Post-Keynote Conversation with Michael Abrash and Andrew “Boz” Bosworth – Ryan Schultz
Yesterday at the Meta Connect 2023 event, after Mark Zuckerberg and a parade of Meta employees extolled the wonders of Meta’s products and services, there was a post-keynote conversation between Michael Abrash (Chief Scientist at Meta’s Reality Labs) and Andrew “Boz. ” Bosworth, CTO and Head of Reality Labs at Meta. Yesterday I was so busy that I didn’t have a chance to see it, but today I had some time to watch it. Here are my notes.
First of all, I’m upset that the only way to see this conversation is through Facebook. This is typical gatekeeping that Meta engages in. This means that you are forced to connect to the Facebook website without being given the option to disable the cookies that are set. At least I could have alleviated the problem to some extent by using the Facebook container plugin in the Firefox browser. I was annoyed. Trust me. If I could have found this conversation on YouTube or somewhere else, I would have seen it there!
To take another example, while Meta boldly says it embraces “open source,” it is pulling tricks like making some of its newly announced games for Meta Quest 2 and 3 exclusive to the Quest ecosystem. , for example Steam players. It’s not cool. But I digress. Let’s get back to the topic at hand: Boz and Michael’s conversation.
Michael Abrash talked about codec avatars, and said that we haven’t yet reached the point where the codec avatar tricks the brain into thinking it’s looking at a real person (perhaps because a well-designed virtual space feels “real” and not just the image it’s looking at), which many of us do This experience immerses your brain: Here’s a recent example of how quickly technology is advancing (as far as I know, it’s only in the research phase and not yet commercially available).
Michael sees Codec Avatar as a way to help the concept of the metaverse reach its full potential – a way to bring people together in a virtual space that feels completely real.
When Boz asked Michael to think about what work inspired him the most, he answered beauty pageant contestants. everything What they have worked for is important. Then Michael answers:
If I had to pick one, I would say that I’m most excited about personalized, context-optimized, ultra-low-friction Ai interfaces. The reason is that… The way humans interact with the digital world changed once, and that was Doug Engelbart, Xerox PARC, and the Mac, and we’ve been living in that world ever since. And as we move into a world where the real and the virtual freely mix, we need new ways to interact. So I think this has to be a contextualized AI approach, and making that happen is what I find most exciting. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the way everyone lives.
The meta is playing the long game here. I am confident that the research work they are doing now will dominate the virtual reality/augmented reality/mixed reality/extended reality market, and it is clear that they see AI work as a key part of that. There’s no word yet on how that will play out, but it’s very interesting to see the two talking about this in a public format (even on Facebook!).
Let us hope and pray that this “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change everyone’s way of life” does not become a corporate-run surveillance-capitalist dystopia!
This was followed by a segment called “Developer State of the Union,” which promised an in-depth look at tools, programs, and features for Meta ecosystem developers. The word “ecosystem” is interesting. so It’s much more intimate than a “walled garden”. 😉
But I’m going to stop my annoying snark for a moment, hit publish on this blog post, and just call for a day.
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