The Facebook presentation struck me as a vision that’s about 20-30 years out of date, just with “better” graphics.
There didn’t seem to be anything new in there and it feels detached from any reality - even a reality in which we might find ourselves in 10-20 years.
I’m generally bullish on VR/AR in the long term. But this is not it.
What also frustrates me with these types of presentations is how misleading they are about the current and near-future state of technology. Much of the general public will be totally misled by what was “demonstrated” here. Particularly once it’s been processed through the bullshit-adding filters of various news outlets who will further degrade the signal to the point where it’s almost entirely noise.
Normal people can’t easily distinguish between utterly fabricated pre-rendered nonsense which has a very low chance of coming into reality in their lifetime, and what’s actually realistically possible in the near-term future (5-10 years).
Microsoft did this with their Hololens presentation years ago. You look at the visuals being presented and you may as well be watching an episode of Star Trek. (But even that was anchored more to reality than this).
Having said that, the scripted dialogue, forced hand gestures and weird facial expressions throughout did get me wondering whether they are actually further forward than we thought, and the entire thing was presented not by humans but by a rough draft of some AI-driven avatars, which look almost real but where they haven’t sufficiently nailed the “acts like a convincing human” feature just yet.
Speaking of bullshit, in the UK that link yields me this, sadly :-(
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
Perhaps a less verbose and more honest version would be:
There didn’t seem to be anything new in there and it feels detached from any reality - even a reality in which we might find ourselves in 10-20 years.
I’m generally bullish on VR/AR in the long term. But this is not it.
What also frustrates me with these types of presentations is how misleading they are about the current and near-future state of technology. Much of the general public will be totally misled by what was “demonstrated” here. Particularly once it’s been processed through the bullshit-adding filters of various news outlets who will further degrade the signal to the point where it’s almost entirely noise.
Normal people can’t easily distinguish between utterly fabricated pre-rendered nonsense which has a very low chance of coming into reality in their lifetime, and what’s actually realistically possible in the near-term future (5-10 years).
Microsoft did this with their Hololens presentation years ago. You look at the visuals being presented and you may as well be watching an episode of Star Trek. (But even that was anchored more to reality than this).
Having said that, the scripted dialogue, forced hand gestures and weird facial expressions throughout did get me wondering whether they are actually further forward than we thought, and the entire thing was presented not by humans but by a rough draft of some AI-driven avatars, which look almost real but where they haven’t sufficiently nailed the “acts like a convincing human” feature just yet.