I'm not a fan of Meta, but they're doing the cutting edge research in VR/AR that nobody else is [1].
Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel optics, thin layer physics...
They're going to own this space for decades to come, and everyone will license from them.
It may seem impractical, but five years ago so did AI/ML. Meta is tackling all of the constituent pieces before they draw them together.
[1] Apple may be a major player in this space, but their rumored efforts are still behind closed doors. Meta understands that Apple and Google won the smartphone era of tech, which is why they want to control their hardware destiny in AR/VR. Valve simply isn't investing as much, and they'll fall behind.
I don't think anyone can or will disagree with you. What Facebook is doing with VR/AR is technologically beyond anything anyone else is doing.
We just don't think the ultimate application of all that research is going to be the Metaverse. Pretending that the ultimate goal is the Metaverse is masking the fact that this VR/AR research is all exploratory. We can assume Wall Street would otherwise heavily punish Facebook for investing blindly so heavily in R&D. The willingness of Facebook to mask the Metaverse as something other than R&D and not Eric's team, which allegedly paid for itself, is what is so baffling.
> Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel optics, thin layer physics...
Microsoft R&D built and patented many of those things and already pushed things through the entire loop from R&D to practical "fun" hardware (Kinect) to boring Enterprise hardware ("Azure Kinect" and HoloLens) and allegedly back to plenty of closed doors R&D again.
It's easy to ignore Microsoft because they "failed" in the consumer space a few times in that loop already, but since no one has proven yet that there is a long-term consumer space (and don't forget the Kinect actually was a very successful consumer item for a brief Wii-epoch moment) and their "unsexy" Enterprise tech has found comfortable niches to serve it is still very possible to see them as the easy "leader" in this space, even if they've never been crazy enough to rename the whole company after it.
Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel optics, thin layer physics...
They're going to own this space for decades to come, and everyone will license from them.
It may seem impractical, but five years ago so did AI/ML. Meta is tackling all of the constituent pieces before they draw them together.
[1] Apple may be a major player in this space, but their rumored efforts are still behind closed doors. Meta understands that Apple and Google won the smartphone era of tech, which is why they want to control their hardware destiny in AR/VR. Valve simply isn't investing as much, and they'll fall behind.