bewilders me is that this has already been done with stuff like VRChat, but FB seems to think they can come along with a weird sanitized corporate version of the same thing that doesn't do anything at all new and actually attract users?

They're probably right. No one else is providing a headset as good as the quest 2 at the same price point, because no one else has $10 billion a year to burn,

I know the headset is good, but they still have to compete with other software.

I'm probably in the minority, but I won't run VRChat because of the EAC kernel-mode spyware they're using. The other competitors, Neos and ChilloutVR, are doing a poor job of even getting the basics executed. Regardless of the outcome, I'd welcome a competing platform that is run by actual professionals (unlike ChilloutVR).

Well we have a world where both Slack and Discord exists so I can see FB trying to position itself as Slack to VRChat (or Neos or Rec Room)'s Discord.

More than just that, to really have a sense of your own avatar in VRChat you need a model which you either make yourself or you pay someone else to make.

Meta is going for a frictionless Memoji like avatar that let's you get going with something that can represent you.

You mean like how FB made a weird sanitized collegiate version of MySpace that didn’t do anything at all new?

Edit: My mistake — Zuck added a poke button.

I don't know why we should assume that a company will be successful in one area just because they've been successful in a totally different area - I wouldn't expect a text/photo based social media company to succeed at creating... whatever this is any more than I would expect Toyota to win the fast food market (although VW does make sausages...).

My prediction: the successful "metaverses" will either be created by totally new companies/indie devs, or by an established game developer (I know this stuff has some overlap with the social media wheelhouse, but no more than say World of Warcraft does).

Ideally someone creates some common open protocol for 3d/VR/AR social spaces that catches on, but I won't hold my breath. (I know there's a few projects like this around already)

Haven't they already been successful with the VR hardware? They've also had a games platform for many years now. "Totally different area" is a bit of a stretch.

Oculus was an aqcuisition, although I guess it does prove that Facebook at least had the taste to know that Oculus was doing a good job.

In all the past years Carmack did a couple extra hours of talks/questions in random online VR rooms. These were just as info-dense as the main talks, and Carmack was even a little looser in them, but it was so hard to find.

I just have to hope a random person in the room will be recording their VR session!

Are they serious? VRChat is already better than this in every way. Graphics quality, frame rate, full body tracking, face tracking, legs... Not to mention being able to make your own maps and avatars. I get that this for mobile platforms but VRChat also has Quest support that is better than this.

I can't think of reasons that this exist other than they might have fundamental, architectural, philosophical disagreement with VRChat that neither parties cannot tolerate but Facebook/Meta is on the losing side, like over real-name-real-face policy vs having none of it.

You don't think that there is room in the market for more players? Even as the player base review bombs VRC for invasive anti cheat/tampering?

VRChat is an amazing experience but it really does require a high-end gaming PC to run well. VRChat on Quest is a joke.

Going with a very conservative graphical quality seems like it gives a lot of advantages as well.

Has John Carmack ever been scripted? Kind of a weird catchphrase. "Gun that shoots bullets."

True. Why point that out? I get paranoid. :) Was he scripted this time? The avatar video was to hide reading from the prompt?

Creating the metaverse as merely a skeumorphic copy of the real world seems like such a boring imaginative failure and wasted opportunity. You can form this digital medium in any way you can envision. Why limit it to bars, houses, offices, avatars, and other humdrum aspects of normal life. Instead let's push our creativity to the limit.

I'd like to see something completely unreal and unlike anything possible to experience irl, and yet interactive, explorable, and as a result something we can build intuitions about how it works. Imagine if Brett Victor, Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, and Stanley Kubrick all went on an acid trip together, and collectively envisioned a virtual reality unbound by any of the forms of the real world, yet with a set of consistent rules learnable via interaction and exploration.

I imagine something like that could be enlightening and mind-expanding, and far more interesting and compelling than what Zuck has envisioned thus far. That's the metaverse I'm holding out for.

It's not limited to this stuff at all. Horizon Worlds is pretty lacking in this front but has some games. Open up VRChat though, and you'll see some amazing stuff. You'll ride in buses that drive through beautiful, vaporwave sunsets. You'll sit at the edge of a waterfall. You'll play games on high speed rails jumping against walls (and yeah it's as crazy as it sounds in VR.) And that's ignoring the games for VR out there.

These people are not interested in creating a better world and a better life for everyone. They are interested in making the vast majority of people their personal slaves and digital sharecroppers. It’s horrible.

The bit about the logs was funny. I have noticed my oculus 2 be pretty responsive and zippy to now being frustrating to the point I put it down. I would guess its getting bloated.

Oh yah and he said there is a part of me that wants to "burn it down". omg I was laughing so hard.

What did he say? Timestamp?

Can anyone with experience having social interactions in VR speak to the value-add of the concept?

Having played VR games, I find the experience novel at first in a way that's pretty impossible to adequately describe to others, but gradually lost interest in it over time.

Curious if there's anything about social VR that you kinda have to experience first-hand to really "get". In concept, for something special and rare like a conference, I could see VR being an improvement over zoom but nowhere near a replacement for the in-person experience.

For stuff like daily meetings, I feel like the fatigue would set in very quickly similar to how it did with VR gaming for me.

Reminds me a little bit of this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29TuWo0Yo

Is there a transcript of this? An hour of Facebook promoters speaking is too much.

I'm wondering how this is any better than video. Sure, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail but still.

From reading the comments I would have expected something far worse, like that image with the Eiffel tower.

Actually doesn't look too bad (I guess my expectations are very low), but what's the missing leg thing? That's just "alpha of a game" level weird.

Is there any good way for me to try this out without buying a $1500 piece of hardware? My instinct is that Oculus' VR vision doesn't make any sense, but I want to try it out before being confident that my instinct is correct.

Thanks to FB you can buy $400 "Meta Quest 2" and experience like 95% of good VR content. Yeah it somewhat worse than Valve Index for VR enthusiasts, but it also much cheaper.

I recently got the HP Reverb G2 to explore VR. It's not that much more than the Quest and has the benefit of being Zuckerberg- and spyware-free.

If you do get a vr headset tether it to a pc and try some actual quality content.

Or, if you have a Quest, forget the tether and go full wireless PCVR, like the rest of us.

This is the way. Currently playing through the HL2 VR Mod using wireless PCVR. It's amazing.

Wireless works surprisingly well, you are right.

The feel and vibe is so bizarrely similar to DigitalSpace Traveler (which existed 25 years ago).

https://www.digitalspace.com/traveler/

So we have the Carmack fans rushing in to hear his masters voice as a floating virtual avatar in the metaverse. But I thought they weren't interested in the whole thing because of the 'Meta is dying' narrative? [0]

So far it looks like despite the so-called 'chaos' reported by the media about Meta, he is still bullish on both AR and VR at the company.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087535

Fwiw, Carmack spends the vast majority of his week working on AI as he is a VR/AR consultant now, and has stated it’s around one day a week (he announced a new AI startup recently), so it seems he’s more bullish on AI.

HN is not a monolith. Some people might like Meta and other people don't like Meta. You can also like Carmack and dislike Meta.

I don't see the narrative you're talking about in that link.

If you like Meta but don't want to admit it, downvote this comment!

AR is where the future is. VR is a major stepping stone. He is being paid obscene amounts of money to work on things he finds is cool.

So of course he's not going to trash talk it.

> But I thought they weren't interested in the whole thing because of the 'Meta is dying' narrative? [0]

I am happy to listen to a smart person who is very clever talk about things I'm interested in, even if I disagree with them on key points.

> AR is where the future is. VR is a major stepping stone.

I think this is totally wrong. VR is going to be where almost everyone spends almost all their time, and it's not even that many years away.

There was a time when humans lived in the wild, and nobody knew any different, and any talk about living in cities would have been met with derision.

Right now humans live in "reality", but in the not-too-distant future (maybe a couple of generations), people will primarily live in totally virtual worlds. There are many advantages:

- you can have as much land as you like, and you don't have to pay for it

- you can get whatever furniture or whatever home decoration you like, and you don't have to pay for it (at least the physical materials - you would probably have to pay a talented artist if you wanted to motivate them to create something bespoke; but you could probably settle for Stable Diffusion anyway)

- you can travel to visit friends instantly, no matter where they are in the world, and you don't have to deal with passports, visas, airport security, etc.

A really good VR world solves basically every pain point of the physical world.

I think people push back on this idea because they think I'm talking about VR as it appears today. I'm not. I'm talking about a version of VR where it literally feels real. Where there is no tangible difference in experience between the many versions of "reality" you can experience inside (for sake of argument...) your headset, and the singular "reality" that you experience outside your front door.

There's also the point that although HN readers may have nice large houses and comfortable lives, the average person in the world doesn't have as much space as they'd like, doesn't have as nice furniture as they'd like, has more noise from neighbours than they'd like, and so on. A really good VR solves all of these problems, and saves money at the same time. People would be crazy not to adopt it.

We'll still rely on the physical world for nutrition, of course. The same way we still rely on nature to provide our food even though we live in cities and work in offices instead of living in the wild and foraging for berries. But the proportion of human activity that will be focused on "reality" will drop from near 100% today to maybe 1% not too far in the future, the same way the proportion of activity that was focused on "nature" has dropped from near 100% 10,000 years ago to maybe 1% now.

> VR is going to be where almost everyone spends almost all their time

I believe that (current, conventional) VR will always be a niche that only sees widespread use when conventional AR headsets can deliver VR experiences

>There was a time when humans lived in the wild, and nobody knew any different, and any talk about living in cities would have been met with derision.

Cities have been an integral part of the human experience pretty much immediately after a society got farming down, and switched away from the hunter gatherer model.

>it's not even that many years away.

> I'm talking about a version of VR where it literally feels real.

This is transhumanism. We are so incredibly far away from being able to do high-precision prosthetic limbs, a fundamental baseline for understanding human/animal i/o signals. The state of the art for ocular nerves is something like 32x32 4bit grayscale - and that's not even being shipped as a product! Evenfollowing a pace of technological development that exceeds conventional televisions (a much simpler technology, that doesn't require surgery to install), you can expect to have full color and high dpi visual prosthetics in the 2040s - at the very earliest.

The timeframe for delivering this a transhumanistic experience is, in my opinion, so far down the line that talking about it in anything but the abstract doesn't contribute at all to the current discussion about AR vs VR.

> A really good VR world solves basically every pain point of the physical world.

This is not a really good VR world. This is a transhumanistic future that requires decades more research. I actually personally believe we'll get there as a species, and I'll be lucky if it's towards the end of my lifetime.

What you're describing is not "virtual reality" in the conventionally agreed upon sense, but rather something called "transhumanism".

Like the movie Surrogates but VR instead of robots.

I don't know what metaverse is, but I feel a lot more comfortable just playing a game like ESO and hanging out with people dancing and sitting in chairs near me. /sitchair

Well it needs to run on the Quest 2, so it looks uncanny, janky and all that, but it's running on smartphone hardware from 2020.

Meta really wants to have it's own hardware platform, otherwise they are at a mercy of Apple, Google and Microsoft when it comes to collecting data. They are very brave for coming out with something this uncomfortably useless though. I'm pretty sure Apple will end up winning this one with their more sensible AR approach.

Seems like they could of made this a lot better with a basic lighting setup … but nothing was as a bad as the comments suggest.

I have enjoyed so many Carmack talks but this presentation is so jarring it makes me uncomfortable.

Loginwall - anyone have a summary?

Seems to be about VR tech so far. It's mostly about social media stuff thus far, with complaints about slow login times and how the Horizon Worlds doesn't integrate with the rest of the system and has interface issues. John wants more screen sharing for people in VR chat like environments.

John is obsessive about eliminating lag everywhere. Ironic that his facial animations are slightly lagging the audio track.

Also, the facial animations are so limited in expressiveness it makes it look like he's suffering from blunted affect.

They probably calibrated them on Mark Zuckerburg.

I clicked through and it's a livestream of Carmack's VR avatar somewhat out-of-sync with his voice.

I think it's live now and hopefully there'll be a transcript later.

Also streaming in youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq5yyzSiAw

Tune in to Carmack Unscripted at Meta Connect to hear John Carmack’s unscripted take on the future of technology.

I hope a video of the event will be uploaded to YouTube, for some reason it didn't want to play on my MS Edge Android... Only works on Chrome when on Desktop mode, but that's really not usable...

I feel like this whole thing could be a webcam and some snapchat filters. I must be getting old, because I just don't get it...

I don't understand what I'm supposed to find at this link. It seems like just a Facebook events page? I'm confused...

They are working with low bandwidth graphics, I wonder if that is part of their global strategy…

Anyone have a link to a recording that has speed control?

For those of us without Facebook accounts, what is this?

No closed captions or sign language interpreter?

Carmack never stops talking for even a moment. Never repeats himself and clearly expresses his thoughts in real time. It's some sort of autism I presume.

I find it very inspiring to be able to express your thoughts in such a clear and concise manner. Most people are usually either very charismatic/good presenters, or highly technical. But Carmack does both while still sounding friendly and just in general excited about tech.

Carmack used to be pretty bad at giving talks but he kept doing them, and because of that, has gotten a lot better at it. Practice makes perfect.

Probably a condensed version of his 5 hour Lex Fridman interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4

That interview is great but I don't think there's any overlap. This is focused on VR, something that was only touched on in the Lex interview.

Not at all. Carmack does these each year at Connect, and they're always fairly bespoke to the things that Meta are working on and just announced

He seems to do an annual "update" video from wherever he's at, about minutiae of whatever he's working on at the time. It used to be QuakeCon keynotes[1] when he was at id.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/john-carmack-quakecon-keynotes

I'm surprised people are shitting on this so hard. The facial animations are quite impressive and everything else isn't that bad.

It's not amazing, but it's not unwatchable either. I can imagine this becoming a good alternative (Not replacement!) to in-person events.

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