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Freeman writes:

Meta removing Facebook login requirement for Quest headsets by next year:

Last year, Facebook started requiring that new Oculus Quest users log in with their personal Facebook accounts rather than a separate Oculus account. Now, in the face of customer backlash and amid Facebook's metaverse-focused rebranding as Meta, the company says it is "working on" options for Quest users to avoid that login requirement starting next year.

"As we've focused more on work, and as we've heard feedback from the VR community more broadly, we're working on new ways to log in to Quest that won't require a Facebook account, landing sometime next year," Andrew Bosworth wrote in a Facebook post following yesterday's Connect keynote. "This is one of our highest priority areas of work internally."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

John Carmack issues some words of warning for Meta and its metaverse plans:

Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse.

"I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player—one company—winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said.

[...] Carmack's full, hour-long keynote is worth a watch for anyone who wants to get into the head of a person who has been immersed in the conceptual and practical worlds of VR and the metaverse for years now. You can also skim through a copy of Carmack's notes for the speech if you don't have the time to listen for an hour.

Previously:
Meta Removing Facebook Login Requirement for Quest Headsets by Next Year
Facebook Changing Name to "Meta"
Two From Facebook - Investing Millions in VR Internet Replacement - AI Difficulties

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

(Apologies in advance for the Facebook link)

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/04/the-first-meta-store-is-opening-in-california-in-may/

On May 9, Meta will double down on its metaverse sales pitch by... making people drive to California to sample its wares at a single physical location.

The uncreatively named Meta Store will showcase every physical product the company sells under its various branded umbrellas, particularly the Meta Quest 2 VR system (formerly Oculus Quest 2). The company's first retail store will be housed in a 1,550-square-foot space on Meta's Burlingame, California, campus, which houses a number of Meta's VR- and AR-specific development efforts, and it will allow the public to test and purchase any of Meta's physical products.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Get ready for a wave of expensive VR headsets:

Call it a summer surprise. Meta suddenly ratcheted up the entry-level price for its 2-year-old Quest 2 VR headset, jumping from $299 to $400 starting Aug. 1. A product getting more expensive two years after its release doesn't normally happen. But these aren't really normal times, and the Quest 2 was never a normal headset.

While Meta's reasoning is that the price increase helps its investment in VR and the metaverse, the Quest 2 headset was always priced artificially lower than a device like that should have cost. It's unfortunate, but it's hardly the end of the price increases for VR tech. Based on what we know about the next wave of the most-anticipated VR headsets, things are going to get a lot more expensive soon.

Meta's next headset, the expected "Quest Pro" also called Project Cambria, should be coming this fall [and] expected to cost over $800.

Apple's long-expected VR headset, now projected for a 2023 release, could vault as high as $3,000, according to reports. [...]

The "most affordable" of the three might be the PlayStation VR 2, a headset expected by the end of this year. Signs are pointing to premium pricing, though. [...]

[...] At the same time, Sag says that he sees a return of VR toward consumer headsets, versus business-focused models. "I think the PSVR will help with that even as the Quest 2 raises in price."

Has a compelling reason for the general public to get one emerged yet, or are we still quite a ways away from that?

Original Submission

John Carmack Steps Out of Meta's VR Mess

upstart writes:

John Carmack steps out of Meta's VR mess:

John Carmack is a legendary name in the tech industry, a prodigy programmer who worked on gaming milestones like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. His late interests, virtual reality and AI, are now forcing his decision to leave Meta and its very messy business outlook.

John Carmack is leaving Meta's VR business. After a decade spent trying to "move things" within Mark Zuckerberg's company, the co-creator of the FPS genre has decided to give up and pursue other interests with his own startup. Carmack's final message, however, depicts a rather troublesome situation for his former employer's business.

Meta, the ginormous corporation previously known as Facebook, is inefficient, constantly self-sabotaging and "ill prepared for the inevitable competition" to come, Carmack said in his final message to employees. The programmer left id Software in 2013 to work full-time at Oculus, a company later acquired by Facebook/Meta to become part of Facebook Reality Labs' VR efforts.

Carmack said that Quest 2, Meta's latest attempt at building and marketing a VR headset for the masses, is pretty close to what he considers the "right thing" to do if you want to make a good product. "It all could have happened a bit faster," Carmack also said, but Meta seems to be inherently inefficient, just like production code which is unable to go beyond a 5% GPU utilization rate.

Meta is not progressing at the pace it should, Carmack remarked, because the company has "only known inefficiency" and "is ill-prepared for the inevitable competition" in the VR space. Meta has a ridiculous amount of people and resources, and yet it is constantly self-sabotaging and squandering effort. It's not even "operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy," Carmack said.

upstart writes:

Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030:

[Ed note: This interview is chopped way down to fit here. Lots of good stuff in the full interview. --hubie]

Inside his multimillion-dollar manse on Highland Park's Beverly Drive, Carmack, 52, is working to achieve AGI through his startup Keen Technologies, which raised $20 million in a financing round in August from investors including Austin-based Capital Factory.

This is the "fourth major phase" of his career, Carmack says, following stints in computers and pioneering video games with Mesquite's id Software (founded in 1991), suborbital space rocketry at Mesquite-based Armadillo Aerospace (2000-2013), and virtual reality with Oculus VR, which Facebook (now Meta) acquired for $2 billion in 2014. Carmack stepped away from Oculus' CTO role in late 2019 to become consulting CTO for the VR venture, proclaiming his intention to focus on AGI. He left Meta in December to concentrate full-time on Keen.

Many are predicting stupendous, earth-shattering things will result from this, right?

I'm trying not to use the kind of hyperbole of really grand pronouncements, because I am a nuts-and-bolts person. Even with the rocketry stuff, I wasn't talking about colonizing Mars, I was talking about which bolts I'm using to hold things together. So, I don't want to do a TED talk going on and on about all the things that might be possible with plausibly cost-effective artificial general intelligence.

[...] You'll find people who can wax rhapsodic about the singularity and how everything is going to change with AGI. But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have 'universal remote employees' that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, 'I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we're going to deploy them on these jobs,' and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that's the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this.

If all we're doing is making more human-level capital and applying it to the things that we're already doing today, while you could say, 'I want to make a movie or a comic book or something like that, give me the team that I need to go do that,' and then run it on the cloud—that's kind of my vision for it.