Mark Zuckerberg insists on transforming with new, hyper-realistic avatars

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t forgotten about the transformation. This week the Meta leader introduced new virtual reality avatars, which use scanning technology Building 3D models of the user’s face. The result is impressively realistic.

“I think it’s really magical,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Lex Friedman Show, published Thursday. “This gets to the core of the vision of virtual and augmented reality, which is to provide a sense of presence as if you are there with the other person, no matter where you are in the world,” the Facebook founder commented.

The interview was not conducted face to face. Or yes, but no. The two were hundreds of kilometers away. “But it’s like we’re in the same room,” an emotional Friedman insisted several times. The video template swaps real images of both with new avatars, which is part of the project Pixel coding avatars Launched by Meta in 2021.

Zuckerberg resumes discussion of the metaverse Right after Meta Connect 2023. During the multi-day event, the company introduced Meta Quest 3 — its mixed-reality headset — and other news about artificial intelligence, a technology that has at times cooled Zuckerberg’s insistence on transformation.

The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 set the trend for major tech companies, including Meta. But the transformation, in and of itself, no longer generates excitement. Last year, Meta recorded operating losses of approx $13.7 billion at Reality Labs. Development department in your virtual world.

The project generated so much disbelief that one of the company’s shareholders asked Zuckerberg, in a public letter, to reduce the investment. “Mita needs to get back in shape and focus,” the letter, published in October 2022, said.

Zuckerberg revealed his first avatar for the metaverse in February of last year. Instantly, it became a meme. He was a caricature of himself, In front of a virtual version of the Eiffel Tower. Easy joke on social networks. Since then, other versions have been made that attempt to improve on this first attempt.

One Meta Graphic artist even said they designed nearly 40 versions of Zuckerberg’s face in 4 weeks, before Meta Connect in 2022. But the result wasn’t much different.

Zuckerberg explained that during the interview with Friedman, they both had 3D scans of their faces. “Instead of having our avatars be cartoony and instead of streaming a video, what we did was scan ourselves and a lot of different expressions,” he said.

From there, they built computer models for each of them. In addition to being very realistic, it is more efficient, Compared to the bandwidth required to stream full video or immersive 3D video. While wearing the Quest Pro, Zuckerberg added that the system, “When you put the helmet on your head, it sees your face, it sees your facial expressions, and it can basically send an encrypted version of what you’re supposed to look like over the cables.”