Vertical Divider
Zuckerberg Uses the Verge to Drill Down into the Metaverse
Given that Quest 2 has been a real hit so far in terms of how people are using it, any global actions on the part of Facebook receive lots of attention. So when Oculus leaders announced they are joining Valve, Google, Microsoft, Unity, Epic Games going “all in” on support for OpenXR, a royalty-free open standard for AR and VR hardware, it caused a backlash.
The decision will make its hardware easier to work with in the long run and should be good for both developers and Facebook. But developers relying on Facebook’s in-house VR development tools—aren’t thrilled. Switching over will be costly and time-consuming.
From August of 2022, Facebook will generally require new apps for Oculus to use OpenXR and the company will only fix bugs in its older software related to privacy, security, or safety. Apps written for the older software “will continue to work normally,” but that doesn’t guarantee assistance with new non-critical bugs or support on future Oculus devices. “Going forward, developers should expect to see all new features land in the OpenXR API,” a spokesperson said. OpenXR was only announced in 2017, and developers didn’t begin embracing it until sometime later.
The first major Oculus feature Facebook is releasing via OpenXR is video passthrough, which will let developers create mixed reality experiences and prototype AR apps by using the Quest 2 and its limited black-and-white cameras.
I’m not sure that people would necessarily find it more natural to work all day wearing a VR helmet, but maybe it’s something we get used to. Verge said the metaverse could create jobs that don’t exist today, like whole economies springing up inside of this metaverse. Verge also doesn’t believe people would work in [a VR helmet] all day long — there’s clearly an evolution, or multiple, in the technology need to happen before this is the main way that people work. Today, the VR headsets are still clunky; their weight and size prevent most people from wearing them all day.
Given that Quest 2 has been a real hit so far in terms of how people are using it, any global actions on the part of Facebook receive lots of attention. So when Oculus leaders announced they are joining Valve, Google, Microsoft, Unity, Epic Games going “all in” on support for OpenXR, a royalty-free open standard for AR and VR hardware, it caused a backlash.
The decision will make its hardware easier to work with in the long run and should be good for both developers and Facebook. But developers relying on Facebook’s in-house VR development tools—aren’t thrilled. Switching over will be costly and time-consuming.
From August of 2022, Facebook will generally require new apps for Oculus to use OpenXR and the company will only fix bugs in its older software related to privacy, security, or safety. Apps written for the older software “will continue to work normally,” but that doesn’t guarantee assistance with new non-critical bugs or support on future Oculus devices. “Going forward, developers should expect to see all new features land in the OpenXR API,” a spokesperson said. OpenXR was only announced in 2017, and developers didn’t begin embracing it until sometime later.
- Anton Hand, co-founder, and CTO of developers RUST LTD, said that transitioning to OpenXR would take a large toll on his studio’s popular game H3VR. The game is supported with weekly updates that add new content, meaning it has been extensively specialized to work correctly with the older version of Unity that predates OpenXR support. For Hand, changing engines to ensure future compatibility with Facebook’s hardware could take a year and throw off the update cadence that has kept H3VR popular.
- Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel of Snap don’t see eye to eye. Zuckerberg’s habit of copying Snap’s most successful features hasn’t exactly endeared Facebook to the Snap founder. But it’s becoming clear that Spiegel and Zuckerberg also have different views around the future role of AR and VR tech. Spiegel has said, “I don’t think [AR] is a replacement at all for existing computing devices, which frankly are much more oriented around information retrieval and information organization.” I think what we’re going to see instead is that AR is much more oriented around human experiences.”
- Contrast that with Zuckerberg gushing about the metaverse where Zuckerberg was quick to say that his vision of the metaverse isn’t solely reliant on AR and VR, he still talked through his now-familiar vision for AR glasses that will, “basically with a snap of your fingers, pull up your perfect workstation.”
The first major Oculus feature Facebook is releasing via OpenXR is video passthrough, which will let developers create mixed reality experiences and prototype AR apps by using the Quest 2 and its limited black-and-white cameras.
I’m not sure that people would necessarily find it more natural to work all day wearing a VR helmet, but maybe it’s something we get used to. Verge said the metaverse could create jobs that don’t exist today, like whole economies springing up inside of this metaverse. Verge also doesn’t believe people would work in [a VR helmet] all day long — there’s clearly an evolution, or multiple, in the technology need to happen before this is the main way that people work. Today, the VR headsets are still clunky; their weight and size prevent most people from wearing them all day.
The Verge
One of the things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been reading more about the metaverse is that it seems to me that it promises to host much more information, generally, than social networks do today. This isn’t a network where I’m spending 20 or 30 minutes a day scrolling through a feed. Potentially, I’m spending eight-plus hours here working. And, as you noted, it’s not just text or voice communications, you’re also virtually moving through these spaces; it’s an office, it’s a performance space. So do you think that the systems that you have now to work on making spaces safe and healthy extend naturally? Or are we going to have to rethink this, just given the volume of information that is contained here?
Zuckerberg
Well, there will clearly be new challenges. Even in just the 2D world of the social media apps that we work on, there are going to be new challenges. So this is not a thing that you’re ever done with. But when we started working on a lot of these problems in a much bigger way, through the middle of the 2010s leading up to the 2016 election, and really turbocharged it a lot after that, we just knew that if you’re going to go and try to build these AI systems to be able to proactively identify harmful content — that’s not something that you can stand up in six months. We basically put together a roadmap that was a three- or four-year roadmap to get through all of the work that we needed to get to a good place. And sometimes when you’re working on long-term projects, it can be a little painful because you realize, “Hey, we want this today.” But it’s going to take a few years to get there. But I do think the reality is that now that we’ve built up a lot of that AI work and we’ve hired a lot of the content moderators, I think it will be easier to add new use cases and be able to adapt the systems that we’ve built to different types of harms. So it’s something that we’re thinking about from the beginning. For example, the gender skew that I just mentioned, the feeling that a number of women have around being harassed in the space, those are somewhat more acute problems, potentially, in gaming and in VR. Obviously, that’s a thing that exists in the other platforms as well. But I think that the mix of the problems that we see may vary, and I’m sure there’ll be new ones too. So this is just something that we’ll need to keep focused on.
The Verge
“Who gets to augment reality?”
Zuckerberg
One of the central questions of our time, … one of the things that is most magical about the present, and that I think is going to get even more so, is that flattening out distance creates a lot more opportunities for people. Not just in the sense that a version of me growing up today wouldn’t be stuck playing Little League, that I’d get to find people who are interested in the same things, so I could explore coding and have a much more vibrant community around that, or surfing, or whatever the thing is that you’re interested in. I think that that’s probably quite compelling and positive. I also think it is really important for economic opportunity. One of the big issues today in society is inequality. And one of the people I think has done the most interesting research on this is, Raj Chetty, I think he’s at Harvard now. Basically some of the research that he’s done shows that the zip code in which you were born and raised is highly correlated with your future mobility and what your income is going to be. And I think that that just goes against the sense that we have in this country that people should have equal opportunity.
But in a world where there can be more remote work, I don’t know what The Verge is doing, but I can tell you at Facebook, since we knew that this pandemic was going to be going on for a while, and we probably weren’t going be in offices, pretty early on, I basically just told our team, “Okay, look, stop just constraining ourselves from hiring people who are physically close to an office that they can’t go into anyway. Remote work is going to be a bigger part of the future; … within five to 10 years, probably about half the company is going to be remote. Let’s double down on that now and hire people in all these different places, which I think is going to create more opportunity.” But then you have this question, which is, now that we’re going back and you have this hybrid world, there are all these cultural questions of, “Okay, will the people who are working remotely really be able to have exactly the same opportunities as the people who are physically there with each other?” And I think when you have technologies like holograms from augmented and virtual reality, the answer gets closer to “yes” than it would have been before. When those people were just videoconferencing in on a flat screen or doing phone calls or not seeing each other as often. The better that this technology for presence gets, the more you can live where you want, be a part of the communities that you want to. And I think that that’s more positive in terms of creating more opportunity for people. Now, obviously, you also have the downsides of that that need to get managed. In order to have a cohesive society, you want to have a shared foundation of values and some understanding of the world and the problems that we all face together.
And I think part of what we’re all trying to figure out now is, how do you build that in a world where people have so much freedom and opportunity to go explore the things that are interesting to them and get different opportunities, but are less anchored physically? But I think we’re probably just going to go more in that direction. I think we will solve, or at least figure out how to come to an equilibrium on, the cohesion point. But I think overall, we should be celebrating the fact that this is going to, I believe, create more opportunity for people, not just in all places in the US but around the world.
Well, I think the metaverse will be governed by a number of different where the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. You have your avatar and your digital goods, and you want to be able to teleport anywhere. You don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s stuff. So for our part, for example, we’re building out the Quest headsets for VR, we’re working on AR headsets. But the software that we build, for people to work in or hang out in and build these different worlds, that’s going to go across anything. So other companies build out VR or AR platforms, our software will be everywhere. Just like Facebook or Instagram is today.
So I think part of this is, I think it’ll be good if companies build stuff that can work together and go across lines rather than just being locked into a specific platform. But I do think that, just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.
“IN ORDER TO HAVE A COHESIVE SOCIETY, YOU WANT TO HAVE A SHARED FOUNDATION OF VALUES AND SOME UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD AND THE PROBLEMS THAT WE ALL FACE TOGETHER”
The XR consortium that we are in with Microsoft and a bunch of other companies that are working on some of this as well. I don’t think every company is going to have exactly the same vision here. I think some are going to have more siloed visions, and I, at least, believe that in order for this to work really well, you want it to be very portable and interconnected.
The Verge
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote last year about the metaverse about “unprecedented interoperability” as one of the defining features of this metaverse. Since the biggest tech platforms are barely interoperable; at most, they might let you share some contact data or export some photos. So it sounds like you’re preparing to build systems that are much more interoperable than the ones we have today, at least on Facebook’s end.
Zuckerberg
I think that that aligns with our mission and worldview. We’re generally not trying to serve a smaller number of people but have them pay us a large premium. That’s not our business model. We’re here to serve as many people as possible and to help people connect. And when you’re building social systems primarily, you want everyone to be able to be a part of the same systems. So we want to make them as affordable as possible, we want to make them as unified as possible, and part of that is making sure that things can run everywhere, can run across different platforms, can talk to each other. There are a bunch of big questions about how you do that. There will be privacy questions, there’ll be intellectual property questions.
I thought Matthew Ball’s essays were great, and anyone who’s trying to learn about the Metaverse I think he wrote a nine-part piece on a bunch of the different aspects of what the metaverse could be, and I highly recommend all of them. I think sometimes people may be a little idealistic about assuming that this will develop in a certain way. The vision that Matthew lays out, for example, of being extremely interoperable, is the vision that I hope comes about. But I think we’ve seen from modern computing that there are different companies that push in different directions. So I think from my perspective, without a doubt, you’re going to have some companies that are trying to build incredibly siloed things, and then some that are trying to build more open and interoperable ones. And I don’t even think it’s a question of, is one going to win over the other? I mean, has open-source won over closed-source? There were just multiple things at different times, some are expressed more in the technology industry than others, but we’re going to be contributing to trying to build a more open and interoperable one, and that’s kind of our goal here. But even within that, there’s a lot of questions about how that works. Is it interoperable because it’s decentralized, in the way that a bunch of the crypto work is being designed now, so there’s kind of no central dependency? It’s not just interoperable, but there’s no centralized control points? Or is it interoperable because there are some bodies that set standards and enable a bunch of these experiences to work together? There will be see multiple approaches on that too.
The Verge
When you read books and watch movies about the metaverse, the fact that these spaces are owned by giant corporations are often the subject of satire. Is there room public, government-owned spaces in the metaverse? For example, libraries, parks, and is this something that governments should start thinking about so that they have a role to play as this stuff gets built?
Zuckerberg
There should be public spaces to enable healthy communities and a healthy sphere. Those spaces range from things that are government-built or administered, to nonprofits, which are technically private, but are operating in the public interest without a profit goal. Wikipedia is really like a public good, even though it’s run by a nonprofit, not a government.
“EACH COMPANY SHOULD NOT HAVE ITS OWN METAVERSE”
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot is: there are a set of big technology problems today that, it’s almost like 50 years ago the government. I’m talking about the US government here specifically, would have invested a ton in building out these things. But now in this country, that’s not quite how it’s working. Instead, a number of Big Tech companies or big companies are investing in building out this infrastructure. Maybe that’s the right way for it to work. When 5G is rolled out, a startup can’t really go fund the tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure to go do that. So, Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile do it, and that’s pretty good, I guess.
But there are a bunch of big technology problems, [like] defining augmented and virtual reality in this overall metaverse vision. I think that that’s going to be a problem that is going to require tens of billions of dollars of research but should unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of value or more. I think that there are things like self-driving cars, which seems like it’s turning out to be pretty close to AI-complete; needing to solve a lot of different aspects of AI to be functional, which is a massive problem in terms of investment. And some of the aspects around space exploration. Disease research is still one that our government priorities. When we look at China, which does invest a lot directly in these spaces, how will that function over time. But look, in the absence of that, yeah, I do think having public spaces is a healthy part of communities. And you’re going to have creators and developers with all different motivations, even on the mobile internet and internet today, you have a lot of people who are interested in doing public-good work. Even if they’re not directly funded by the government to do that. And I think that certainly, you’re going to have a lot of that here as well. I believe there is this long-term question where, as a society, we should want a very large amount of capital and our most talented technical people working on these futuristic problems, to lead and innovate in these spaces. And I think that there probably is a little bit more of a balance of space, where some of this could come from government, but I think startups and the open-source community, and the creator economy is going to fill in a huge amount of this as well.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been reading more about the metaverse is that it seems to me that it promises to host much more information, generally, than social networks do today. This isn’t a network where I’m spending 20 or 30 minutes a day scrolling through a feed. Potentially, I’m spending eight-plus hours here working. And, as you noted, it’s not just text or voice communications, you’re also virtually moving through these spaces; it’s an office, it’s a performance space. So do you think that the systems that you have now to work on making spaces safe and healthy extend naturally? Or are we going to have to rethink this, just given the volume of information that is contained here?
Zuckerberg
Well, there will clearly be new challenges. Even in just the 2D world of the social media apps that we work on, there are going to be new challenges. So this is not a thing that you’re ever done with. But when we started working on a lot of these problems in a much bigger way, through the middle of the 2010s leading up to the 2016 election, and really turbocharged it a lot after that, we just knew that if you’re going to go and try to build these AI systems to be able to proactively identify harmful content — that’s not something that you can stand up in six months. We basically put together a roadmap that was a three- or four-year roadmap to get through all of the work that we needed to get to a good place. And sometimes when you’re working on long-term projects, it can be a little painful because you realize, “Hey, we want this today.” But it’s going to take a few years to get there. But I do think the reality is that now that we’ve built up a lot of that AI work and we’ve hired a lot of the content moderators, I think it will be easier to add new use cases and be able to adapt the systems that we’ve built to different types of harms. So it’s something that we’re thinking about from the beginning. For example, the gender skew that I just mentioned, the feeling that a number of women have around being harassed in the space, those are somewhat more acute problems, potentially, in gaming and in VR. Obviously, that’s a thing that exists in the other platforms as well. But I think that the mix of the problems that we see may vary, and I’m sure there’ll be new ones too. So this is just something that we’ll need to keep focused on.
The Verge
“Who gets to augment reality?”
Zuckerberg
One of the central questions of our time, … one of the things that is most magical about the present, and that I think is going to get even more so, is that flattening out distance creates a lot more opportunities for people. Not just in the sense that a version of me growing up today wouldn’t be stuck playing Little League, that I’d get to find people who are interested in the same things, so I could explore coding and have a much more vibrant community around that, or surfing, or whatever the thing is that you’re interested in. I think that that’s probably quite compelling and positive. I also think it is really important for economic opportunity. One of the big issues today in society is inequality. And one of the people I think has done the most interesting research on this is, Raj Chetty, I think he’s at Harvard now. Basically some of the research that he’s done shows that the zip code in which you were born and raised is highly correlated with your future mobility and what your income is going to be. And I think that that just goes against the sense that we have in this country that people should have equal opportunity.
But in a world where there can be more remote work, I don’t know what The Verge is doing, but I can tell you at Facebook, since we knew that this pandemic was going to be going on for a while, and we probably weren’t going be in offices, pretty early on, I basically just told our team, “Okay, look, stop just constraining ourselves from hiring people who are physically close to an office that they can’t go into anyway. Remote work is going to be a bigger part of the future; … within five to 10 years, probably about half the company is going to be remote. Let’s double down on that now and hire people in all these different places, which I think is going to create more opportunity.” But then you have this question, which is, now that we’re going back and you have this hybrid world, there are all these cultural questions of, “Okay, will the people who are working remotely really be able to have exactly the same opportunities as the people who are physically there with each other?” And I think when you have technologies like holograms from augmented and virtual reality, the answer gets closer to “yes” than it would have been before. When those people were just videoconferencing in on a flat screen or doing phone calls or not seeing each other as often. The better that this technology for presence gets, the more you can live where you want, be a part of the communities that you want to. And I think that that’s more positive in terms of creating more opportunity for people. Now, obviously, you also have the downsides of that that need to get managed. In order to have a cohesive society, you want to have a shared foundation of values and some understanding of the world and the problems that we all face together.
And I think part of what we’re all trying to figure out now is, how do you build that in a world where people have so much freedom and opportunity to go explore the things that are interesting to them and get different opportunities, but are less anchored physically? But I think we’re probably just going to go more in that direction. I think we will solve, or at least figure out how to come to an equilibrium on, the cohesion point. But I think overall, we should be celebrating the fact that this is going to, I believe, create more opportunity for people, not just in all places in the US but around the world.
Well, I think the metaverse will be governed by a number of different where the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability. You have your avatar and your digital goods, and you want to be able to teleport anywhere. You don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s stuff. So for our part, for example, we’re building out the Quest headsets for VR, we’re working on AR headsets. But the software that we build, for people to work in or hang out in and build these different worlds, that’s going to go across anything. So other companies build out VR or AR platforms, our software will be everywhere. Just like Facebook or Instagram is today.
So I think part of this is, I think it’ll be good if companies build stuff that can work together and go across lines rather than just being locked into a specific platform. But I do think that, just like you have the W3C that helps set standards around a bunch of the important internet protocols and how people build the web, I think there will need to be some of that here, too, for defining how developers and creators can build experiences that allow someone to take their avatar and their digital goods and their friends, and be able to teleport seamlessly between all these different experiences.
“IN ORDER TO HAVE A COHESIVE SOCIETY, YOU WANT TO HAVE A SHARED FOUNDATION OF VALUES AND SOME UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD AND THE PROBLEMS THAT WE ALL FACE TOGETHER”
The XR consortium that we are in with Microsoft and a bunch of other companies that are working on some of this as well. I don’t think every company is going to have exactly the same vision here. I think some are going to have more siloed visions, and I, at least, believe that in order for this to work really well, you want it to be very portable and interconnected.
The Verge
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote last year about the metaverse about “unprecedented interoperability” as one of the defining features of this metaverse. Since the biggest tech platforms are barely interoperable; at most, they might let you share some contact data or export some photos. So it sounds like you’re preparing to build systems that are much more interoperable than the ones we have today, at least on Facebook’s end.
Zuckerberg
I think that that aligns with our mission and worldview. We’re generally not trying to serve a smaller number of people but have them pay us a large premium. That’s not our business model. We’re here to serve as many people as possible and to help people connect. And when you’re building social systems primarily, you want everyone to be able to be a part of the same systems. So we want to make them as affordable as possible, we want to make them as unified as possible, and part of that is making sure that things can run everywhere, can run across different platforms, can talk to each other. There are a bunch of big questions about how you do that. There will be privacy questions, there’ll be intellectual property questions.
I thought Matthew Ball’s essays were great, and anyone who’s trying to learn about the Metaverse I think he wrote a nine-part piece on a bunch of the different aspects of what the metaverse could be, and I highly recommend all of them. I think sometimes people may be a little idealistic about assuming that this will develop in a certain way. The vision that Matthew lays out, for example, of being extremely interoperable, is the vision that I hope comes about. But I think we’ve seen from modern computing that there are different companies that push in different directions. So I think from my perspective, without a doubt, you’re going to have some companies that are trying to build incredibly siloed things, and then some that are trying to build more open and interoperable ones. And I don’t even think it’s a question of, is one going to win over the other? I mean, has open-source won over closed-source? There were just multiple things at different times, some are expressed more in the technology industry than others, but we’re going to be contributing to trying to build a more open and interoperable one, and that’s kind of our goal here. But even within that, there’s a lot of questions about how that works. Is it interoperable because it’s decentralized, in the way that a bunch of the crypto work is being designed now, so there’s kind of no central dependency? It’s not just interoperable, but there’s no centralized control points? Or is it interoperable because there are some bodies that set standards and enable a bunch of these experiences to work together? There will be see multiple approaches on that too.
The Verge
When you read books and watch movies about the metaverse, the fact that these spaces are owned by giant corporations are often the subject of satire. Is there room public, government-owned spaces in the metaverse? For example, libraries, parks, and is this something that governments should start thinking about so that they have a role to play as this stuff gets built?
Zuckerberg
There should be public spaces to enable healthy communities and a healthy sphere. Those spaces range from things that are government-built or administered, to nonprofits, which are technically private, but are operating in the public interest without a profit goal. Wikipedia is really like a public good, even though it’s run by a nonprofit, not a government.
“EACH COMPANY SHOULD NOT HAVE ITS OWN METAVERSE”
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot is: there are a set of big technology problems today that, it’s almost like 50 years ago the government. I’m talking about the US government here specifically, would have invested a ton in building out these things. But now in this country, that’s not quite how it’s working. Instead, a number of Big Tech companies or big companies are investing in building out this infrastructure. Maybe that’s the right way for it to work. When 5G is rolled out, a startup can’t really go fund the tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure to go do that. So, Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile do it, and that’s pretty good, I guess.
But there are a bunch of big technology problems, [like] defining augmented and virtual reality in this overall metaverse vision. I think that that’s going to be a problem that is going to require tens of billions of dollars of research but should unlock hundreds of billions of dollars of value or more. I think that there are things like self-driving cars, which seems like it’s turning out to be pretty close to AI-complete; needing to solve a lot of different aspects of AI to be functional, which is a massive problem in terms of investment. And some of the aspects around space exploration. Disease research is still one that our government priorities. When we look at China, which does invest a lot directly in these spaces, how will that function over time. But look, in the absence of that, yeah, I do think having public spaces is a healthy part of communities. And you’re going to have creators and developers with all different motivations, even on the mobile internet and internet today, you have a lot of people who are interested in doing public-good work. Even if they’re not directly funded by the government to do that. And I think that certainly, you’re going to have a lot of that here as well. I believe there is this long-term question where, as a society, we should want a very large amount of capital and our most talented technical people working on these futuristic problems, to lead and innovate in these spaces. And I think that there probably is a little bit more of a balance of space, where some of this could come from government, but I think startups and the open-source community, and the creator economy is going to fill in a huge amount of this as well.