Would love to get some conversation going around how Facebook's vision for a metaverse might interface with their need to work more meaningfully (or less) with data labelling companies, such as Appen.
This is a really good interview with Mark Zuckerberg about the metaverse to get the conversation going:
https://stratechery.com/2021/an-interview-with-mark-zuckerberg-about-the-metaverse/?mc_cid=52e6998722&mc_eid=f403306459'"There’s the vision way of looking at this, which is the high level abstract version, and then there’s just a lot of specific trade-offs that you make along the way when you’re building out these platforms. One of them that we talked about a little bit in the film is what we’re doing around building
Project Cambria, which is the
next VR headset that we’re going to release where one of the
big new features is around eye-tracking and face-tracking. The reason why we’re putting those in is because we’re really optimizing for social presence, which I think is going to be important across a lot of use cases that we talked about in the film, not just the ones that you would think about as social where you’re hanging out with someone."
"But eye tracking, it’s really important for, among other things, being able to make eye contact in VR and AR. Face tracking is valuable so that way, you can smile physically and your avatar can smile and it creates a much richer sense of presence. The reality is, is that there’s a real trade-off about including those sensors. In addition to the financial cost of including them, it also makes the device a little bit bigger, maybe it makes it a little thicker. So if you were trying to design the package with the goal of having it be as thin as possible, which other companies might do, then maybe you’d trade that off."
The key question is, what is the limiting factor for this metaverse vision to play out? Does AI/ML/data labelling play a big role? Facebook does a lot of pitching in their presentation about bringing developers on, which suggests that most of the foundational work to enable a metaverse is yet to be built.
Keen to hear thoughts,
T.E.P.
(20min delay)