Facebook’s goal is clear, but how to achieve the goal is full of variables.
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Editor’s note: Virtual reality and augmented reality were once high expectations, and they were considered to be the next big thing after mobile. Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus for $2 billion that year brought the market’s hype of VR to a climax. It has been 5 years since Oculus’ first VR product, Rift, was launched. In these 5 years, what progress has Facebook bet on for the next platform? What’s the next step for VR and AR? PETER RUBIN reveals the secret for us. The original text was published on the “Connect” website. The title is: 5 Years After the Oculus Rift, Where Do VR and AR Go Next?
Five years after Oculus Rift was launched, where is the next step for VR and AR? (Top)
Key points:
Faceook Reality Lab has 9 teams
The augmented reality glasses Big Kahuna will be the finale of the Facebook game
Facebook’s goal is clear, but how to achieve it is full of variables
Another obstacle to Facebook’s VR and AR vision is the issue of rebuilding trust
Three, the goal is clear, the road is tortuous
When the first Quest headset went on the market, the team still united under the banner of Oculus had a new leader, and the old people have since left. In 2017, the founder, the miracle boy Palmer Luckey, left Facebook. The following year, CEO Bu BrenDan Iribe also left the company, and Nate Mitchell, vice president of product, left in 2019. At this time, Mark Zuckerberg has transferred Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who is leading the Facebook advertising and commercial platform, to lead the company’s larger AR/VR department. (Bosworth praised Michael Abrash, calling him the “flame guardian” of Facebook’s dream.)
Under Bosworth’s leadership, Facebook’s ambitions are even greater. According to Information, his department (renamed Facebook Reality Labs last year) has 9 teams, including VR, AR, portals, and devices. According to reports, as many as one-fifth of Facebook employees are working for them. Some of the results of these teams are clearly already available. The Portal series, which has been expanded to 4 products, has proven to be the favorite of home office workers (that is, everyone). Facebook’s first smart glasses, a product in cooperation with the Ray-Ban brand, is expected to be launched later this year. It is said that the launch of smart watches will not be too late. Zuckerberg also hinted that Quest will launch a future version.
Then Big Kahuna. That mysterious augmented reality glasses is the finale of the Facebook game. (Let’s forget about brain implants for now) This is a vision that Abrash has put forward at the developer conferences over the years, and the company has become more and more comfortable with discussions about it. Imagine a pair of glasses that can superimpose virtual content on the real world. This may mean simple things, such as games or keyboards, but it may also mean the lifelike incarnation that the company has been working on at the Pittsburgh Research Laboratory. Do you remember a scene in “Kingsman: The Secret Service”? There is a group of people meeting together, but in fact they are not together at all. That’s the one.
Or even better, imagine that the computer vision capabilities of these glasses (which should have surpassed Quest’s in-out tracking or Portal’s automatic framing technology for several generations) could use your way to see the world and take advantage of it. An abrupt but powerful assistant to perform things like reducing the background noise of earplugs or translating signs written in other languages. This is not only as simple as allowing you to leave your phone, it can even replace all your digital devices. (“Why do you need a TV when the glasses can show anything you want to watch anytime, anywhere?” Abrash asked me in an email.)
According to everyone’s estimation, there is still a long way to go to achieve this. Zuckerberg said: “I know that if we want to make it into oneIf you look at the platform of the future, you have to prepare for 10 to 15 years of hard work. “But that’s the idea he talked about when he first met Oculus employees. In fact, it will take us about ten years to get close to something like Abrash’s goals, and within this time we need The problem to be solved is just the most difficult of them. It is not only necessary to realize computer vision and general computing power that can present realistic AR effects in real time, but also to figure out how to reduce it to a pair. It is not all attractive. There are no glasses. Only in this way, the battery can last for a day. And it will not generate ridiculous heat. Oh, and you must be able to manipulate all virtual objects and information superimposed in the real environment, but you don’t need to pay Out the game controller.
Schroepfer said that many of these are possible: “We already have’experience proof’ on many things, but packing them all together is the real difficulty. This will lead to the possibility of changing the middle route from now to the destination.” Bosworth said: “I probably have a feeling for what will become in ten years. But I don’t know much about what will happen in those ten years. As evidence, he mentioned a breakthrough his team had just made two weeks ago. They spent a year trying to pack a certain sensor into a VR headset, but in the end they realized that this approach was too costly from the perspective of heat dissipation and computing. But later they discovered that the other technology they gave up had huge benefits. So it became the front runner. He said: “The sorting varies according to the trade-offs of size, cost, weight, and functionality, but these things are currently zero-sum games. It’s easy to remember where your North Star (target) is. Change. The largest is the middle part.”
Two weeks ago, Facebook Reality Labs held a media conference to showcase their North Star. You may have read relevant reports, if not, the magic word is “wristband”. Specifically, this is an electromyography (EMG) nerve interface wrist device, which means that it can translate the electrical signals generated by your muscles when you are moving. They hope that 10 years later, you can manipulate the interface of the AR world with a tiny finger movement (or no movement at all). The FRL conference also played a scene showing that an employee can play a simple video game without hands; that’s because the EMG device reads that the brain almost emits when he thinks of pressing the space bar. Undetectable signal. (Don’t ask, the question is: Yes, Mark Zuckerberg has tried it.)
This may not be regarded as an invasive technique in the traditional sense (we still put the brain implant away), but againRemind us that the capabilities of AR and VR depend on data. Lots of data. Where do you look, how do you look, what your face and other people’s faces are doing, etc. In virtual reality, this is the source of psychological information, which was once very attractive to companies such as Cambridge Analytica. Moreover, anonymity dies when you can recognize who the other party is only by movement patterns.
In AR, this theme is even more worrying. After you leave the party or store, you probably forget more than the details you remember. But your glasses will store everything you have seen (even more than this). As Katitza Rodriguez and Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote last year, the result could easily turn the world into a “circular prison with spoofs.” Moreover, the companies that developed these systems happened to have not gained the trust of everyone in the past. When the ethical flaws in technology such as facial recognition are still being discussed, there is even more reason to attract the attention of doubters.
This is why Facebook wants to showcase its own research results and interact with those monsters and monsters many years before putting them into its own products. Schroepfer pointed out that FRL has formulated “responsible innovation principles”, the most important of which is: never surprise everyone. He said: “The threshold we set is very high. This means that in terms of the actual working mechanism of these products and how everyone understands them, we must work very carefully. The reason why Portal has taken us so long Time, the reason is that the posture tracking algorithm must run locally on the device-because then we don’t have to explain that the reason why we upload the video to the server is for posture detection, but it will not be used anywhere else. I used this in the past. One thing I learned in five years is that waiting for you to launch the product before trying to solve the problem is too painful.”
Perhaps more painful than this is that Facebook has to fight against such a narrative: Although they may have good people doing a good job to solve the problem, the company has essentially lost its way. If all these people are about to realize this vision, if the thing that allowed Mark Zuckerberg to walk into Atman Binstock’s demo room is finally completed, then they have to achieve this in a way that can regain everyone’s trust. One goal. But that is their brand building job. Bosworth said: “There is no panacea in this world. Trust is not something that you can solve well or product specifications are excellent. You can only constantly set expectations, and then slowly continue to meet and exceed expectations to solve this problem. . There are no shortcuts in this area, and I will not take shortcuts.“
Zuckerberg said: “Now everyone has a lot of concerns about how to use our data, which is understandable. But at the same time, Facebook may have built some of the most advanced privacy for people and any company’s infrastructure. Tools and controls. We will take this very seriously, because we are in the basic stage of developing the next-generation platform. However, given the experience we have, if we do it in an open way and demonstrate throughout the process If we work, then our solutions will create a lot of value for everyone. I am very confident about this.”
Of course, we have heard this before. When they first launched Portal in 2018, it was difficult to find a reviewer who unreservedly recommended this product. But fast forward to today, and their tone is more like this: “If Facebook can alleviate the pain of remote access for the elderly, I would be happy to put all my principles aside.” The experience proved to be one thing. But the quality of the experience (plus sincere efforts to restore trust) still has a long way to go. Even if it’s just the distance between the two incarnations.
Translator: boxi.