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Last year, former Oculus CTO (and current business advisor) John Carmack threw up the gauntlet on Meta’s short-term metaverse plans. At the 2022 Meta Connect conference, Carmack said last October, he hoped he would be in his headset, “walking around the [virtual] halls or walking around the stage as my avatar for thousands of people getting the feed across multiple platforms.”
Carmack’s vision didn’t come true on Tuesday, when a jerky and clunky Carmack avatar delivered one of his signature hours-long unscripted conversations in an abandoned VR room, broadcast as plain old 2D video on Facebook.
“Last year I said I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have Connect in Horizon this year,” said Carmack introductory. “This here, this isn’t really what I meant. I’m an avatar on the screen on a video for you is basically the same as [just] be on a video.”
That set the tone for a presentation in which Carmack said “there’s a lot I’m grumpy about” regarding the current state of Meta’s current VR hardware and software. While that grumpiness was somewhat tempered by talking about recent improvements and hopes for the future of virtual reality, in general Carmack seemed frustrated with the direction Meta as a whole is taking its VR efforts.
Pushing for quantity over quality
Take Horizon Worlds, for example, Meta’s first product to socialize in the corporate version of the metaverse. On the one hand, Carmack said watching Mark Zuckerberg’s Connect presentation in a Horizon room with a few dozen other people Tuesday offered “real benefits” over watching that same presentation on a laptop screen amid his cluttered desk.
On the other hand, that’s a far cry from his vision of “arena-scale support with thousands of avatars scurrying around… at least hundreds in large rooms… in a completely uniformly shared world.” Carmack said he wants to “be present with a live audience in a virtual space where anyone who wanted to could stay and talk afterwards for as long as they felt like it.”
“Last year I said I’d be disappointed if we didn’t have Connect in Horizon this year… This here, this isn’t really what I meant.”
Former Oculus CTO John Carmack
If you could achieve such a truly virtual conference room, “You could just give people a free headset and still get ahead” compared to the hassle of holding a face-to-face conference, Carmack said. That kind of widely shared world is a tough technical challenge, Carmack said, and while Horizon “definitely can’t handle it right now … it’s not an insurmountable [challenge].”
Earlier this year, Carmack also cited some “public ridicule about the quality of avatars,” an apparent reference to a low-detail Mark Zuckerberg avatar that went viral in August after Meta shared it online. That reaction has ensured that “a lot of people internally” [to be] paranoid about showing anything but the highest quality avatars.”
But Carmack expressed some serious skepticism about that drive for avatar fidelity. He expressed a preference for spaces filled with lots of low-detail avatars for Meta’s insistence on the species almost photorealistic “codec avatars” that consume too much processing power to enable crowded virtual rooms. “We have a finite amount of resources here on our headsets, and cloud rendering is not going to save us in many cases,” said Carmack. “I definitely lean towards optimizing for quantity and not for quality.”
And while Carmack said he was happy with the current state of Meta’s avatars, he noted that his Connect presentation was in a “custom build of Horizon” designed to ensure his avatar’s level of detail never dropped. He also turned off the much-discussed facial recognition features on his Quest Pro headset because, in the current state of the software, “there’s a decent chance I’d do something really embarrassing” in a very public setting.
