meta vr

Report: Meta is Considering Physical Stores to Sell Its Vision of the Metaverse

November 10, 2021 From roadtovr

Meta (formerly Facebook) is not only building its next generation of AR and VR headsets, but it’s looking to jumpstart a sort of immersive internet the company believes will one day be the future of human interaction—that’s the ‘metaverse’ everyone’s talking about. And to sell that idea to the masses, the company has allegedly discussed rolling out physical stores.

A New York Times report maintains that Meta has been planning its own retail stores that aim to eventually span the world. The report cites people with knowledge of the project in addition to internal company documents shared with The New York Times.

Those documents allegedly revealed that Meta’s stores aim to let people try out its upcoming XR hardware in a “more open and connected” space which will make guests feel “curiosity, closeness,” and “welcomed”—all whilst on a “judgment free journey.”

We know marketing fluff when we hear it, however the report maintains that “serious work” was started last year, predating the Meta rebranding late last month. Whether it actually follows through with those plans is still an uncertainty. The company hasn’t substantiated any of the claims made in the report.

The company is no stranger to the challenges of getting VR headsets on neophyte noggins. It’s had pop-up events and in-store demos as far back as 2016 to prepare for the launch of the original Oculus Rift.

Opening physical stores though would be much larger step for Meta, putting it in the same retail class as Microsoft, Apple and Google; the latter just opening its first retail store this summer. It would not only need highly visible locations to broaden its push into the consumer market, it would need to be very confident in its products—emphasis on the plural.

Although the company only sells Oculus Quest 2 and has partnered to create the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses, it has a few products in the works. Last month the company unveiled its Project Cambria mixed reality headset and teased an AR headset called Project Nazare. We aren’t sure when either will be productized, but you can bet Meta will be looking to offer in-person demos when they do, since both AR and MR headsets will be entirely new territory for most people.

Meta: Facebook Facial Recognition Shut Down But May Return On-Device

November 3, 2021 From uploadvr

Meta announced it will shut down the facial recognition system used across its Facebook social media network. However, the company will likely still employ on-device facial recognition in future hardware.

In a post on the Facebook blog, VP of Artificial Intelligence Jerome Pesenti outlines that the system would not only be turned off in the coming weeks, but all associated data would also be deleted. This will “result in the deletion of more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates. ”

The system is currently used on Facebook to identify and recognize the faces of Facebook users who appear in photos on the social media network, uploaded by themselves or others. This had various uses, including suggested/automatic tagging of people in photos and an automatic alt-text generator, which used AI to form a description for the visually-impaired and identify if their Facebook friends appeared in a photo.

The decision to remove and delete the system is part of “a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication.” Pesenti says that while there are helpful applications for facial recognition systems, they also “need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole.”

While the broad system used across the Facebook platform is being shut down, Meta’s director’s still believe that there will remain “a narrow set of use cases” where facial recognition technology will be appropriate. One of these could be identity verification using an on-device facial recognition system, or potentially for driving some form of Meta’s in-development photorealisitc ‘Codec Avatars’.

Talking about on-device recognition, Pesenti had this to say:

This method of on-device facial recognition, requiring no communication of face data with an external server, is most commonly deployed today in the systems used to unlock smartphones.

We believe this has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control and transparency, and it’s an approach we’ll continue to explore as we consider how our future computing platforms and devices can best serve people’s needs.

Meta also recently announced that it will no longer require Oculus Quest headsets to be linked to a Facebook account from 2022, and existing headset owners will soon be able to unlink their Facebook account from their Quest.

This is a very important decision. We must continue having a public discussion about the societal implications of this technology. https://t.co/qs6Xj7TaG9

— Boz (@boztank) November 2, 2021

This slew of recent policy changes likely points to Meta eventually releasing a VR headset that can be unlocked with on-device facial verification and no requirement to connect or link your Facebook profile.

Meta VP of VR/AR and incoming 2022 CTO Andrew Bosworth tweeted (embedded above) that the decision to move away from broad facial recognition on Facebook is “very important” and encouraged continued discussion about the implications of emerging technologies.

You can read the full post by Jerome Pesenti here.

Zuckerberg: Meta Will Continue To Subsidize Headset Cost

November 2, 2021 From uploadvr

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave insight into the company’s current and future hardware business model at Connect 2021, indicating that the plan is to continue to sell devices at cost or with subsidies to help build a larger ecosystem with as many users as possible.

The Quest 2 starts at just $299 despite having a higher resolution, more features, and less weight than its predecessor. That entry level price, however, may just be the start for Meta’s long-term ambitions.

Back in March, Zuckerberg confirmed that the company’s business model for headsets was focused on offering a low price above everything else.

Last week at Connect 2021, Zuckerberg gave further details about Meta’s commitment to this model, now and going forward. You can read a transcription below or watch from the 43:15 mark on the video embedded above.

Most of all, I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things and holding back the entire internet economy. We’ve tried to take a different approach. We want to serve as many people as possible, which means working to make our services cost less. not more.

Our mobile apps are free. Our ads’ business model is an auction, which guarantees every business the most competitive price possible. We offer our creator and commerce tools either at cost or with modest fees to enable as much creation and commerce as possible.

And it’s worked. Billions of people love our products. We have hundreds of millions of businesses on our platform, and we have a rapidly growing ecosystem and a thriving business.

That’s the approach that we want to take to help build the metaverse too. We plan to continue to either subsidize our devices or sell them at cost to make them available to more people. We’ll continue supporting sideloading and linking to PCs, so consumers and developers have choice rather than forcing them to use the Quest Store to find apps or reach customers. And we’ll aim to offer developer and creator services with low fees in as many cases as possible. So we can maximize the overall creator economy, while recognizing that to keep investing in this future we’ll need to keep some fees higher for some period to make sure that we don’t lose too much money on this program overall.

After all, while a growing number of developers are already profitable, we expect to invest many billions of dollars for years to come before the metaverse reaches scale. Our hope though is that if we all work at it then within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce and support jobs for millions of creators.

Quest Users Unlinking Facebook Account Keep Their Purchases, Meta Confirms

October 29, 2021 From uploadvr

Oculus Quest 2 owners forced to use a Facebook account with the headset and those that merged their Oculus account with the social network will be able to unlink and retain their software purchases in the future.

The confirmation comes from incoming Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth (head of the company’s Reality Labs future-building effort). We asked Bosworth directly if we could unlink and delete our Facebook accounts from Quest and still keep our software purchases, to which he simply replied: “Yup”. This follows the announcement of a rebranding that will see Facebook’s corporate name and identity go Meta.

Once unlinked, Quest owners should even be able to delete their Facebook account and retain their VR software purchases.“From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new brand starts showing up in our products, I hope people around the world come to know the Meta brand and the future we stand for,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Founder’s Letter.

Last year Facebook revealed that “all future unreleased Oculus devices” would require a Facebook account and then released Quest 2 with the requirement.

Now, though, Zuckerberg and Bosworth seem to be steering Meta’s VR work in a different direction. We previously reported Meta Quest 2 branding will replace Oculus Quest 2 as Zuckerberg sheds the most visible elements of the team he acquired in 2014 from Brendan Iribe, Palmer Luckey, and others for $3 billion. We also reported Meta would allow the use of an “account other than your personal Facebook account,” though the wording in yesterday’s keynote was vague.

There’s still more to learn about how this will work, but the changes come as Zuckerberg recently signaled the Reality Labs effort at Meta would require continually growing investment starting with $10 billion this year.

“Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We’re still the company that designs technology around people.”

Meta starts with a headcount of nearly 70,000 and the bulk of the revenue fueling the organization comes from its legacy “family of apps” like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp. So while “the metaverse encompasses both the social experiences and future technology”, future Reality Labs are planned to sell “at cost or subsidized to make them available to more people.