Mark Zuckerberg showing his ‘metaverse’ avatar during Connect 2021
Facebook
The metaverse could usher in a new era where we live more in the digital world than in reality.
AR glasses will be ubiquitous as they become necessary to shop, work, and live, just like the internet.
Experts say that turning point in the metaverse will “not be good for humanity.”
The metaverse has been peddled as a futuristic place where we all — sitting in our living rooms with goggles strapped to our noggins — can interact, buy things, date, and more in a virtual world.
But what if, in addition to being a place, the metaverse also represents something else: a point in time when we live more in the digital world than we do in the physical one?
Such a moment is a long-held theory among the augmented reality community, including Louis Rosenberg, a 30-year veteran of AR development and the CEO of Unanimous AI.
“The nomenclature aside (i.e. what you actually call this transition moment), I am absolutely certain that this point in time will come,” Rosenberg told Insider. “And it will not be good for humanity.”
Although virtual reality and AR are both key aspects of the metaverse structure, it’s AR glasses that will become ubiquitous within 10 years, replacing the cell phone as our primary means of interacting with digital content, he said.
That’s the moment when the lines between the real and digital worlds will blur more than ever before.
“Once you present a virtual object that is indistinguishable from a physical one, that’s the last step,” Rosenberg said.
FOMO will drive people into the shared virtual playland
Facebook’s Ray-Ban “Stories” smart glasses
Facebook
We’ve seen points in time like this before, Rosenberg said, like how the printing press revolutionized how we share information or the telephone how we can communicate across distances.
Fast forward to the smartphone age, and “we use our phones more times than we speak to our spouse,” Vipp Jaswal, CEO of Interpersonal Intelligence Advisory — a consulting firm that looks at human behavior across real and digital platforms — told Insider.
The metaverse will similarly usher in a new kind of technology, one that will become necessary to operate in society. We’ll date, work, live, buy and sell things, and play virtually, Rosenberg said.
“You’ll go to the store, and you won’t be able to see the prices on things” if you don’t have AR glasses, Rosenberg said.
Shaan Puri, founder of the startup Stealth and former Twitch product director, recently pondered on Twitter if the metaverse itself is the point in time and is the name given to the transition moment when the virtual landscape becomes more “real” than the natural world.
He also likened that moment to the singularity theory in the world of artificial intelligence, which posits that the time could come when AI becomes smarter than humans.
But Rosenberg said the metaverse is not the name given to the point in time. It more so marks it, since it’s an evolutionary stage where we as a species will seek socialization in this next iteration of the internet.
With that reality comes what we’ve been discussing for months: that social media’s woes will be amplified in this futuristic virtual world. Polarization, divisiveness, and misinformation will grow tenfold, and the metaverse will facture reality, experts previously told Insider.
Experts agreed that our collective push into the metaverse is worrisome for that reason, as is the reliance we will have on such a fake landscape.
“Being in this metaverse will be a bigger part of our lives than being in the outside world,” Rosenberg said. “And there are all kinds of things that are terrifying about that.”
Mark Zuckerberg showing his ‘metaverse’ avatar during Connect 2021.
Facebook
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is spending billions every year in an attempt to create “the metaverse.”
Its main competition, the company said, is from Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Epic Games, and Google.
The “metaverse” concept that Meta is pursuing is similar to online gaming worlds, with 3D avatars.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is investing $10 billion this year alone in creating “the metaverse.” In the coming years, the company expects to increase that investment.
Though no such market for a “metaverse” exists just yet, Meta is already sizing up the competition: “As we invest in the metaverse, we know that we face fierce competition from companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Snap, Sony, Roblox, Epic, and many others at every step of this journey,” the company said in a statement to Vox this week.
It’s no surprise that Meta is eyeing the biggest players in tech and video games given its goal of creating a virtual shared space, as depicted by Mark Zuckerberg in a presentation last month.
In the video, Zuckerberg laid out the company’s vision for a future where people don headsets and become virtual avatars in a virtual space shared by people around the world.
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ll be able to feel present, like we’re right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are.”
He went on to show a variety of examples of this future virtual world, with everything from virtual board games to virtual board meetings.
It’s a vision of the future that resembles modern online gaming worlds going back decades, from “Second Life” to “World of Warcraft” to VR chatroom apps. As such, it’s no surprise that Zuckerberg sees the likes of Sony, which makes PlayStation, and Microsoft, which makes Xbox, as part of the group posing “fierce competition” in the still non-existent metaverse marketplace.
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Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images
Andrew Bosworth is a key executive at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.
Bosworth will become CTO of Meta next year and will play a key role in its metaverse ambitions.
He has been at the company since 2006 and has become one of Mark Zuckerberg’s key lieutenants.
Andrew Bosworth, also known as “Boz” inside the company formerly known as Facebook, is lined up to play a key role in the tech giant’s future.
Facebook announced in October it was rebranding as Meta, a new parent company that encompasses two major businesses. The first is Facebook’s traditional business of social media, the second is Reality Labs – which Meta hopes will build out CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions of turning it into a “metaverse company.”
Here’s what you need to know about Andrew Bosworth:
Bosworth told The Los Angeles Times he resided on a horse ranch and vineyard in Santa Clara County, California.
In the 2011 interview, he said his family have lived on the ranch since 1891, and he has tattoos of California, a grizzly bear, and golden poppies tattooed on his right forearm.
Bosworth studied computer science at Harvard, where he met Mark Zuckerberg in an artificial intelligence class in 2004.
Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard dropout, pictured at the Harvard University commencement in Cambridge, MA on May 25, 2017.
David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Bosworth was a senior when Zuckerberg was a sophomore, and Zuckerberg was assigned to Bosworth.
“He didn’t attend my lessons as often as most of my students, but to be fair he was quite literally building Facebook at the time,” Bosworth told The Los Angeles Times.
Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard during his sophomore year in 2005 to focus on Facebook full-time.
Bosworth left university and briefly worked at Microsoft. He started working for Facebook in 2006.
In a 2021 interview with The Verge, Bosworth said his brief time at Microsoft taught him a lot about “professional software development and management.”
He recalled to The Verge that when he joined Facebook, there were roughly 15 engineers working at the company. Bosworth added there are only five or six employees who have been at Meta longer than he has.
Bosworth was responsible for building the Facebook’s first News Feed.
Andrew Bosworth.
GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP via Getty Images
“I built all the AI, the ranking, and we built the first, as far as I know, the first ranked content feed, and I built all the rank and the AI behind it,” Bosworth told The Verge.
“It consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me,” Bosworth told The Los Angeles Times in 2011.
Bosworth also told The Los Angeles Times that the News Feed was initially met with a backlash from users, who found it too intrusive.
“That passionate outpouring of sentiment, much of it negative, was being fueled by News Feed itself. That’s when I realized how big the opportunity was at Facebook. I would have preferred a fan group to a protest group, but the fact that people felt that passionately about the product at all was very humbling and eye-opening,” Bosworth said.
As Bosworth’s career at Facebook progressed he went on to lead teams that built products, including Facebook Messenger and Groups.
In 2012, Bosworth took what was supposed to be a six-month sabbatical from the company – but instead he took over its ads business.
In a 2015 interview with Wired, Bosworth said six months ahead of the planned sabbatical in 2012 Zuckerberg asked him to figure out a way to monetize ads on mobile.
“[Zuckerberg] was like: ‘There are at least four billion-dollar opportunities on mobile in the next six months. You can unlock one or two. And then you can go on your vacation.’ That’s an insane thing to say. But I was like: ‘Why not?'” Bosworth told Wired.
Two days before Bosworth was supposed to go on his sabbatical, Zuckerberg asked him to head up engineering for all Facebook’s advertising products, and Bosworth accepted.
Bosworth ended up taking a two-month trip and then tacked on some extra time off at the end of the year. ” I just kept taking it by halves,” he told Wired.
Bosworth ran Facebook’s ads business until 2017.
He has been running the company’s consumer hardware division – now called Reality Labs – for the last four years.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage at an Oculus developers conference in 2016.
Glenn Chapmann/AFP via Getty Images
Reality Labs has undergone many name changes, having been called simply AR/VR, then Facebook Reality Labs, and now Reality Labs.
Reality Labs has been responsible for producing Facebook’s hardware products, including the video-calling device Facebook Portal and the Oculus VR headset.
Protocol reported in July on recall documents which indicated Facebook had sold 4 million Oculus Quest 2 headsets in the US alone since its launch in September 2020.
Bosworth announced alongside the wider Meta rebrand in October that the Oculus brand will be sunsetted. From 2022, the Oculus Quest headset will be named the Meta Quest.
Reality Labs is set to be an integral part of Meta’s metaverse ambitions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows off his vision for the metaverse during Facebook’s Oculus Connect conference on October 28, 2021.
Facebook/Handout via REUTERS
When Zuckerberg announced the formation of Meta as Facebook’s new parent company in October, he said the business would be split into two strands. The first is Facebook’s Family of Apps, its traditional social media business, which encompasses its Facebook app, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The second and more metaverse-centric strand will be Reality Labs.
“From now on, we’ll be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s announcement of its rebrand.
The word metaverse is a term borrowed from science-fiction. It refers to a future version of the internet, which people access using technology such as virtual-reality and augmented-reality headsets, rather than screens on phones and laptops.
Under Bosworth’s stewardship Facebook launched a smart glasses product together with Ray-Ban.
Facebook’s Ray-Ban “Stories” smart glasses
Facebook
The $299 “Ray-Ban Stories” glasses launched in September 2021, and allow users to capture photo and video.
“As our next CTO, Boz will continue leading Facebook Reality Labs and overseeing our work in augmented reality, virtual reality and more, and as part of this transition, a few other groups will join Boz’s team as well. This is all foundational to our broader efforts helping to build the metaverse, and I’m excited about the future of this work under Boz’s leadership,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Bosworth has sometimes proved a controversial figure inside Facebook.
Facebook CTO Andrew Bosworth below a large photo of Mark Zuckerberg
Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images
Bosworth made headlines in 2018 when BuzzFeed published an internal memo he had sent around two years previously. The memo was entitled “The Ugly,” and in it, Bosworth appeared to justify any number of horrible things happening on Facebook, so long as the company continued to grow.
“The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned,” Bosworth wrote in the memo.
“That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period,” he added.
Zuckerberg denounced Bosworth’s memo after BuzzFeed broke the story.
“Boz is a talented leader who says many provocative things. This was one that most people at Facebook including myself disagreed with strongly. We’ve never believed the ends justify the means,” Zuckerberg said.
During a committee hearing in front of Irish lawmakers in 2018, head of public policy at Facebook Ireland Nimah Sweeney also said Bosworth has a “reputation for posting provocative material to get a conversation going” inside the company.
“I think a lot of us would like to go back and hit delete before he ever managed to send that,” Sweeney added.
Documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that as recently as 2020, Bosworth was still writing memos about hate on Facebook’s platform.
Insider first reported on the August 2020 memo entitled “Demand Side Problems,” which was contained in a cache of documents released by Haugen.
In the memo, Bosworth appeared to question whether it was futile for Facebook to try to address hate speech on its platforms. Bosworth also posted the memo to his personal blog in early 2021.
“As a society we don’t have a hate speech supply problem, we have a hate speech demand problem,” Bosworth wrote.
“Online platforms don’t work on the supply side because they don’t control the demand side,” he added.
Alongside writing on his personal blog, Bosworth also hosts his own podcast called “Boz to the Future.”
Andrew Bosworth’s podcast “Boz to the Future.”
Spotify/Insider
Bosworth’s technology podcast began in June 2021 and has featured appearances from fellow Facebook executive Chris Cox, as well as tech journalists Ina Fried and Casey Newton.
Facebook is working on tech that will monitor human life, the company said in a new blog post.
The idea is to build AI that sees the world as humans do, from a first-person perspective.
This AI could be used for what Facebook envisions as the future of smartglasses.
Facebook envisions a future where smartglasses “become as useful in everyday life as smartphones,” the company said in a new blog post.
In order to achieve that future, such devices will require powerful AI software that can read and respond to the world around the headset’s user. And the only way to train AI to see and hear the world like humans do is for it to experience the world like we do: from a first-person perspective.
“Next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the center of action,” the blog post said.
Facebook’s solution to this problem is a new project, titled, “Ego4D,” which will collate data from “13 universities and labs across nine countries, who collected more than 2,200 hours of first-person video in the wild, featuring over 700 participants going about their daily lives.”
The data will be open to the research community, the blog post said, but the goal of the project is clear: To create the type of AI that can power a slew of Facebook devices currently in the works.
There’s even a Facebook division, known as Reality Labs, that’s focused on research and development for the future of VR and AR tech.
That division is headed by longtime Facebook exec Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who shared images of himself in various prototypes this past week:
The company already makes a very popular virtual reality headset in the Oculus Quest 2, and it has plans to transition from VR to augment reality (AR) in the coming years.
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Think of it as what will come after the internet. It’s a virtual universe that will straddle the physical and digital worlds, allowing people to live and interact in real-time in both of them.
Digiday gave a good example: you wouldn’t have different social media profiles across various platforms. You would instead automatically be yourself when you log onto Twitter, Instagram, and other online spaces.
The metaverse concept has been somewhat niche, presiding largely in the gaming world, until Zuckerberg pushed it into the limelight this week in an interview with The Verge.
He said Facebook would evolve from a social media company into a “metaverse company.” And Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth said Monday that the company is even building out a designated executive team to oversee progress towards the metaverse vision. It’ll exist within Facebook’s virtual reality branch.
Facebook’s VR and AR technology can currently “teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences,” Bosworth said in the Facebook post. “But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.”
Zuckerberg said he’s banking on the transition to occur over the course of the next five years or so.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of chip and graphics card producer Nvidia, recently spoke to a group of journalists at the IT expo Computex about his views on ethereum’s value, how Nvidia’s products fit into the crypto ecosystem and why he thinks we’re on the cusp of creating a metaverse in an interview published by VentureBeat.
Nvidia’s graphic processing units are top-level graphic cards that also have crypto mining capabilities. Huang, a big proponent of artificial intelligence, unveiled a lower resolution graphics card at the conference that has been designed specifically for crypto mining. He also addressed the global chip shortage, Nvidia’s role in it and whether he believes the Chinese government will interfere in the development of artificial intelligence.
Here are Huang’s ten best quotes from the interview, lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
“Am I excited about proof of stake? The answer’s yes….Ethereum has established itself. It has the opportunity now to implement a second generation that carries on from the platform approach and all of the services that are built on top of it. It’s legitimate. It’s established. There’s a lot of credibility. It works well. A lot of people depend on it for DeFi and other things. This is a great time for proof of stake to come.” – on the opportunities ethereum provides and the network’s value for blockchain and crypto.
“We reduced the performance of our GPU on purpose so that if you would like to buy a GPU for gaming, you can. If you’d like to buy a GPU for crypto mining, either you can buy the CMP version, or if you really would like to use the GeForce to do it, unfortunately the performance will be reduced.” – on how Nvidia is trying to decrease graphic card prices and why they developed CMP.
“We’ll just keep working with our supply chain to inform them about the changing world of IT, so that they can be better prepared for the demand that’s coming in the future. But I believe that the areas that we’re in, the markets that we’re in, because we have very specific reasons, will have rich demand for some time to come.” – on managing the ongoing global shortage of semiconductors.
“It’s now established that ethereum is going to be quite valuable. There’s a future where the processing of these transactions can be a lot faster, and because there are so many people built on top of it now, ethereum is going to be valuable. ” – on the outlook for the ethereum network based on its scalability.
“I believe we’re right on the cusp of it. […] There will be many types of metaverses, and video games are one of them, for example. […] We’ll see this overlay, a metaverse overlay if you will, into our physical world.” – on when and how a metaverse will become real.
“You need that blockchain to have some fundamental value, and that fundamental value could be mined. Cryptocurrency is going to be here to stay. Ethereum might not be as hot as it is now. In a year’s time, it may cool down some. But I think crypto mining is here to stay.” – on the future of crypto mining and blockchain networks.
“I believe that there will be a larger market, a larger industry, more designers and creators, designing digital things in virtual reality and metaverses than there will be designing things in the physical world. […] The economy in the metaverse, the economy of Omniverse, will be larger than the economy in the physical world. Digital currency, cryptocurrency, could be used in the world of metaverses.” – on his vision for the omniverse that Nvidia is developing.
“My sense is that we’re welcome in China and we’ll continue to work hard to deserve to be welcome in China, and every other country for that matter.” – on whether the Chinese government will step in and regulate Nvidia’s work on artificial intelligence.
“One of the most important technologies that we have to build, for several of them – in the case of consumers, one of the important technologies is AR, and it’s coming along.” – on the development and accessibility of augmented reality.
“This is the largest market opportunity the IT industry has ever seen. I can understand why it inspires so many competitors. We just need to continue to do our best work and run as fast as we can.” – on the future of the graphics processing unit industry and the competition within it.
Rachael Newberry, RIoT’s program director, connecting virtually with a cohort of startups during the pandemic.
Katherine Dupree
RIoT is a nonprofit organization driving innovation and entrepreneurship in the Raleigh area.
One program, RIoT Your Reality, is a competition where teams pitch AR ideas to improve the city.
Other initiatives include an accelerator program and a data-centric stormwater management project.
This article is part of a series focused on American cities building a better tomorrow called “Advancing Cities.”
In July, six teams will demonstrate their ideas for how augmented reality can help solve some of the challenges facing Raleigh, North Carolina, and the surrounding areas.
Through the program RIoT Your Reality, the teams are examining ways to improve diversity, inclusion, and accessibility in city programs, promote workforce development, and reinvent the Raleigh Convention Center to drive economic development.
Tom Snyder.
Katherine Dupree
“It’s the intersection with government,” Tom Snyder, executive director at RIoT, a local nonprofit working to advance innovation, told Insider. “The city of Raleigh and town of Cary together posed a few problem statements that they’re looking for help on. And we’re running a challenge where people are developing new prototypes of augmented-reality applications to serve those challenges.”
RIoT Your Reality is a partnership with RIoT, the city of Raleigh, the town of Cary, Google Fiber, US Ignite, and Facebook Reality Labs. It kicked off in April with several teams pitching their AR ideas. Six were selected to receive $1,000 to build a prototype, which they’ll demo during an event on July 27. A final winner receives $40,000 and a spot in the RIoT Accelerator Program to launch a new startup.
Snyder said the goal is to create a municipal pilot project and learn how to scale a startup to assist cities beyond North Carolina.
The AR competition is just one of the ways that RIoT works to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the Raleigh area. Here’s a look at some of the organization’s other major programs.
Helping businesses create new tech jobs
RIoT was founded in 2014 as part of the larger nonprofit Wireless Research Center, located in Wake Forest, North Carolina, which works to advance wireless technology innovation.
Originally, the name was an acronym for Raleigh Internet of Things, then Regional Internet of Things. Now it just goes by RIoT.
“Our grounding thesis is that the best new jobs are created at the forefront of emerging technology,” Snyder, who helped found the organization, said. RIoT’s programs help entrepreneurs start companies and established businesses grow through new technology adoption, all of which creates new jobs.
Being headquartered in Raleigh offers advantages, Snyder said. The area is home to several top universities, including Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, which fosters a talent pipeline. Several major tech and data companies, including IBM and SAS, have a presence in the region, creating a “great diversity of industry” within the tech sector, he said.
“There are just massive industries and a really nice balance here that makes it a more attractive place for people to be,” Snyder said. “You can’t just job hop during your career, but you can industry hop successfully. And that brings fresh ideas and really makes us a strong place to live.”
RIoT has another location in Wilson, North Carolina, though its presence extends beyond the state. The organization hosts events around the country and is planning to establish new offices in Colorado and Virginia.
Enabling startups to get off the ground
One of RIoT’s programs to boost economic development, the RIoT Accelerator Program, connects entrepreneurs with partners in their industries and gives them access to prototyping tools and other resources.
RIoT Accelerator winner Michael Bender, founder and CEO of Intake, a healthcare analytics company, holding the RIoT championship belt.
Joe Bruno of Oak City Productions
The accelerator is currently on its eighth cohort. Snyder said RIoT is purposeful in supporting underrepresented groups when selecting startups to participate, and about 60% of the companies involved have been run by women, minorities, and veterans.
Since 2014, the companies participating in the accelerator have created more than 200 jobs, generated more than $100 million in revenue, and earned millions in grant and venture funding, he said.
Growing the accelerator to help more startups is one of its goals. By the end of 2021, Snyder said the accelerator will be offered in multiple cities.
To help startups prototype and experiment with ideas without having to spend money on equipment, RIoT Labs offers hardware, wireless, and software prototyping tools, including a 3D printer, electronic equipment, soldering irons, and more.
“We can provide that equipment for you to go create your new connected device, do the performance testing on the front end, do the regulatory certification testing on the back end, and get it to market,” he said.
RIoT works with government and corporate partners, including Cisco and SAS. Snyder said the organization is always on the lookout for new ones willing to support the entrepreneurial community.
“We want Raleigh to be the place that anyone in the world who wants to participate knows if I come here, I can find the partners that I need to be successful,” he said.
Making Raleigh the center of the ‘data economy’
RIoT worked with Raleigh and the surrounding communities on a data-centric stormwater management project.
Partnering with local startup GreenStream Technologies, they used water-level monitoring sensors to better understand water movement and predict when to shut down a street before it floods or dispatch emergency responders before flooding reaches emergency levels.
Snyder said Raleigh has done a good job of thinking about how to make data collected at the city level accessible – and has the potential to be the “center of excellence of the data economy.” Processing and measuring data depends on the advancement of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and automation technologies.
“We’re moving from a world where the economy was driven by the internet to now one where it’s being driven by real-time data,” he said.
Through programs like RIoT Your Reality and the water management project, Raleigh serves as a testbed to experiment with new ideas and technologies.
“When we can do that successfully, not only are we solving the city’s needs in a way that they can remain focused on their day-to-day operations, but if it’s a local company that provides for those needs, we’re creating jobs here in the community,” Snyder said.
The man in charge of the world’s biggest social network just joined the world’s buzziest new social network.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg created a username – “Zuck23” – and signed on to the new voice-chat-based. invite-only social app Clubhouse on Thursday night for an interview.
Like Tesla CEO Elon Musk before him, Zuckerberg jumped on Clubhouse to participate in “The Good Time Show,” a talk show based on Clubhouse.
Zuckerberg was on the show to discuss futuristic technology from Facebook’s Reality Labs group, which specializes in augmented reality, virtual reality, and other platforms believed to be the future of human-computer interaction.
To that end, Zuckerberg discussed the promise of AR/VR as it applies to remote work. In the next 5 to 10 years, according to Zuckerberg, half of Facebook’s staff could be working remotely on a permanent basis – regardless of global pandemics.
Perhaps more notable than what Zuckerberg said on Clubhouse was his presence on the buzzy new social networking app – Facebook is notorious for replicating key features of its rivals through Facebook and Facebook’s subsidiaries. Instagram Stories, for instance, is largely a re-creation of a similar function on Snapchat.
Aside from positive buzz, Clubhouse has been repeatedly criticized for its moderation issues that overwhelmingly impact Black people and people of color, Grit Daily reported. “On Clubhouse,” the report said, “there are no screenshots. There is no way to drag up old Clubhouse posts years later like a user might do on Twitter. There is no way to record conversations – meaning there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all. There’s no path to accountability.”
Clubhouse’s key functionality is voice-based communication: Users essentially join instanced group voice chat rooms, which other social networks don’t offer. The app is currently invite-only, but it’s expected to open up to everyone in the near future.
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Google has shut down its development of 3D painting app Tilt Brush, marking the latest in a string of virtual and augmented reality disappointments for the firm.
But on Tuesday, Google confirmed in a blog post that it would halt development of the product, instead making its source code available on code-hosting platform Github.
“As we continue to build helpful and immersive AR experiences, we want to continue supporting the artists using Tilt Brush by putting it in your hands,” the blog read. “This means open sourcing Tilt Brush, allowing everyone to learn how we built the project, and encouraging them to take it in directions that are near and dear to them.”
Google released Tilt Brush for the HTC Vive virtual reality headset in 2016, and the program later became available on Facebook-owned Oculus Rift. The program allowed users to create colourful, 3D paintings and animations.
Despite billions of dollars of investments from big tech firms, virtual reality is still struggling to break into the mainstream, and for most remains a novelty rather than a mature entertainment platform.
A few weeks ago, Patrick Hackett, one of the co-creators of Tilt Brush, confirmed he was leaving Google in order to join I-Illusions, the games studio behind popular VR title Space Pirate Trainer.
“To my #TiltBrush community: You’ve been inspiring and encouraging and wonderful and I love you,” he wrote. “I’ve made so many great friends over these years and am indebted to you forever.”
Insider approached Google for comment.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook has spoken about the potential of augmented reality in the past.
Yves Herman/Reuters
Apple is working on a VR-AR headset that is expected to be released as soon as 2022, Bloomberg reports.
The headset will be an expensive device that paves the way for more mainstream AR glasses from the iPhone company in upcoming years, according to the report.
Apple has been exploring VR and AR technology for years, and Tim Cook has described augmented reality as promising.
Apple’s first major new product since the Apple Watch will be an expensive headset designed to set the stage for augmented reality glasses, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The headset is expected to be released as soon as 2022 and will go head-to-head with other devices like Facebook’s Oculus and Sony’s PlayStation VR, sources familiar with the matter told Gurman.
The VR headset will set the stage for a thinner, sleeker pair of smart glasses that could replace the iPhone in about a decade, The Information reported last year.
Apple’s initial headset release will operate primarily as a virtual-reality device, displaying an “all-encompassing 3-D digital environment” for users to do anything from game to watch videos or simply chat, according to the report. Gurman says the first headset’s augmented-reality capabilities will likely be “more limited” as the company continues to develop the technology.
The headset will reportedly be battery operated much like Facebook’s Oculus Quest and will not require a gaming console like PlayStation’s PSVR headset, though Apple’s product is expected to be much more expensive than its competitors which below $1,000.
Apple’s first headset will likely not be a product for the masses for some time
According to Gurman, some sources say the company may sell only one of the devices daily at each of its retail locations. If that’s the case, the product would firmly be on the niche end of Apple’s product lineup, closer to the unit sales of high-end devices like the Mac Pro, which starts at $6,000.
The VR headset would be a gamble on Apple’s part into a fairly new and undeveloped technology that has yet to gain meaningful traction with mainstream consumers.
The company’s main focus in developing the headset seems to be as a prototype, leading up to an eventual pair of AR glasses – a device that would be much more mainstream, Gurman reports.
The headset faces several hurdles before it can be released
Hardware companies in the VR and AR space often talk about eventual versions of their product that will more closely resemble traditional glasses, but such a device with compelling AR and VR features is a complex undertaking that utilizes bleeding-edge tech. So far, no company has pulled it off.
There’s also the question of whether enough people will actually buy such a device. Google’s Glass product was launched in 2013 and failed just two years later. But while wearable technology for the face can be a tough sell, Facebook has begun to see promising signs with the Oculus Quest 2.
Another key part of convincing people to buy such a device is the content that runs on it. Companies like Facebook and Valve have spent many millions funding the development of VR experiences.
Apple has been known to take on similarly ambitious products that have either flopped or never reached the market, including Ping an attempt to turn iTunes into a social network, the AirPower charging mat, and Apple’s Pippin gaming console.
But Apple CEO Tim Cook is bullish on augmented-reality, and appears to be pushing Apple into new categories in recent years.
In addition to new Apple Watch models, leaning into the services business, and launching high-end Apple headphones, Apple has also reportedly been working on a self-driving electric car since 2015. The project, codenamed “Project Titan,” has faced delays, and is not expected to be released for at least five years.
Outside of entering a new frontier with technology that is still evolving, the headset also faces several hurdles before it’s ready for launch, according to Gurman. Components used in the headset reportedly include powerful chips along with high-resolution displays, as well as a fan to cool the headset down. These additions have led the headset to become heavy enough to warrant concerns of possible neck strains, according to the report.
