That's So Meta

Never did I think I would ever have the slightest interest in anything that came out of the demon-haunted orifices of Facebook (sorry, Meta), let alone listen to anything the Zuckerbot had to say. Nevertheless, last week's Meta Connect has me genuinely excited.

First off, I've seen a few outlets expressing surprise because for some reason they thought the metaverse was already dead. This is of course nonsense. As I noted on the first post I did on the metaverse back in 2021, a timescale of five years was plausible but definitely on the optimistic side of things. I was a bit more skeptical a couple of months later, while in March this year I revised a plausible framework (for mass adoption) to the end of the decade. Not for a moment have I ever had the impression that the metaverse is anything imminent; postulating something as being about 5 years away is basically synonymous with allowing a large margin of error. I've never seen Meta claim the ultimate vision of the future is anywhere near nigh. Quite where people have got this impression, I don't know.

Anyway, I've noted throughout my coverage of this that the whole concept is hardware dependent. Thresholds of comfort, price, battery life, affordability etc. must all be overcome for XR to rival (say) mobile phones in significance. The hardcore fans like to claim that the Quest 2 was a huge upgrade from the Quest 1, but I've tried both and honestly it's not. It's incremental : better resolution, more processing power and that's it.

The Quest 3, though... this is sounding like a much bigger deal. Not a revolution that will usher in a new era of human existence, but a much more important step towards changing how we access the digital world.

In the Meta Connect event itself, we got the official launch of the Quest 3. I've seen several hands-on tests with this, and so far as I can tell it seems very impressive indeed. On the Quest 1 and 2, the passthrough gives you get a blurry, grainy, warped, over-exposed, black-and-white view of the world that's enough to stop you bumping into things but nothing much more than that. On that last link, you can clearly see that on the Quest 3 even small real-world text is readable. In full colour, with a massively improved light balance and far less distortions. 

And of course, it gets significant (but more incremental) general performance upgrades. But one can cross a threshold either through one giant leap or many small steps, and here too things look important. We're getting close to, though perhaps not yet equalling, the graphical fidelity of PC VR in a standalone device.

But wait, there's more ! Meta also announced other significant developments. First, their AI program continues apace, generating (for some reason) AI characters tailored to specific tasks. Most eye-catching of these was Snoop Dog as a Dungeon Master. Quite why anyone in the world would want this, other than for momentary shits and giggles, I know not*, but the branding is likely on-point. Most people seem to like pointless celebrities for some reason, though I was more interested in their developing a no-code AI development platform to open this customisation (eventually) to the masses. Plus, they announced far faster and higher-quality AI image generation, which will be directly integrated into WhatsApp in the near future. Job concerns aside, this is the democratisation of creativity.

* The Zuckerbot asks, "why not ?". But I say, why Snoop Dog when you could have Brian Blessed or Ian McKellen ? What's wrong with you, you weirdo ?

Finally there was a return of sorts to the metaverse with their smart glasses. These are much (!) cheaper, better looking and more functional than Google's ill-fated foray. They don't offer metaverse access in the conventional, image-based sense; they don't overlay any visual imagery on what you see. Instead they provide access to Meta's AI, allowing you to query what you see wherever you are (as well as recording and even streaming video and photographs). Although I don't personally want them, I think this is a pretty neat trick. It incorporates the digital world directly and instantly into the regular world, so in that sense they can be said to be metaverse-compliant.

What does all this mean ? For that we go to the "first metaverse interview" (I recommend watching the very beginning and then skipping to 30 minutes in). Watching this, I have to say I felt like Vash in Star Trek : The Next Generation, holding with awed reverence "a piece of the future". Now the interviewer is, it must be said, quite annoying and half the content is just him saying how impressed he is... but... he might be right. If the uncanny valley hasn't quite been fully crossed, the expedition is well on their way up the far slope to the sunny uplands beyond. The degree of realism, the subtlety of expression and nuance of emotions the avatars convey, is far beyond anything I've seen before.

When we get to this quality more generally - and we're not there yet in any meaningful way, since this is just a proof of concept that takes hours to set up per person in a dedicated scanner - we have to confront Morpheus' admittedly-cliché question, "What is real ? How do you define real ?". It's easy to dismiss the metaverse as overhyped techbro nonsense when it's all dumb cutesy cartoon characters, but when you have something with such a visceral sense of presence, when it reaches that level of realism... then it's rather harder to ignore. And some commercial apps (like Brink Traveller) already reach comparable quality for static landscapes... so this is absolutely something we can do. It's going to happen, ready or not.

And that, as per the interview, really lays out the vision of the metaverse and what it means. It's the seamless integration of digital and physical reality. You just can't do that with a phone or desktop PC.

Now, feeling like I've soiled myself, I have to say I wholeheartedly buy into the Zuckerbot's vision of this (extremely serious caveats about whether I trust him notwithstanding). He's right to say we need physical reality, that going on hikes, being in nature, talking with friends, using physical hardware - this all matters very much. But he's also right to say that the digital world is meaningful too. Content isn't any less important because it exists only digitally. The right approach is to use the differences of the two to complement each other. Which is why I found the VR Oasis hands-on test of the Quest 3, though the guy seems lovely, to be quite baffling in its claims that augmented reality isn't really that important compared to fully-immersive virtual reality.

As discussed in the interview, when you can have such a lifelike interview with someone, when you can connect with anyone in this way... why wouldn't you ? Zoom, it seems, won't last five minutes when such a technology is widespread. Likewise, the Quest 3 already allows you to bring digital objects into your reality in a semi-permanent way. The question here really is why not rather than why. Yes, absolutely, you need many objects to be real, solid, physical things. You can't have a VR toaster. But many others you don't. You want a pinball or snooker table, you don't need one. You want a full-size dinosaur skeleton, you don't need one. Unless you're an actual palaeontologist, I suppose, but even then, a virtual model sounds pretty useful to me !

The biggest potential impact of the Quest 3 is for me productivity. It appears to begin to breach several important thresholds : comfort (better weight distribution and so narrow you can reportedly drink while wearing it), accessibility (no need to set up boundaries any more), performance, and flexibility (being able to freely and without hassle switch between real and digital worlds). But while I'm longing to set up Stranger Things portals to the upside-down all over my home, the thing that I think is potentially really impactful is, of all things, the integration with Microsoft Office. If I can have multiple windows acting as giant, lifelike monitors wherever I am, if it's comfortable enough to use for work for extended periods... that's a big deal. If I can keep different windows open showing me the figure I need to write about full-screen whilst still being able to write about them... that makes a real difference to how I work. How much of a difference, time will tell.

Of course the Quest 3 itself won't have us all wearing goggles the entire time. The photorealism of the avatars is still only a working prototype, not a mass-market consumer product. So no, the Quest 3 will not itself usher in the metaverse (no, you still don't need "metaverse officers" !)... but it's making it look an awful lot closer, and a lot less like the delusional pipe-dream of a typical Silicon Valley twatface. 

The end of the decade, the Zuckerbot says, is when we might have glasses rather than goggles for delivering genuine lifelike "holograms", when the digital and physical worlds collide. And for all his myriad faults, I really want to see what happens when they do. And I'm tired of the constant luddite anti-tech rhetoric. The optimistic vision is just so very much more appealing.