Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta, took part in the first-ever Metaverse interview using photo-realistic virtual avatars, demonstrating the Metaverse’s capability for virtual communication.
Zuckerberg appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, using scans of both Fridman and Zuckerberg to create realistic avatars instead of using a live video feed. A computer model of the avatar’s faces and bodies are put into a Codec, using a headset to send an encoded version of the avatar.
The interview explored the future of AI in the metaverse, as well as the Quest 3 headset and the future of humanity.
The first of its kind interview saw Zuckerberg and Fridman discuss the capabilities of Meta’s photo-realistic avatars in a virtual environment, using headsets to place both participants in a shared virtual space that beams photo-realistic avatars instead of a live video feed.
“In addition to being photo-realistic, it’s also much more bandwidth efficient than transmitting a full video or 3D immersive video of a scene like this”, says Zuckerberg, “Most communication, when people are speaking, is not actually the words, it’s their expressions. There’s a certain realism that comes with delivering this photo-realistic experience that is really magical. This gets to the core of what the vision around virtual and augmented reality is, delivering a sense of presence as if you’re there together.”
Zuckerberg predicts that this technology could be used for a new form of hybrid meetings, blending virtual participants into real world environments. Zuckerberg continues: “The vision for this over time is not just having this be a video call. The thing you can do in the metaverse is do things where you’re physically there together and we could play games like this, have meetings like this. In the future, once you have mixed reality and augmented reality, we could have codec avatars like this and go into a meeting and have some people physically there and have some people show up in this photo-realistic form, superimposed on the physical environment. Stuff like that is going to be super powerful.”