Who Cares About the Metaverse?

what's up [Music] somebody tell me why this was never in any of meta's presentations how is me putting a phone camera in the quest Pro had said the most compelling demo of the r I've seen in like the last five years but I have some hot takes on this whole metaverse thing that I kept to myself for a little while but I think it's finally time to share them so buckle up let's get into it so meta stock is down over 60 percent this year Facebook's growth has flatlined and their CEO Mark Zuckerberg has doubled down on this commitment to the whole metaverse thing which they've continued to pour tons and tons of money into it's like what is going on here but let me let's just zoom out a second and start with some definitions VR is virtual reality which is you know putting the headset on and being completely immersed in a new virtual world AR is augmented reality which is overlaying virtual things on top of the real world I'm gonna use those a lot in this video those two things though are both particularly hard to demo you kind of have to try it and use it to actually understand it and appreciate it so I know there's a lot of curiosity about VR especially lately and it can be kind of hard to tell if it's like just another Trend in Tech like 3D TVs whatever happened to those or if it's actually the future that we'll all be living in like ready player one or maybe more like Wally hard to tell either way there's basically one visible Mega company that's clearly pushing all their chips in on this definitely being our future and that's meta formerly known as Facebook with their CEO Mark Zuckerberg this guy this guy right here and he explained to me many times that they really believe in this metaverse thing and he showed me all this Quest Pro stuff right before it was announced on stage so I got to form my opinions on it before the slightly more cringe-worthy presentation version we've all seen the the metaverse might have a pretty terrible reputation already but let's try to take a step back look at it objectively like a piece of tech shall we [Music] so like I said VR is one of those things you kind of have to try to understand and appreciate but also the spectrum of how much people care about the metaverse is hilarious like all the way from not caring at all and never having tried VR in their life all the way to like serious Believers like companies hiring a chief metaverse officer and a metaverse being in every headline and just like a weird obsession with it so it can be kind of hard to give a single answer to this but I actually think it's pretty simple the internet as we have it right now is mostly controlled by two things ads and devices so if you control the ads then you're the one connecting people to the things that they buy that's basically what Google does like Google's job is to know everything they possibly can about people and then show them ads for things not just on Google search results but all over the Internet with Google Adwords pretty much every company in the world who does online advertising pays Google to do it for them so for as much as we talk about like the pixel and Google Chrome and Android on this channel Google is is at its core and adds business and then if you control the devices people use then you very much have control over what makes it to people's eyeballs Facebook has wanted to make a popular device but they don't make one trust me they've tried but now in 2022 as popular as Facebook is they have clearly saturated the market they've peaked they've begun their inevitable very slow Decline and so they're they've made their bazillions of dollars but now with things like the iPhone adding that ask app not to track button that took a multi-billion dollar chunk out of Facebook's ads business didn't really hurt Google as much because people still go to google.com and type in a box what they're looking for Google still knows a lot about people so bottom line bottom line is Facebook is accepting that L you know they they dominated the early parts of the internet and that was great but now the slow decline has begun and they're moving on to the next big thing and if you could look all around at all the technologies that could maybe be the next big thing that one thing that keeps bubbling back up to the surface has been VR and AR and so Facebook meta can control as much of this VR future as possible the software the hardware the ads the things that make it to people's eyeballs then they will regain the control and the money that they're after so cue them rebranding themselves to meta and pouring billions and billions of dollars into that exact Mission okay so this might be kind of a hot take but the meta Quest Pro this headset is 1500 and I'll explain the thinking behind that in a second but it is actually pretty good it's a pretty good technologically speaking a pretty good headset it is much more comfortable than a lot of others I've tried so they've split the components now between the displays and lenses in the front and speakers and buttons through the middle and then the battery at the back it is it is lighter than it looks but I think it's more about the balance and the weight here you can see feels like the balance point is right in the middle there which is better but then you put it on and you look like this here you go boom and without the uh blockers on the side there is a little bit of a gap and you do have peripheral vision light coming in from the sides and not the top inside there is a custom Snapdragon xr2 plus processor 256 gigs of storage 12 gigs of RAM and then a Slimmer set of displays and lenses and then the screens inside are giving you 1920 by 1800 per eye at up to 90 FPS and I can do this decent full color pass-through with the 10 sensors and cameras scattered around the outside it's not the best pass-through I've ever seen but it does work and it lets you feel like you're in a normal environment plus there's these new touch Pro controllers which have cameras and sensors of their own and they all charge on a single dock through some pins which we'll be doing often because sadly the headset does just have like a one and a half hour battery life when unplugged but then there's also a suite of sensors on the inside facing your eyes facing your face for face tracking okay right now I'm looking at an alien face but a little bit more interesting than that is the alien face is in real time showing what the headset sees my face doing and so every expression that I make every little facial movement oh the eye movements the every it's it's kind of a lot of the little things too like the little muscles on your face that move when you talk and you make little micro Expressions so if I was in a virtual world and trying to convey emotions to another person then they would see everything that's pretty cool VR and AR both worked pretty well through this headset but at the end of the day it still is a pretty chunky it's a pretty big headset it doesn't fold down either so if you want to travel with it you need like a bag or a backpack this version might not be tempting to you Zuckerberg keeps telling me you know people buy a new two thousand dollar machine as their desktop computer all the time and this is maybe a replacement for that someday but this might not be tempting to you but theoretically in a couple of years a new version of it is much much smaller closer to like a regular pair of glasses and then even further down the road another version is even smaller maybe lightweight like Google Glass used to be back in the day and then eventually it's an incredible actually portable piece of tech and so theoretically if you pour enough money and talent into something it can become amazing which leads me to my next point this is the real question here every time I see a new VR headset pop up whether it's this like pico Pro headset or the metaquest pro or anything like that the question is always like is this VR thing really actually going to be the future like it's cool with tech and it works and everything but are we actually going to be spending meaningful time in VR at some point and the answer of course depends on who you ask obviously I feel like I've noticed the younger the person is that you talk to the more likely they are to want to give VR a chance or to try it more often but if you ask meta if you ask anyone in leadership at meta the answer is yes absolutely 100 this is the future that we are all going to be living in using VR all the time metaverse for sure now of course they have to believe in that because the whole company is a huge ship barreling in that exact Direction but also watching the presentation of everything at the meta connect keynote as miserable and awkward as as it was the more you watch the more it kind of crystallizes their whole plan for me basically step one think of all the things people normally do on the internet step two make those things in VR and then pour tons of money into them and then that's kind of the whole plan if you get the time and you actually get to watch through that presentation it happens over and over again where basically they realize that people do certain things in real life and then they want to bring that thing into VR oh you'd like to do this here's a VR version Oh you do this other thing here's a VR version over and over again and ideally for them anyway convincing people to use the VR version just will become a matter of making the VR version really really good hopefully better than the real life version and that's where I think my hot day comes in which is that some of these VR applications are actually scary good and starting to look better than the non-vr version and for meta if they can get enough of these things to be real then they'll be making this metaverse thing happen Gretchen stop trying to make metaverse happen it's not going to happen Okay so some are easier than others right gaming yeah we've got some good games already in VR now we got to work on getting more like a better variety of games better Fidelity Etc more immersion and pouring money into this ecosystem will entice developers to rapidly improve games and make better games which is awesome but there's more to life than just games what else do people do all day in 2022 Zoom calls okay perfect yes they've got Zoom calls but better they've built an entire virtual meeting room experience where you can do video conferencing in VR with other people so you know some of your friends or co-workers don't have VR headsets that's fine they'll show up as a floating video feed in the metaverse but now with a bunch of people in meetings you can talk to the people around you you can do breakout meeting rooms instantly really good immersive presentations Etc now currently as you can tell these are all using these avatars and these I think are bad they're pretty cringy I I mean you can customize them of course with a bunch of different things different hair and features and outfits and piercings Etc which is kind of neat sure but you still end up feeling like a metaverse meeting is just a bunch of me characters from Nintendo Wii but it's very much a stop Gap because we also saw that meta announced this live Avatar demo that looked absolutely wild to me you can essentially use your phone to take a scan of yourself and then the headset takes that and puts a photorealistic version of you into the virtual environment complete with that face tracking and eye tracking and everything that we talked about before that is super Next Level so you can imagine now instead of just a zoom call with co-workers a really good meeting is a bunch of people from all over the world all in one room with all the advantages of the eye contact and relative audio positioning and being able to like lean over to the person next to you and say something really quietly just to them all this is stuff that you can't really do in a zoom call and so just replace these weird Avatar cars with the hyper realistic ones and they might be onto something but that's just meetings that's not even that much time what else people do uh maybe they just work remotely period sure okay then they'll build this whole metaverse this whole Virtual Office Building for people to work in so if they work all over the world in different countries they can all collaborate in the same spaces but even the first thing I showed in this video which is just simply working on your computer which is a thing that many people do for many hours a day and the quest pro has native Mac support that let me project my Mac screen onto these multiple huge virtual screens so you can take a huge triple monitor setup wherever you go basically you can just take this headset with you and do way more with fairly high resolution that can again get better with time and more money they've poured money into Microsoft to bring Office 365 and Word and Excel and everything into work rooms natively they've poured money into Accenture to give them like thousands and thousands of VR headsets to get those people to use the metaverse to work virtually all the time basically meta can and will dump a ton of money into this because that's all they're doing right now there's like a a common Trope that like if you want to make a bunch of money as a startup right now just make a virtual reality Tech startup in some way and you will eventually level up enough to just get acquired by meta it's no wonder Chief metaverse officers became a thing that became a way to like make it seem like you might get acquired by meta but that brings us to the last thing there's only really there's only one problem that I have with all of this which is that one company controlling the entire Foundation of this second generation internet if you want to call it that this metaverse is a terrible idea so this comes down to meta wanting as much control over this future as possible Facebook was built on someone else's Foundation they want to build the next foundation and then be the ones responsible for everything that grows up on top of it the the work rooms the games the experiences everything so that they're pretty visibly pouring as much money into it now as possible to get as far ahead as possible now plenty of other companies are are developing and making really cool VR stuff now along those same lines don't get me wrong there's the Pico headset I just showed you there are stuff from Google stuff from I think we all expect in the next year so Apple to finally unveil their VR headset which I think will make meta a little bit nervous because Apple will for sure make sure that's the best one for iPhone users but meta has already you know made so many connections and and built so many Technologies and bought up so many VR companies and VR Studios that it sucks but it's like if there's any company that can be positioned to bring this technology over the hump to make it a thing then it's meta but the downside of that one especially this company having possibly that much control over people and over the future of the internet and possibly doing crazy things like like using eye tracking to make sure you see certain ads is way too much for me to want to root for it at all I've said it before but when companies truly compete that is actually when we win when there's actually real incentive to get better because competition makes them better that's when we get better stuff but man Mark's metaverse money might make the meta thing much more mainstream or maybe not thanks for watching catch you guys later peace [Music]

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 9,160,870

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Id: CqkhjL3WvWQ

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022