Carmack Unscripted

https://www.facebook.com/events/reality-labs-facebook-page/carmack-unscripted/1134234204162755/

by tosh • 4 years ago

172 271 4 years ago

facebook.com

sneak• 4 years ago

Loginwall - anyone have a summary?

radiojasper• 4 years ago

Tune in to Carmack Unscripted at Meta Connect to hear John Carmack’s unscripted take on the future of technology.

mmastrac• 4 years ago

I clicked through and it's a livestream of Carmack's VR avatar somewhat out-of-sync with his voice.

I think it's live now and hopefully there'll be a transcript later.

jandrese3• 4 years ago

Seems to be about VR tech so far. It's mostly about social media stuff thus far, with complaints about slow login times and how the Horizon Worlds doesn't integrate with the rest of the system and has interface issues. John wants more screen sharing for people in VR chat like environments.

John is obsessive about eliminating lag everywhere. Ironic that his facial animations are slightly lagging the audio track.

mtlmtlmtlmtl2• 4 years ago

Also, the facial animations are so limited in expressiveness it makes it look like he's suffering from blunted affect.

drexlspivey• 4 years ago

Also streaming in youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq5yyzSiAw

cm2187• 4 years ago

Am I the only one being put off by the talking avatar thing? It's in the way. I don't think it works.

savanaly2• 4 years ago

It's sort of pointless if you have to just watch it in a video like I assume we all are. I think it would be better if you were in there in the room with John (using a VR headset). Personally I'm listening to it in the background from another tab.

ncallaway• 4 years ago

Yea, I actually found the avatar in the video was worse than just audio. It was just enough motion to distract my eye, while being pretty valueless in terms of communicating anything.

I ended up listening in the background, but opened up a new blank tab to hide the motion.

p1necone7• 4 years ago

It looks like a wii avatar from 15 years ago and the motion tracking is all jittery, FB is trying to win the VR market with this garbage?

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

This is doing a disservice to the vr market as people will think this the best it has to offer.

solardev3• 4 years ago

It's like the Wii avatar playing a VR version of itself and thinking "wtf I don't look like that, this is terrifying"

tomcam5• 4 years ago

Highly distracted. First time I’ve listened to John Carmack without being able to concentrate easily.

Animats3• 4 years ago

Sure it works. It just doesn't work for Facebook, which is on Failure #3 now. Here's an intro to VRchat by some VR natives.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UBmmpt5iJ8

cheschire• 4 years ago

Probably a condensed version of his 5 hour Lex Fridman interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4

savanaly2• 4 years ago

That interview is great but I don't think there's any overlap. This is focused on VR, something that was only touched on in the Lex interview.

dagmx4• 4 years ago

Not at all. Carmack does these each year at Connect, and they're always fairly bespoke to the things that Meta are working on and just announced

waffle_ss• 4 years ago

He seems to do an annual "update" video from wherever he's at, about minutiae of whatever he's working on at the time. It used to be QuakeCon keynotes[1] when he was at id.

[1] https://archive.org/details/john-carmack-quakecon-keynotes

stusmall• 4 years ago

I'm sure some PM somewhere in Meta is proud it's using that horrid avatar instead of an actual video. But ooft, it looks so goofy on what seems to be a serious conversation.

Their whole metaverse bet seems weirder and weirder by the day.

SXX6• 4 years ago

Meta just need to partner with Microsoft to integrate it with Linkedin.

Then it's will turn into the one true cringe generator.

kwertyoowiyop10• 4 years ago

“I am so proud and honored and humbled to announce that my avatar now has three glowing rings over its head!”

“Please help me celebrate my Metaversary…”

“Nobody truly appreciates how hard us weebles work to get our Zuckabadges. Next time you see a weeble, give it a ‘/clap’!”

Oh sweet lord this will be horrific.

imglorp• 4 years ago

Didn't they already to try to copy linkedin once? I forget which string of names it was under. Something work face business link book ish.

apineda• 4 years ago

It's very distracting. Plus I appreciate being able to see peoples faces as they express themselves and ideas.

xwolfi3• 4 years ago

I dont even care: im fine with 20 chat windows with history I can cycle through as they illuminate...

Anything the VR stuff is doing feels like a "good on paper" awful distraction.

tekni5• 4 years ago

I completely agree, this absolutely horrendous for a visual presentation. A wii like character, no proper lighting, floating with no legs and the subtle fidget moving of the limbs, lack of facial expression and flapping mouth that hardly mimics the sound. What did facebook spend all their money on?

I'd rather see video or even a still picture of Carmack than this monstrosity.

crooked-v2• 4 years ago

The immediate comparison I think of is VRChat, which does literally everything on that list better and has by comparison a shoestring budget.

kwertyoowiyop10• 4 years ago

Wouldn’t it be great to read an honest postmortem report, a few years from now?

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

A proper Mii would have been better. They are purposely cartoonish and can’t move in human ways.

This is trying to be vaguely human in hand and lip movement and it looks like bad marionette.

Hopefully it gets better but right now I’d rather just listen to the audio.

waynesonfire2• 4 years ago

And the camera pans around, which John said is driven by someone on the production team... but, there is nothing to see there. I guess the motion is introduced to keep us from falling asleep?

cma3• 4 years ago

He says he didn't use the new face tracking because it glitches out too much, so it was using the old auto generated face expressions. Big WTF.

Waterluvian2• 4 years ago

It’s actually unsettling to me how committed they are to such garbage.

I’m hoping this is just an expensive example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy because otherwise it’s perplexing and eerie.

vkou2• 4 years ago

It’s actually unsettling to me how committed they are to such garbage.

Facebook missed the boat on owning an OS or phone, so their only hope in protecting access to their apps is by owning a brand-new platform.

Which means that the company is all-in on VR, regardless of whether or not the result will be any good.

deckard1• 4 years ago

Zuckerberg is surrounded by yes men/women. That's the only explanation I can think of. I watched a few of their videos. The video with him talking about Zoom integration with Meta and splitting off in groups with avatars, etc. Does anyone really want to work like this?? The entire benefit of remote work is that I don't have to deal with this BS. Please stop trying to force these weird extroverted fetishes like avatar huddle groups and awkward virtual whiteboarding sessions onto remote work. We have 2d whiteboarding apps that already work!

The overall bland soulless corporateness of it all is creeping me the fuck out. These presenters are all 100% dead inside.

baby3• 4 years ago

People aren’t happy when a company decides to to 100% in something for years, but they aren’t happy either when they keep dropping products (stadia)

waynesonfire2• 4 years ago

I watched a bit of the conference and they may start to pivot. They were talking about how whatever it is they were building is going to have browser integration.

scifibestfi• 4 years ago

It's whiplash how Meta VR is putting out demos that look 20 years old, while Meta AI is putting out demos that look like they're from the future.

https://makeavideo.studio

Keyframe• 4 years ago

It does look goofy, doesn't it? Like an elaborate joke. I'm not trying to shit on people's hard work, but it all looks so, I don't know.. bland and not interesting AT ALL. Like Second life meets that playstation thing, but even worse somehow.

tomrod• 4 years ago

Sometimes good work needs to be shit on in a constructive way.

This is bloody awful quality in visual quality and marketing. You want to show something that works well. This... this does not "work", let alone well.

jabroni_salad• 4 years ago

I'll happily spend an evening watching vrchat shenanigans or 2.5D vtubers but this thing just goes so far beyond 'corporate inoffensiveness squeezed the soul out of it'. It's like the developers actively disdain their own work.

kwertyoowiyop10• 4 years ago

Games have Art Directors.

From the evidence, Meta doesn’t have any.

MobiusHorizons• 4 years ago

Part of the problem would be that you can’t have video of a person’s face while they are wearing a headset as far as I know. I expect that to remain a technical blocker even as the graphics horsepower of the headsets increase over time.

sumedh• 4 years ago

Use some fancy AI to create a real time deep fake of your face.

Geee• 4 years ago

This level of quality is fine for low-end headsets like Quest. All game engines should be able to increase rendering quality on high-end systems. It's a mystery why they don't do this.

baby3• 4 years ago

One of Meta’s moto is “we’re only 1% there” or something to that effect. I could imagine that it’d be really cool if they did that every year and it gets better and better and then we look back at the first ones and see the huge progression. I’m excited personally

DerSaidin2• 4 years ago

Compare to this Carmack conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I845O57ZSy4

jayd163• 4 years ago

Did you listen to Carmack? It's addressed immediately. He's specifically making a point about what is currently feasible and mentions how he wanted it this way since the last Connect (and said as much last time).

moolcool2• 4 years ago

He dumps on the technology constantly in the video. I don't think any PM is happy watching this lol.

gilbetron• 4 years ago

To be fair, a video of a VR event is way different than being in VR for that event. A comparison is a video of people watching a movie versus actually watching that movie, except more extreme. VR is far more visceral, at least when done well. A video review of, say Half-Life Alyx, is no comparison to actually being in it.

Now, that said, Meta's seems to be floundering a lot for its actual art style, there is no doubt about that!

LoveMortuus• 4 years ago

I hope a video of the event will be uploaded to YouTube, for some reason it didn't want to play on my MS Edge Android... Only works on Chrome when on Desktop mode, but that's really not usable...

lwneal• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq5yyzSiAw

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

Is it just me or is the audio balance set a bit too far to the right? It makes it uncomfortable to listen to this with headphones.

wskinner• 4 years ago

I noticed this as well.

tomcam5• 4 years ago

Why… why is he bottomless? (He’s represented by a Wii-like avatar. When camera angles change from close up to medium shot he’s just a floating torso in a living room set)

paulryanrogers2• 4 years ago

My guess is because of height variance, crouching, misaligned floors, difficulty doing IK in a lifelike way given all those.

kwertyoowiyop10• 4 years ago

They could maybe hire some engineers and, I don’t know, have them work on that? Every other game in the world seems to have figured out a solution.

ht85• 4 years ago

At least give the man a ghost bottom, would make the floating less awk :/

taejavu• 4 years ago

Maybe they couldn't figure out how to stop the legs from flailing around and obscuring his face.

bryan0• 4 years ago

This isn't too far from the truth. Carmack is known for giving presentations lying on his back with his legs up in the air. this simply wouldnt work on an avatar with legs. Kudos to Meta for recognizing this before giving an embarrassing presentation.

iandanforth2• 4 years ago

One of the big announcements in the Keynote was "legs" so apparently all avatars have been legless.

roughly• 4 years ago

Because if he had legs, he might also have genitals, and you’re not allowed to do that on Facebook’s Metaverse.

hnick• 4 years ago

Fools! Don't they know pornography drives all new technology? This is dead in the water.

nitrixion• 4 years ago

That reasoning aside, there are an infinite number of ways to solve this that would be less "weird" to look at than simply nothing. Even a simple colored half sphere would be better than just nothing.

xdavidliu• 4 years ago

this comment is gonna age poorly

zeroonetwothree3• 4 years ago

There were some "harassment" issues with legs.

tomcam5• 4 years ago

Really? Can’t tell if satire...

dagmx4• 4 years ago

Legs are hard.

The headset he’s wearing can’t see his legs reliably. It’s just the physics of what can be seen from there.

Add to that, inverse kinematics to lock the legs to the floor is expensive to compute (when you’re dealing with such a small frame budget)

They did announce legs support in the keynote though.

tomcam5• 4 years ago

I never thought inverse kinematics would be the explanation, and it’s totally obvious in retrospect. Thank you so much. TIL

jayd163• 4 years ago

Its not exactly IK compute. It has more to do with it looking decent than the pure compute. There's no shoulder hip or leg tracking so its really not easy to figure out what the legs should be doing.

dzdt• 4 years ago

I'm convinced that as long as "metaverse" is a thing that involves putting on a nerdy pair of goggles to participate the whole concept is going precisely nowhere with the general population. Its like 3d TV: no one has any interest in putting special hardware on their face to participate in things like that.

p1necone7• 4 years ago

The thing that bewilders me is that this has already been done with stuff like VRChat, but FB seems to think they can come along with a weird sanitized corporate version of the same thing that doesn't do anything at all new and actually attract users?

colinmhayes• 4 years ago

They're probably right. No one else is providing a headset as good as the quest 2 at the same price point, because no one else has $10 billion a year to burn,

Karrot_Kream7• 4 years ago

Well we have a world where both Slack and Discord exists so I can see FB trying to position itself as Slack to VRChat (or Neos or Rec Room)'s Discord.

tblflpr• 4 years ago

You mean like how FB made a weird sanitized collegiate version of MySpace that didn’t do anything at all new?

Edit: My mistake — Zuck added a poke button.

celdon252• 4 years ago

I'm probably in the minority, but I won't run VRChat because of the EAC kernel-mode spyware they're using. The other competitors, Neos and ChilloutVR, are doing a poor job of even getting the basics executed. Regardless of the outcome, I'd welcome a competing platform that is run by actual professionals (unlike ChilloutVR).

runjake• 4 years ago

This is embarrassing for Carmack and I'm surprised he agreed to this.

ffhhj• 4 years ago

He just entered the Desert of the Real. Leave all that has a meaning behind.

kwertyoowiyop10• 4 years ago

He’s Audi 5000 to work on AGI, right?

dbish2• 4 years ago

Not 100% true. He stated on Lex’s podcast that he is part time (1 day/week AR/VR) with the rest of his time on his new AI startup

barbazoo• 4 years ago

I'm wondering how this is any better than video. Sure, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail but still.

rvz• 4 years ago

So we have the Carmack fans rushing in to hear his masters voice as a floating virtual avatar in the metaverse. But I thought they weren't interested in the whole thing because of the 'Meta is dying' narrative? [0]

So far it looks like despite the so-called 'chaos' reported by the media about Meta, he is still bullish on both AR and VR at the company.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087535

parker_mountain2• 4 years ago

AR is where the future is. VR is a major stepping stone. He is being paid obscene amounts of money to work on things he finds is cool.

So of course he's not going to trash talk it.

But I thought they weren't interested in the whole thing because of the 'Meta is dying' narrative? [0]

I am happy to listen to a smart person who is very clever talk about things I'm interested in, even if I disagree with them on key points.

jstanley• 4 years ago

AR is where the future is. VR is a major stepping stone.

I think this is totally wrong. VR is going to be where almost everyone spends almost all their time, and it's not even that many years away.

There was a time when humans lived in the wild, and nobody knew any different, and any talk about living in cities would have been met with derision.

Right now humans live in "reality", but in the not-too-distant future (maybe a couple of generations), people will primarily live in totally virtual worlds. There are many advantages:

- you can have as much land as you like, and you don't have to pay for it

- you can get whatever furniture or whatever home decoration you like, and you don't have to pay for it (at least the physical materials - you would probably have to pay a talented artist if you wanted to motivate them to create something bespoke; but you could probably settle for Stable Diffusion anyway)

- you can travel to visit friends instantly, no matter where they are in the world, and you don't have to deal with passports, visas, airport security, etc.

A really good VR world solves basically every pain point of the physical world.

I think people push back on this idea because they think I'm talking about VR as it appears today. I'm not. I'm talking about a version of VR where it literally feels real. Where there is no tangible difference in experience between the many versions of "reality" you can experience inside (for sake of argument...) your headset, and the singular "reality" that you experience outside your front door.

There's also the point that although HN readers may have nice large houses and comfortable lives, the average person in the world doesn't have as much space as they'd like, doesn't have as nice furniture as they'd like, has more noise from neighbours than they'd like, and so on. A really good VR solves all of these problems, and saves money at the same time. People would be crazy not to adopt it.

We'll still rely on the physical world for nutrition, of course. The same way we still rely on nature to provide our food even though we live in cities and work in offices instead of living in the wild and foraging for berries. But the proportion of human activity that will be focused on "reality" will drop from near 100% today to maybe 1% not too far in the future, the same way the proportion of activity that was focused on "nature" has dropped from near 100% 10,000 years ago to maybe 1% now.

xsmasher• 4 years ago

HN is not a monolith. Some people might like Meta and other people don't like Meta. You can also like Carmack and dislike Meta.

I don't see the narrative you're talking about in that link.

actionfromafar3• 4 years ago

If you like Meta but don't want to admit it, downvote this comment!

dbish2• 4 years ago

Fwiw, Carmack spends the vast majority of his week working on AI as he is a VR/AR consultant now, and has stated it’s around one day a week (he announced a new AI startup recently), so it seems he’s more bullish on AI.

SXX6• 4 years ago

While this "metaverse" thing is worse than some "crypto NFT AR" scams I do appreciate that Facebook invest into VR R&D heavily and hopefully at some point in future some other company will benefit off their investment. I guess it's great they give funding to people like John Carmack instead of spending these money on lobbying another anti-consumer garbage.

hwers• 4 years ago

I’m seeing a lot of R&D solely focused on giving them the chance to extract rent through future silly things like buying artificially scarce houses in fbs metaverse. I’m barely seeing any “giving back” type research like AT&T created with their research in the internet.

camdat• 4 years ago

I’m seeing a lot of R&D solely focused on giving them the chance to extract rent through future silly things like buying artificially scarce houses in fbs metaverse

An example from FB please?

SXX6• 4 years ago

Their end-game is very much obvious, but honestly they are so bad at it... I doubt they will manage to actually build anything successful to extract any value out of it. The reason why Facebook Metaverse is so cringey is because they have no clue how to make games or anything like it. The "real metaverse" already exist in Roblox, Fortnite and few other popular games that every teenager socialize in.

At the same time thanks to Facebook any average Joe can easily get consumer-ready VR hardware for around $400. We just really dont have many companies behind VR except for Valve and they're simply dont have enough manpower to create mass-market hardware.

My point is that we must appreciate those engineers who persuaded Zuck to spend money on VR hardware and research. Yeah their attempt at "metaverse" is laughtable, but investment into hardware is priceless.

neuronexmachina• 4 years ago

It looks like their AR/VR publication list is here: https://research.facebook.com/publications/research-areas/au...

For publications in general: https://research.facebook.com/publications/

onepointsixC6• 4 years ago

Meta does plenty of FOSS work as far as giving back in concerned. But artificially scarce houses? How about a source for that.

coding123• 4 years ago

I don't know what metaverse is, but I feel a lot more comfortable just playing a game like ESO and hanging out with people dancing and sitting in chairs near me. /sitchair

barelysapient• 4 years ago

Why even have the video? The lips aren't in sync, the movement stutters. Its horrible to watch.

msa_ds2• 4 years ago

I can't even see how long the video in my firefox, and no jumping around. I would personally fire the people responsible for this right now, bad idea and bad implementation. But seems Zuckerberg is obsessed over this failure...

actionfromafar3• 4 years ago

I think it was because it was a live transmission.

nomel7• 4 years ago

In person, there's very low latency thanks to all the engineering effort, as he mentioned. I don't understand why the capture was so incredibly terrible.

loud_groan5• 4 years ago

These devices weren't designed to stream video, end of story.

cma3• 4 years ago

He actually mentioned there is still too much voice latency in person and he wants to fix it at the firmware level. Sad part is he's said the same thing about audio latency on Android for the past 5 or 6 Connect events going back to GearVR. The company must be completely dysfunctional. They hired a whole custom OS team and abandoned the project rather than fixing low-hanging fruit.

karmasimida• 4 years ago

I mean I really don't want to shit on Meta but ...

is this parody? The quality of this is really really bad, almost ps2 level bad

Using this for presentation is really unwise.

kwertyoowiyop10• 4 years ago

Holy cow and he said this was a CUSTOM BUILD to maintain frame rate! So it can’t even push this level of graphics normally. For what it showed I’d expect about 600 FPS. And the arms are jittering..Wtf?

ZephyrBlu4• 4 years ago

This VR world is running on a headset (Basically a phone), not a beefy computer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32505204.

abledon• 4 years ago

I wonder if the majority of people designing/pushing these huge systems of weird cartoon avatar interaction systems... are a tad bit on the spectrum (Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms....) but a side effect is the uncanny valley of these weird avatars being pushed by these teams at Meta/FB. It feels more 'creepy' to me talking to a cartoon 'uncanny-valley' representation of a person rather than just seeing their actual photo/video feed.

reading this post on "Avatars, Anthropomorphism, and Autism Spectrum Disorder"...

A 2016 study looked measured the neural responses of children with ASD and neurotypical children when shown unfamiliar human and robot faces. The test showed that the targeted responses were present for both for neurotypical children, but only for the robot faces for the kids with ASD. “Together, these studies provide some evidence that individuals with ASD may typically process anthropomorphic rather than human faces

https://codebaby.com/avatars-anthropomorphism-and-autism-spe...

beezlebroxxxxxx• 4 years ago

It looks like they're trying make corporate Memphis art meets DreamWorks movie character design into just the standard avatar. Insanely goofy.

loud_groan5• 4 years ago

The biggest games are Orcs, Humans and a Lot of Brown (the Riot and most of the Blizzard portfolios). Or Toon With a Lot Of Purple (Overwatch, Fortnite, many Playstation titles). Or Brown (Modern Warfare, PUBG, CS:GO, R6). Or anime. Or photoreal (Unreal engine titles excluding Valorant & Fortnite, RDR, Cyberpunk...)

When you reach 100m users, the ideas get limited. C'est la vie.

benreesman2• 4 years ago

I’m more than a touch aspy myself which makes this faux-biting rebuke that sounds cool in only my head a bit meta: but nerds figured out how to sell tech stuff to normies quite some time ago.

KerrAvon2• 4 years ago

Zuck hasn't.

Karrot_Kream7• 4 years ago

I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else. Performance on headsets is a challenge on pretty much all of these apps, from VRChat to Rec Room. I also think a lot of people that look just at the pictures don't realize that presence in VR adds a lot and can compensate for some loss of graphical fidelity. It's like how the first 3D games were quite blocky and a lot less refined than the best 2D games of the era but just the ability to move your character and the camera in 3D compensated for the bad graphics, to an extent.

loud_groan5• 4 years ago

I think it's much more a facet of limited performance (as mentioned in the talk itself) on these platforms rather than anything else.

VRChat avatars have personality. On hardware now 6 years old.

People are reacting to the lack of personality, not the lack of immersion.

xwolfi3• 4 years ago

But why the fuck do I need this when I can multi task using screens. It just feels that once they do their final state multiverse and force us inside, we ll still have multiple screens and workspace area to organize.

The population is not even massively growing so we probably will never have a space issue ...

xnx• 4 years ago

As best I can tell the push for this comes from the top and no one who knows better is stopping him.

nomel7• 4 years ago

The push for low fidelity, as usual, and as mentioned in this very talk, is the limited power of these mobile systems pushing dual 2k displays at 90Hz.

DonHopkins3• 4 years ago

Maybe if Zuckerberg himself didn't look so much like a plastic lizard, his avatar wouldn't be so creepy.

numpad06• 4 years ago

These deep down in the uncanny valley stuff is usually done by assigned neurotypicals, not autistic. Autists are usually good at staying out of it.

zeroonetwothree3• 4 years ago

Please stop perpetuating this harmful stereotype about people with ASD.

dqpb• 4 years ago

weird cartoon avatar interaction systems

Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars. There would be no interaction! You'd spend all your time rendering.

munificent2• 4 years ago

Imagine the opposite - photorealistic avatars.

You mean like... video?

Animats3• 4 years ago

photorealistic avatars.

It's coming, to, of all things, Second Life. Second Life is adding "puppeteering", and this works with head tracking, face tracking, and full body tracking. Users have been working on VR viewers. (The client is open source.) It's all very experimental, but there is a meeting in Second Life every two weeks[1] where all of this is demoed. Some of the attendees are rigged for full body tracking, and, with good quality Second Life avatars, which have far more detail than Meta or VRChat, and can do facial expressions, they look reasonably good. It's striking how someone with a full rig dominates a meeting without even trying. They're so much more present than the people sitting at keyboards.

Hardware is a big problem. You need a good gamer PC to run all this and get the full effect. And a VR headset. And tracking gear. This is a real problem in the era of the $99 Chromebook. It's not getting cheaper, either. The first NVidia graphics card that was good enough for this was the NVidia 1060 with 6GB VRAM, in 2016, introduced at $250. It still costs about $250 to get that level of GPU power from NVidia.

People who really want to be looked at - performers, influencers, etc - will need a full tracking rig. The audience doesn't.

[1] https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/entry/6509-introducin...

cowtools• 4 years ago

Which gives them superpowers in understanding tech/algorithms...

does it?

drbojingle• 4 years ago

I suspect its just easier and faster (in terms of cpu and network throughput) to translate human facial expessions to a digital represebtation and apply it to lofi animated character than using something more hi def.

Vanit• 4 years ago

I initially thought the same, but using even the current gen avatars for multiplayer on the Quest 2 feels great and is surprisingly convincing. The speech to mouth movement detection looks natural and combined with the body language being accurately represented with reverse kinematics I felt like I was colocating very realistically.

DerSaidin2• 4 years ago

I don't think those avatars have enough human likeness to really trigger the uncanny valley effect.

I think it is weird for a different reason: it looks like 1990s tech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Worlds

nharada• 4 years ago

Is there any good way for me to try this out without buying a $1500 piece of hardware? My instinct is that Oculus' VR vision doesn't make any sense, but I want to try it out before being confident that my instinct is correct.

SXX6• 4 years ago

Thanks to FB you can buy $400 "Meta Quest 2" and experience like 95% of good VR content. Yeah it somewhat worse than Valve Index for VR enthusiasts, but it also much cheaper.

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

I recently got the HP Reverb G2 to explore VR. It's not that much more than the Quest and has the benefit of being Zuckerberg- and spyware-free.

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

If you do get a vr headset tether it to a pc and try some actual quality content.

nomel7• 4 years ago

Or, if you have a Quest, forget the tether and go full wireless PCVR, like the rest of us.

JieJie• 4 years ago

The developer of Doom is building the corporate Metaverse.

You guys are pulling my leg, right?

msa_ds2• 4 years ago

Every single one of my childhood heroes has committed suicide before my eyes by doing stuff like this. I always considered them having some solid morals and being wealthy enough would make this improbable but boy I was wrong. Oh well, they can't kill the old memories, yet.

SXX6• 4 years ago

To be honest Carmack have a good reasons to work on it even if it means work for TheEvilCorp: first of all if you listen to him he is truly interested in advancing VR tech. So he doesn't do it just for the money.

Also I guess he run out of money when Armadillo Aerospace has failed and at least before he talked like he want to make second attempt in space industry and this will require a lot of money.

Bluecobra• 4 years ago

In the Metaverse, no one can pull your leg because they forgot to code it. :D

Karsteski• 4 years ago

Yes, it's very unfortunate that he is associated with Facebook now :| Such great technology, that I'll never use until other companies are able to catch up.

The idea of using any sort of VR tech that Facebook controls literally disgusts me. Can't even imagine the amount of information they will control on people with such things...

p1necone7• 4 years ago

The Vive is just as good as the Oculus (VR games with a decent gaming PC hooked up is a much better experience than the all in one stuff that's running on mobile hardware).

I'd also look out for the PSVR 2 when that releases - just as walled garden as Oculus but it's not Facebook.

loud_groan5• 4 years ago

He has been, and continues to be, a huge jackass. You're just seeing his true form.

nsxwolf• 4 years ago

Carmack never stops talking for even a moment. Never repeats himself and clearly expresses his thoughts in real time. It's some sort of autism I presume.

Version467• 4 years ago

I find it very inspiring to be able to express your thoughts in such a clear and concise manner. Most people are usually either very charismatic/good presenters, or highly technical. But Carmack does both while still sounding friendly and just in general excited about tech.

wvenable• 4 years ago

Carmack used to be pretty bad at giving talks but he kept doing them, and because of that, has gotten a lot better at it. Practice makes perfect.

goertzen• 4 years ago

Seems like they could of made this a lot better with a basic lighting setup … but nothing was as a bad as the comments suggest.

sebringj2• 4 years ago

The bit about the logs was funny. I have noticed my oculus 2 be pretty responsive and zippy to now being frustrating to the point I put it down. I would guess its getting bloated.

sebringj2• 4 years ago

Oh yah and he said there is a part of me that wants to "burn it down". omg I was laughing so hard.

ralfd• 4 years ago

What did he say? Timestamp?

swellguy• 4 years ago

Has John Carmack ever been scripted? Kind of a weird catchphrase. "Gun that shoots bullets."

actionfromafar3• 4 years ago

True. Why point that out? I get paranoid. :) Was he scripted this time? The avatar video was to hide reading from the prompt?

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

They are working with low bandwidth graphics, I wonder if that is part of their global strategy…

Ninjinka• 4 years ago

My company's Slack was dying laughing at how negative his event was within the first 10 minutes. And then towards the end he says "and now I'm gonna be grumpy" and we were sent reeling.

Favorite quote was "one of my internal posts was reported and taken down for not being sensitive enough."

tristor• 4 years ago

Wow... thanks to the person that posted the YouTube link, because I have Facebook blocked. Carmack was good to listen to, but the pan in when they turned it over to him /felt/ laggy, like you could see frame rate jitter, and the entire thing was out of sync. I'm generally pretty bullish on VR for entertainment and collaboration long-term, but this honestly felt like going back 20 years ago. I've had more realistic and smoother experiences in MMOs with voice chat.

nomel7• 4 years ago

The frame rate is fine in person, with these avatars. I think the delay/low FPS was on the 2d capture side. But sheesh, that should have been worked out.

FrostKiwi3• 4 years ago

Same experience with the Quests about 2D capture. If you allow video capture to kick in, rendering resolution is lowered, the devices struggle to maintain proper frame rate, Asynchronous reprojection kicks into high-gear. It's really a hardware limitation of those mobile SOCs, but pretty embarrassing none-the less.

lofaszvanitt4• 4 years ago

World is bonkers... can someone elaborate what is happening @ FB and other Silicon Valley companies where people seemingly went crazy? There are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating a metaverse like thing with stunning detail, but this?

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

I suspect micro-dosing is showing its effects. Cant find any other rational explanation.

lofaszvanitt4• 4 years ago

Nah, this is more like I'm pretending to be an idiot... and this pattern appears at even more and more outlets.

DethNinja• 4 years ago

I can explain it, but you won’t like it:

* Entire economy is right now controlled by FED and mega funds like Blackrock. What Engineers or public think is at the moment is unimportant, entire shift to Metaverse is directed by these mega funds / mega investors.

* So, people that control the economy desperately want Metaverse to happen.

* The reason is that they believe Metaverse will give much needed bread circuses to citizens and keep them happy during the incoming calamities like climate change.

* Moreover, they can easily forcefully strap low income workers to VR/AR glasses and control them more effectively during the work.

* Though there are couple of major problem with this plan.

* Most of the companies working in this area is just interested in suckering the investments. This is very similar to blockchain startups.

* Public won’t be very interested in AR tech, and forcing AR top down will actually create genuine social issues.

lofaszvanitt4• 4 years ago

Hell, it's hard to believe/digest. Anyway, it seems forced, that's for sure. The 3D glasses/TV madness had similar traits back then. If this turns out to be true, then I'm wondering what will the company who succeeds creating a compelling Metaverse will get in return. :O

stainforth• 4 years ago

I am not going to disagree with any of this, really appreciate this angle. I'll add that from Stratechery type concepts, Warren Buffet wisdom and the like, companies need a moat and in these platform providers its all about the walled garden. If the metaverse were to be the next big thing for sure, you'd want to be the one to capture it. I wonder if FB consulted with the Big 4 or BCG ilk to have the greenlight to go down this road, I'd find it humorous.

loud_groan5• 4 years ago

There are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating a metaverse like thing with stunning detail, but this?

John Carmack is spent.

Richard Garfield also created Artifact.

Niantic also created Wizards Unite.

Markus Persson made some videos of some kind of Stargate Universe spaceship game with a programmable 16 bit computer. It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.

There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops!

are a handful of contenders in the video game entertainment industry who are really capable of creating

It's just super really fucking risky. It's not this, VC thing where you are just putting out winners over and over again.

There are no Marc Lore types in gaming. There's no exit strategy for Marc Lores of gaming. And if you don't have any idea what I'm saying or talking about at this point, if you're like, who the fuck is Marc Lore, you are not comprehending how far you are from understanding the challenge of making these games with huge audiences that last for years.

You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.

The mistake wasn't taking a risk. Better Zucc make video games than a payment system or a crypto trading platform or a spare room rental company. The mistake is that John Carmack is a dick.

munificent2• 4 years ago

It sounded cool, but people hated it before it was even released.

My recollection was that a bunch of people were really excited, a bunch of people were like, "What is this?", and then Notch basically just lost interest and wandered off. I think he's one of those people that needs externally imposed structure and doesn't know what to do with himself now that he's super rich.

lofaszvanitt4• 4 years ago

Oh man, are you high? :DDDD

---" There are 100 billionaire 35-45 yo men with fond memories of Civilization, Diablo, Halo trying to make video games hiring the top game designers. And they get flops! ---"

Examples of these big flops please.

Creating a big title is a team effort. You can shove your top designer if he doesn't have a proper team. Ex blizzard guys, almost all of them failed, why? Because they jumped out, believed they were hotshots, but their team/general game idea was lacking. Also look what happened to David Jaffe without Sony's backing...

If you have the money, but don't know jackshit about games, and you don't have a Steve Eisman quality bullshit detector, what are you expecting? Btw there are a lot of excellent indie titles that trump big titles while made by a few individuals, but only a fraction of gamers know about them, because they don't have the money plus marketing machine needed to bring them to a wider audience. Pour your zillions there or hire me, give me a shitton of money, power to kick people in the balls and you'll get your 10x return, lol.

Plus how is this relevant? All I'm saying that the tech is ready, can be made, there are perfect VG examples that can be used as a VR/MV setting, but what Meta showcased is a letdown.

gilmore606• 4 years ago

You are just as likely to get a hit from an extremely talented and lucky unknown as you are from Richard fucking Garfield. A title that cost its developer $1 to make can become a #1 App Store game at roughly the same a-priori likelihood as a game with a $100m budget.

Given this, where is the YCombinator for games? Why isn't someone funding 100,000 ConcernedApes and ToadyOnes in an attempt to cash in on the next Stardew Valley? Serious question.

_manifold• 4 years ago

The direct technical explanation for the fidelity gap here, as has been stated elsewhere in the comments here, is that Meta's metaverse VR tech runs off of a smartphone chip. Performance is thus very limited. Further compounding this limitation is the fact that since it is VR, the application has to render the world twice every frame - so rendering capability is ostensibly cut in half. The result is bland, low-detail, flat-looking (and in this case jittery and glitchy) graphics.

I think this gap could easily have a hand in preventing the Facebook metaverse from reaching mainstream appeal. We've had gorgeous graphics in games and virtual worlds for quite a long time now - just look at what Crysis achieved fifteen years ago. To the average consumer who doesn't care about the technical limitations and issues behind the product, this is like rewinding the clock twenty years.

As far as why Zuckerberg is so hyped on it - your guess is as good as mine. Just seems like a really misguided attempt at creating a new platform/ecosystem that they control entirely and can monetize.

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

As someone who’s always looked up to carmack, unless he’s forced to do this against his will, i find it disappointing he would promote this failing meta product.

droopyEyelids• 4 years ago

He's not just drinking the kool-aid, he's an exec in the kool-aid company hoping to build kool-aid factories and put a pipeline to a spigot next to the water faucet in every home

jandrese3• 4 years ago

His job is basically to make it work. A lot of his points are about the current deficiencies and how he thinks he can make something compelling with more work. Everything from lag to loading times to poor integration between the two virtual environments to features he thinks would make the experience compelling.

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

He’s working at meta one day a week i believe, i dont see how he can improve things. Also how much room for improvement is there for a mobile phone with a builtin vr goggle? Basically thats what the oculus is. Even carmack said there is only this much you can achieve on such a platform. Now if somehow they’d squeeze in more hardware then that could work. Or a dedicated console and stream content via wifi (wireless pc vr works quite well on oculus, albeit the headset isnt that great).

FrostKiwi3• 4 years ago

I recommend watching last year's speech by Carmack. It gives a little perspective as to why this was targeted to be a virtual session.

He is not a fan of how Meta pushes the Metaverse, "Money is flowing and enormous wheels in the company apparatus are turning" and he wants to salvage that financial energy to push technology in some meaningful way. (Pushing down audio latency on the Quest 2 was such a talking point). This shows what Meta's tech is capable of, mask off, no per-rendered CG advert and I think that's a good thing.

Besides that, afaik he is largely detached from that project now and only does once a week consulting, with the main focus being his pursuit of AGI.

Doesn't change of course how embarrassingly bad Meta's money invested vs results achieved are.

edit: Fount the spot I referenced. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo at 15:10 onward

KVFinn• 4 years ago

In all the past years Carmack did a couple extra hours of talks/questions in random online VR rooms. These were just as info-dense as the main talks, and Carmack was even a little looser in them, but it was so hard to find.

I just have to hope a random person in the room will be recording their VR session!

mberning• 4 years ago

These people are not interested in creating a better world and a better life for everyone. They are interested in making the vast majority of people their personal slaves and digital sharecroppers. It’s horrible.

DonHopkins3• 4 years ago

No closed captions or sign language interpreter?

Comevius• 4 years ago

Well it needs to run on the Quest 2, so it looks uncanny, janky and all that, but it's running on smartphone hardware from 2020.

Meta really wants to have it's own hardware platform, otherwise they are at a mercy of Apple, Google and Microsoft when it comes to collecting data. They are very brave for coming out with something this uncomfortably useless though. I'm pretty sure Apple will end up winning this one with their more sensible AR approach.

RoyTyrell• 4 years ago

Reminds me a little bit of this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg29TuWo0Yo

RobLach• 4 years ago

I have enjoyed so many Carmack talks but this presentation is so jarring it makes me uncomfortable.

jallen_dot_dev• 4 years ago

I'm listening to this in a separate tab, not watching the video, and I feel like I'm missing absolutely nothing for not watching a floating Carmack Cartoon torso that occasionally blinks.

HanyouHottie• 4 years ago

Are they serious? VRChat is already better than this in every way. Graphics quality, frame rate, full body tracking, face tracking, legs... Not to mention being able to make your own maps and avatars. I get that this for mobile platforms but VRChat also has Quest support that is better than this.

numpad06• 4 years ago

I can't think of reasons that this exist other than they might have fundamental, architectural, philosophical disagreement with VRChat that neither parties cannot tolerate but Facebook/Meta is on the losing side, like over real-name-real-face policy vs having none of it.

onepointsixC6• 4 years ago

You don't think that there is room in the market for more players? Even as the player base review bombs VRC for invasive anti cheat/tampering?

RockRobotRock• 4 years ago

VRChat is an amazing experience but it really does require a high-end gaming PC to run well. VRChat on Quest is a joke.

Going with a very conservative graphical quality seems like it gives a lot of advantages as well.

ZephyrBlu4• 4 years ago

I'm surprised people are shitting on this so hard. The facial animations are quite impressive and everything else isn't that bad.

It's not amazing, but it's not unwatchable either. I can imagine this becoming a good alternative (Not replacement!) to in-person events.

iandanforth2• 4 years ago

Anyone have a link to a recording that has speed control?

cheeselip420• 4 years ago

I feel like this whole thing could be a webcam and some snapchat filters. I must be getting old, because I just don't get it...

Salgat• 4 years ago

The feel and vibe is so bizarrely similar to DigitalSpace Traveler (which existed 25 years ago).

https://www.digitalspace.com/traveler/

sanderjd• 4 years ago

I don't understand what I'm supposed to find at this link. It seems like just a Facebook events page? I'm confused...

hettygreen• 4 years ago

Imagine if all of this money and brain power went to designing pleasant civic spaces where we could meet each other face to face.

The idea of a future where everyone is at home with screens strapped on their face, talking to their bubble-friends in a simulated tree-lined park while the outside world turns increasingly hostile is pretty sad.

Serious question: Has anybody else noticed that it's gotten very hard to talk to other people face-to-face lately? I feel like I'm expected to be an anonymous and obedient dopamine dispensing machine for the other person. Even worse, I've also noticed myself doing the same; getting home and then realizing I spent the whole conversation bragging or ranting while barely letting the other person speak. It's like the odds of having an even back-and-forth interaction is <20% post covid.

cma3• 4 years ago

in a simulated tree-lined park while the outside world turns increasingly hostile is pretty sad.

To the extent it ends up saving on jet travel and commuting it could make the outside world less hostile (delaying the onset of global warming). I don't think it is there yet in this iteration obviously.

Animats3• 4 years ago

Is there a transcript of this? An hour of Facebook promoters speaking is too much.

lumost2• 4 years ago

Seriously, who wants these VR systems? Have we evolved to the point where giant tech companies no longer require customers? Even the high end-VR games I've played in the mall aren't as convincing as a standard PC/Console game. From what I've seen a mere 260k VR units were sold in 2022. Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.

Where are the lines around the corner? where are the reports of sold out VR headsets? I haven't been able to buy a GPU for years, but I'm willing to bet I'll find a discounted quest if I go looking.

oxff• 4 years ago

I would love an answer to this. They look like bad mobile games because it has to run on mobile hardware. Interactions, latency etc. are all worse than on some average PC game.

You could just log into, I don't know, ARMA III server as a department and host your meeting there instead of this torture.

solardev3• 4 years ago

Even on the PC-connected headsets (Index, Vive, etc.) where the graphics are infinitely better, the games are still really meh. It feels like a solution in search of a problem. Once the novelty of "ooh, 3D and position tracking" wears off, the games themselves feel like tech demos... even the best VR games pale in comparison to your typical "very positive" rando indie game on Steam, of which there are hundreds.

You know how Nintendo sold a bazillion Wiis and Switches even though their hardware is pretty subpar? They had solid, fun games with charisma and charm.

The VR world, meanwhile, has... uh... disembodied techbros floating in a shrink's office with you? I really respect Carmack, but... what the hell, man?!? Any of his old indie or id software games were SOOOO much better than this Meta crap.

The whole thing feels like a sunken cost fallacy where some True Believers keep making new headsets, but they're not fundamentally getting better... still stuck in dorky-gimmick land.

wcarss• 4 years ago

Smartphones were already selling 47 million units in 2010.

The bet isn't that the Quest or any extant VR headset _is_ the iPhone, the bet is that some successor of the Oculus could be the iPhone. Facebook is hoping they can either capitalize on it directly or hold the patents to skim the cream off of whomever does.

The current headsets are more like PalmOS -- pretty cool, but not yet cool enough. They're for geeks and enthusiasts. If my silly analogy holds, we're currently waiting for Nokia and Blackberry to show up and miss (but make a lot of progress along the way), and then we'll get an iPhone around ~2028, and the bet might pay off.

lumost2• 4 years ago

So Facebook drops billions per year to be palm pilot? What incentive does anyone have in this org to deliver an actual product/customer value? How do we know VR isn’t a bet for the 2030s?

If this was a small labs net spending a few million a year… then I’d buy this, but we’re looking at a bet the farm situation.

moolcool2• 4 years ago

I will die on the hill that PalmOS was primarily a marketing failure. They were always primarily thought of basic personal organizer devices, but the Palm Tungsten and Zire lines (Starting around 2003) had very strong multimedia and gaming functionality.

SkyMarshal• 4 years ago

Creating the metaverse as merely a skeumorphic copy of the real world seems like such a boring imaginative failure and wasted opportunity. You can form this digital medium in any way you can envision. Why limit it to bars, houses, offices, avatars, and other humdrum aspects of normal life. Instead let's push our creativity to the limit.

I'd like to see something completely unreal and unlike anything possible to experience irl, and yet interactive, explorable, and as a result something we can build intuitions about how it works. Imagine if Brett Victor, Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, and Stanley Kubrick all went on an acid trip together, and collectively envisioned a virtual reality unbound by any of the forms of the real world, yet with a set of consistent rules learnable via interaction and exploration.

I imagine something like that could be enlightening and mind-expanding, and far more interesting and compelling than what Zuck has envisioned thus far. That's the metaverse I'm holding out for.

Karrot_Kream7• 4 years ago

It's not limited to this stuff at all. Horizon Worlds is pretty lacking in this front but has some games. Open up VRChat though, and you'll see some amazing stuff. You'll ride in buses that drive through beautiful, vaporwave sunsets. You'll sit at the edge of a waterfall. You'll play games on high speed rails jumping against walls (and yeah it's as crazy as it sounds in VR.) And that's ignoring the games for VR out there.

barbariangrunge• 4 years ago

For those of us without Facebook accounts, what is this?

wink2• 4 years ago

From reading the comments I would have expected something far worse, like that image with the Eiffel tower.

Actually doesn't look too bad (I guess my expectations are very low), but what's the missing leg thing? That's just "alpha of a game" level weird.

H12• 4 years ago

Can anyone with experience having social interactions in VR speak to the value-add of the concept?

Having played VR games, I find the experience novel at first in a way that's pretty impossible to adequately describe to others, but gradually lost interest in it over time.

Curious if there's anything about social VR that you kinda have to experience first-hand to really "get". In concept, for something special and rare like a conference, I could see VR being an improvement over zoom but nowhere near a replacement for the in-person experience.

For stuff like daily meetings, I feel like the fatigue would set in very quickly similar to how it did with VR gaming for me.

Carmack Unscripted

Related Stories