Tech YouTuber Lex Fridman has interviewed Meta Platforms Inc.’s META CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, in the metaverse, and it prompted a surprised and somewhat confused reaction from Jimmy Donaldson, popularly known as MrBeast.
What Happened: In a first-of-its-kind interview shared on Thursday, Fridman and Zuckerberg didn’t meet in person but talked in a digital world called the “metaverse.”
The tech duo wore their headsets and entered into the digital realm from their respective places and interacted via their “codec avatars,” which at first glance looked far more advanced than the previous cartoon-ish metaverse avatars, which gained massive trolling for the company and the Meta CEO himself.
Maybe this is why MrBeast was also surprised.
Zuckerberg explained that they made these avatars by scanning their faces. Those scans were condensed into a codec, which made it easy to send their photorealistic avatars over the internet.
During this conversation, Fridman noticed that these avatars looked very human, with all their imperfections like freckles and wrinkles. The Meta CEO also highlighted that they tried to capture human emotion’s intricacies, including the eyes’ expressive power.
According to Zuckerberg, they intended to replicate the subtleties of non-verbal communication in the metaverse.
While at the moment, there are only a handful of people who are testing these photorealistic code avatars, and it takes a lot of time and resources to handle the scans and convert them into the codec, Zuckerberg envisions a future where it would be easier for people to create their avatars using just a smartphone.
Why It’s Important: Last August, Zuckerberg was ridiculed for the quality of metaverse avatar’s graphics after he posted a screenshot of it on Facebook. Users compared the avatars with the video game 1996’s Quake and Second Life 2007.
Zuckerberg posted a second image days later showing a more sophisticated avatar but still became the subject of online memes and trolls.
For the unversed, on Wednesday, Meta launched Quest 3, the latest addition to its VR headset lineup. The announcement came amid a mounting rivalry between the tech giant and Apple Inc. AAPL, which is expected to release its first-generation mixed reality headset, Vision Pro, for sale in early 2024.
Image source – Shutterstock
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