The future according to Mark Zuckerberg – La Tercera

Technology doesn’t stop and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, knows it. The boss of the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is getting ready to launch its Meta Quest Pro -ex “Project Cambria”- in October, which will be the new generation of its Oculus virtual reality glasses. In an interview broadcast a few days ago on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the executive spoke at length for about three hours, and expressed his impressions about what the technologies of the following decades will be and how there will be a balance between the digital and the material. What did he talk about? Here we select the most important.

When Zuckerberg unveiled the so-called “Project Cambria” at the last Connect 2021, videos, images and sketches about the new generation of virtual reality glasses immediately began to circulate. It was something completely different – or, perhaps, a little more evolved – than its predecessors.

If in the past Oculus Quest users could have their own avatars – 3D reproductions of their person – they did not come close to a “realistic” experience. There were no such fluid expressions nor could you “look into the eyes” of the user’s eyes. “For me it’s all about helping people connect,” said Zuckerberg, who hinted at how, despite helping connect, virtual reality still has some impediments. “How eye contact is made in virtual reality, how your face is tracked… There your avatar is not just one thing, but you can frown, pout or any other expression, and the idea is that this is reflected in real time,” he said.

It is the first time that they will make a simulation of real eye contact. “When you video call, you don’t really feel like you’re there with the person at all times… you’re kind of trying to convince your brain, but VR allows you to do that,” she said.

There are still some difficulties regarding the design of the devices. In the future, Zuckerberg said, they will reduce their sizes, with the idea that users can use them anywhere, “even on planes.” The most definitive model of glasses, he said, could be seen for another three to five years, “but it will be very expensive once it is available.”

The Meta Quest Pro -former “Project Cambria”- will be launched next October and, according to comments made by Mark Zuckerberg, will mix virtual reality and mixed reality. In its “premium” version, they would be over US$1,500.

Regarding the Meta Quest Pro, which will be released in October, the executive mentioned that they have Mixed Reality (MR) and Virtual Reality (VR). “VR glasses are at the height of sales of Xbox, Play Station and that type of platform”, assured the CEOwho added that these platforms “move in different areas, such as video games, social to get together with friends and the fitness world -which can already be done with a phone, but it is uncomfortable to see it on such a small screen-“.

Technology will become increasingly immersive and compelling. “The Holy Grail is to create something that provides a sense of human presence,” Zuckerberg said. With a MR and VR device, the boss refers to the same device that, according to its modalities, can project things in an isolated way inside the glasses, but also project them in the outside world, as well as make applications like Pokémon Go and which can be interacted with.

“Imagine that you don’t have to move to a city to have all the financial opportunities you need… Maybe in the future you can use Augmented Reality (AR) or VR to teleport to work in the morning and be seen as a hologram. It would be great, right?”, raised the executive, who assured that with these technologies different economic opportunities will be unlocked for thousands of people. Of course, will it ever be 100% as good as being there in person? “Perhaps not”, he replied to himself. With these tools, a lot of value can be created, even if it is not a face-to-face conversation, for example.

“If today we can play or meet, tomorrow it will be work, and you can be like a hologram remotely, and live wherever you want, be with your family, wherever they live… Remote work is very useful for some things, but I think we have to be able to find the mix”, said the founder of Facebook.

The most complex, in the future, will be to have a computer or device that can deliver information directly to the brain of users. “It’s not something we’re working on,” Zuckerberg was quick to say, before Rogan questioned him. Of course, he gave the example of Elon Musk with Neuralink, “that they are taking this further and that it will be ready in a few decades”. “There will be some interesting use cases in people who have certain types of damage or things like that, but I think that normal people in the next ten or fifteen years will not want to have a chip or something installed in their brain for entertainment,” he said. .

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The Wristband that Meta is working on will allow you to interact with different objects displayed by MR and even send messages without taking your cell phone out of your pocket, without anyone knowing what you are doing.

At the end of 2021, the lenses made by Ray Ban next to Facebook, which allow you to take photos, record videos and publish them on networks. Of course, it is still far from specifying its ideal model. “There is a version that I spent a lot of time thinking about… you have some AR glasses, how will you control them? There are many different modes: one of them will be the voice, and you will have the possibility to speak to them, but that does not always work, because you want to be discreet and that not everyone around you will listen to you and you will not dictate everything out loud, “he advanced. The second way, he said, will be by using your hands. For some time now, Meta has been working on a bracelet that allows users to interact with content. You can make slight movements, like a click. “If you play chess or poker, it’s not like you go down the street and manipulate things with your hands,” he said. How do you control something with your mind? The answer is one: with the hands.

“The research that we are doing is just input, so the device is not trying to send signals to your brain, but it is making it possible to communicate with the computer and the path that we have is based on the fact that we have all these extra neuron motors in the body,” he developed. The bracelet they work on can pick up those signals and translate them into completely different things, like having a virtual hand up front, but in parallel at the same time having the physical limb. In the future, for example, you will be able to be in a meeting and, in case a notification appears in the corner of the glasses and you want to respond, “maybe you can turn your wrist a little, with a super discreet movement so that nobody knows what You are doing”.

But that’s just one example. In the case of Zoom, he said that one of the useful features it had during the pandemic period was that users could say something to each other directly over chat and not do it in public. With his glasses, in combination with the bracelet, they could directly send a message or notification to another person present in a meeting.

“There’s a physical world and a digital world… And I think the combination of these results in ‘the real world,’ because there’s also all the other additional information that we give to the physical world,” Zuckerberg said. Since everything is information, even the non-tangible of the virtual world also becomes part of the real world. “Maybe there will be sculptures, in the future, that are not physical, but holograms and that you can easily change them, so maybe the range of physical and digital things also become more balanced and things like that… Even people could appear and interact with each other, “he commented.

Zuckerberg’s impressions point directly to the future and not the short term. Some of his ideas have already been raised, but they are closer to Hollywood than reality, such as the human holograms of “Blade Runner 2049″ that can interact with the protagonist. Another of the popular cases, although without Artificial Intelligence involved, is “Star Wars”, saga in which the characters can send each other messages in hologram format. According to the CEO of Meta, if you want to talk to another person, you can “just show up.”

What the metaverse is the big goal Of all these tools that are being carried out, Zuckerberg ventured to say that “virtual reality will eat up TV” and that it could disappear, since users could consume their movies or series in their glasses.

Facebook suffered one of the biggest credibility crisis towards the end of 2021. With that in mind, Zuckerberg touched on how diverse each of the platforms are. “A lot of what gets designed is a reflection of the people using it, and it’s not like I want to build something that makes people super mad.” “ANDIt’s hard to be on Twitter for a while and not get angry; On the other hand, I think Instagram is a super positive space.”, he raised, also saying things like “the energy there is generally very positive” and that “positivity can be absorbed”. Something that specialists and reports could easily refute.

Do they show things on Facebook that encourage or influence users? If they didn’t do rankings, she said, the most recently posted would always show in the feed, and thus only store posts would appear. What they show users will depend on how and how much their environment reacts, signaling that they might be interested. “Even if our system doesn’t know what that post is about, if it has comments and likes, that means it has a positive reaction… If a friend of yours makes 500 posts today, but there is one that has more positivity, it is the one that should be shown more frequently. And a system that doesn’t do that is clearly an inferior system.”, he assured.

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Users can make and customize their own avatar, which they can then change their appearance and purchase various items in the metaverse.

He also reinforced that they have “certain people working in counterterrorism and counterintelligence” and that they are constantly trying to find different signs of danger. Even for fake news with its “fact checkers”. “At this point we have hundreds of thousands of people working for the company and we spend about five billion dollars a year on the subject and that was our last stat … Our defense budget, to put the numbers in perspective, is basically to defend the integrity of the community.… It is probably larger than the defense budgets of most countries,” he revealed.

“We do not block disinformation, we simply have labels that put where that publication should go… There the fact checker will say if that is false and will show it less in the news rankingZuckerberg said, confirming that, faced with fake news, a person is not stopped from sharing it. “It depends on what kind of content it is… We can go deeper into each of its nuances. There is misinformation that can lead to harm. So, disinformation that promotes violence, that threatens health and safety, we deal with in only one way. But there is also other misinformation. Things that are wrong, and that are what people say reduce confidence in the system when they see it, but we have no reason to believe that it will lead to any physical security problems for people. And we treat it differently,” he stated.

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The future according to Mark Zuckerberg – La Tercera