Mark Zuckerberg: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s incredible. You’re basically playing piano on a table, and that’s without any controller. And how well it matches physical reality with no latency, and it’s tracking your hands with no latency and it’s tracking all the people around you with no latency. Integrating physical reality and digital reality, obviously that connects exactly to this Codec Avatar, which is in parallel allows us to have ultra realistic copies of ourselves in this mixed reality. So it’s all converging towards an incredible digital experience in the Metaverse. To me, obviously I love the intimacy of conversation, so even this is awesome, but do you have other ideas of what this unlocks, of something like Codec Avatar unlocks in terms of applications, in terms of things we’re able to do? Well, there’s what you can do with avatars overall, in terms of superimposing digital objects on the physical world, and then there’s psychologically, what does having photorealistic do? So I think we’re moving towards a world where we’re going to have something that looks like normal glasses, where you can see the physical world, but you’ll also see holograms. And in that world, I think that there are going to be, not too far off, maybe by the end of this decade, we’ll be living in a world where there are as many holograms when you walk into a room as there are physical objects. And it really raises this interesting question about what are… A lot of people have this phrase where they call the physical world the real world. And I kind of think increasingly, the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is the combination of the physical world and the digital worlds coming together. But until this technology, they were sort of separate. It’s like you access the digital world through a screen and maybe it’s a small screen that you carry around or it’s a bigger screen when you sit down at your desk and strap in for a long session, but they’re kind of fundamentally divorced and disconnected. And I think part of what this technology is going to do is bring those together into a single coherent experience of what the modern real world is, which is, it’s got to be physical because we’re physical beings. So the physical world is always going to be super important. But increasingly, I think a lot of the things that we kind of think of can be digital holograms. I mean, any screen that you have can be a hologram, any media, in any book, art. It can basically be just as effective as a hologram, as a physical object. Any game that you’re playing, a board game or any kind of physical game, cards, ping pong, things like that, they’re often a lot better as holograms. Because you could just snap your fingers and instantiate them and have them show up. It’s like you have a ping pong table show up in your living room, but then you can snap your fingers and have it be gone. So that’s super powerful. So I think that it’s actually an amazing thought experiment of like how many physical things we have today that could actually be better as interactive holograms. But then beyond that, I think the most important thing obviously is people. So the ability to have these mixed hangouts, whether they’re social or meetings where you show up to a conference room, you’re wearing glasses or a headset in the very near term, but hopefully by over the next five years, glasses or so. And you’re there physically. Some people are there physically, but other people are just there as holograms and it feels like it’s them who are right there. by over the next five years, glasses or so. And you’re there physically. Some people are there physically, but other people are just there as holograms and it feels like it’s them who are right there. And also by the way, another thing that I think is going to be fascinating about being able to blend together the digital and physical worlds in this way, is we’re also going to be able to embody AIs as well. So I think you’ll also have meetings in the future where you’re basically, maybe you’re sitting there physically and then you have a couple of other people who are there as holograms, and then you have Bob, the AI, who’s an engineer on your team who’s helping with things, and he can now be embodied as a realistic avatar as well, and just join the meeting in that way. So I think that that’s going to be pretty compelling as well. Okay, so what can you do with photorealistic avatars compared to the more expressive ones that we have today? Well, I think a lot of this actually comes down to acceptance of the technology. And because all of the stuff that we’re doing, I mean, the motion of your eyebrows, the motion of your eyes, the cheeks and all of that, there’s actually no reason why you couldn’t do that on an expressive avatar too. I mean, it wouldn’t look exactly like you, but you can make a cartoon version of yourself and still have it be almost as expressive. But I do think that there’s this bridge between the current state of most of our interactions in the physical world and where we’re getting in the future with this kind of hybrid, physical and digital world, where I think it’s going to be a lot easier for people to take some of these experiences seriously with the photorealistic avatars to start. And then I’m actually really curious to see where it goes longer term. I could see a world where people stick to the photorealistic and maybe they modify them to make them a little bit more interesting, but maybe fundamentally, we like photorealistic things. But I can also see a world that once people get used to the photorealistic avatars and they get used to these experiences, that I actually think that there could be a world where people actually prefer being able to express themselves in kind of non, ways that aren’t so tied to their physical reality. And so that’s one of the things that I’m really curious about. And I don’t know, in a bunch of our internal experiments on this, one of the things that I thought was psychologically pretty interesting is, people have no issues blending photorealistic stuff and not. So for this specific scene that we’re in now, we happen to sort of be in a dark room. I think part of that aesthetic decision I think was based on the way you like to do your podcast, but we’ve done experiences like this, where you have a cartoony background, but photorealistic people who you’re talking to, and people just seem to just think that that is completely normal. It doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t feel like it’s weird.…

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