Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Finally Doesn’t Look Like It Came From A 90s Videogame
Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Finally Doesn’t Look Like It Came From A 90s Videogame
Remember the infamous selfie that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took, virtually, in Horizon Worlds last year? That ended up became a meme – or rather, a laughing stock for almost the whole internet for simply how bad it looked (and it didn’t come with legs attached, too). People even pointed him a game called VRChat which already does a better job for Zuckerberg’s so-called “Metaverse” dreams.
However, looks like that perception may very well be shattered to pieces: MIT scientist Lex Fridman posted on X (Twitter), where he demonstrated a conversation made with Mark Zuckerberg while being “miles apart”. “But this time we talked in the Metaverse as photorealistic avatars,” he noted, and boy does it completely drop the jaws with the photorealism shown in the clip.
This near-realism models of Fridman and Zuckerberg is what’s called Codec Avatars, which is made by using extensive 3D scans of the user’s face to create a digital 3D model, packaged as a codec (like how a video encodes). The headset then takes facial movements from the user to interpret the movements in the virtual world, in real-time.
That said, this is all demonstration, and it’s not exactly a live demonstration. Still, to get it to this point is nothing short of impressive – game studios took way more time to deal with such kind of work to map their characters in videogames. Zuckerberg has better ideas: he envisions that in the future, the 3D scans can be done by a smartphone, and let the VR headset take care of the rest. This could prove to be promising for his billion-dollar big bet into the metaverse – a move that even his own employees remained skeptical up until this point.
Other skeptics also pointed out Meta’s – and its former self, Facebook’s – questionable track record when it comes to ensuring users’ privacy. Should biometric imagery data be readily accessible, some has voiced their concerns on whether this could worsen the situation where deepfake and other AI-assisted manipulations could proved to be even harder to control if fallen into the wrong hands.
Source: Futurism
Pokdepinion: From the technological standpoint, that’s impressive. Perhaps a little bit too impressive…
