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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the Metaverse?

From today's earning's call.

    Now beyond AI, the other major technology wave that we're focused on is the metaverse. A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the Metaverse vision. So I just want to say upfront that, that's not accurate. We've been focusing on both AI and the Metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both. The two areas are also related. Breakthrough in computer vision was what enabled us to ship the first stand-alone VR device.

> Breakthrough in computer vision was what enabled us to ship the first stand-alone VR device

Is there any truth to this statement?

I suspect it's all just spin to avoid admitting that the whole metaverse thing was a huge waste of time and money.

Meta has led in the application of ML to computer vision for years now frankly. They have tons and tons of papers on computer vision using ML that are clearly and obviously applicable to metaverse-esque things.

(I have no stake in Meta in any form, just care about computer vision)

You might be surprised how much machine learning goes into image processing, because it doesn’t get all the hype that chat bots do.

We shouldn’t conflate intelligence with being able to speak.

To ship the headset it had to be able to track it's position with submilimeter precision, with low jitter, in real time, and on cheap, mobile hardware, be able to track where controllers are, and be able to recognize existing rooms it's mapped before so it can restore the boundaries you've set up in the past. All of that was powered by computer vision. After the launch, hand tracking was another use of computer vision that was added.

The computer vision based room, hand and controller tracking of the Quest 2 is frankly pretty amazing. I don’t have experience with any other devices, but I was shocked how good it was after impulse buying a Quest 2 a while back. I hardly ever use it anymore, but the tracking seems to get better every time I plug in and update the device.

I want to know if it was their own, or if they're taking credit for their Oculus acquisition and subsequent enshittification.

The Quest was their own. Facebook acquired Oculus before the kickstarter backers even got their DK1s.

If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one. -- old proverb

Honestly, at the rate this goes, I might get my .hack dream yet.

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