That he Metaverse of Meta is being a fiasco is something that at this point no longer surprises anyone. In fact, after learning that not even within the company are they particularly enthusiastic about the idea or at least about its flagship application, Horizon Worlds, John Carmac has decided to join the negative trend to show some disappointment while calling for caution around the ambitions around the Metaverse.
John Carmack is known for being one of the co-creators of Doom and is considered the “father” of Quake, although for more than one possibly his technological contribution to the world of video games is more outstanding than the titles in which he has participated. However, for a few years he has been a consultant for the technology direction of Oculus (before he was director of technology), the virtual reality headset company that was acquired years ago by Facebook, in addition to being an executive advisor at the parent company, Meta .
As we have already said, the legendary former member of Id Software gave his opinion a few days ago at the 2022 Meta Connect Conference on the state of the Metaverse, expressing a combination of things that believes that they could have been done better with others in which he shows relative optimism about the development of applications for the Metaverse and virtual reality in general. Of course, the talk seems to have been previously recorded and has not actually been broadcast live (that is, a recorded video was broadcast live).
The funny thing is that John Carmack has given his talk using his avatar in the Metaverse, which looks much better than Mark Zuckerberg’s, although the absence of legs gives a somewhat disturbing sensation. The developer has explained the recent work in Meta and its goals around virtual reality, but not before acknowledging that some goals that were set last year have not been met.
After the introduction, Carmack delves into the technical aspects of the recent developments carried out in Meta both at the hardware and software level for virtual reality. One of the main themes was to say that developers should focus on what they can achieve now rather than their long-term goals. This sounds a bit like an acknowledgment that Meta was overambitious, but who knows.
There are also certain discrepancies. While Meta now seems to make getting more realistic avatars a priority and has a project called Codec Avatars that goes in that direction, Carmack said he preferred to focus on generating large numbers of computationally cheap avatars using affordable hardware, because price, at least for now, it aims to be a stone in the way of the expansion of the Metaverse. Apart from a Meta Quest Pro that is worth 1,700 euros, the Meta Quest 2 currently costs 450 euros. Carmack has expressed his desire to sell a virtual reality headset with a base price of $250 to contribute to the massification of the Metaversesomething that we will see if it achieves with the future Meta Quest 3, which is currently in development.
The former member of Id Software has called for tempering the ambitions around the Metaverse and the applications that may be in it, since Meta’s intention is to create an open ecosystem through its software development kit (SDK), with which it is possible to use the avatars in third-party virtual reality experiences and other applications. On the other hand, Carmac believes that the possible takeoff of the Metaverse depends on some application or game that helps it emerge in a similar way to what Doom and Quake were in their day.
We’ll see if one day the Metaverse takes off, but for now it doesn’t seem like it’s going to do so in the short term unless something comes along that makes it flashy. Titles like Fortnite and Roblox, each with its own focus, seem to be better positioned than Zuckerberg’s invention, which seems to have drowned, at least for now, in his own ambition.
