When Facebook (NASDAQ:META) founder and Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:FB) head Mark Zuckerberg met up with podcaster Lex Fridman for a virtual video podcast on Thursday, it felt like something straight out of a sci-fi novel.
Without context, viewers would have believed they were watching Lex and Mark converse in the same room with each other.
In reality, viewers were watching real-time rendered digital representations of Lex and Mark at a scale of photorealism and fidelity previously thought impossible.
The “first podcast in the metaverse” as it has now been dubbed felt like a turning point for digital technology that clearly left Fridman awestruck by the encounter.
At times he was lost for words, between calling the experience and realism “incredible”.
This is not actually Lex – Credit: YouTube/Lex Fridman
“Where am I? Where are you Mark? Where are we?” he questioned, as if his brain was malfunctioning by the sheer technical marvel he was witnessing.
“This is really the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen,” said Lex. “It feels like the future.”
How far things have come since Zuckerberg debuted the legless Horizon Worlds metaverse avatars to global ridicule.
This was the quality of Meta's avatars barely a year ago – Credit: Meta Platforms
The deep generative 3D avatars, scanned and created through Meta’s Pixel Codec Avatars research lab, are very nearly photorealistic.
An ever-so-slight sense of the uncanny valley is still there, though Lex and Mark aren’t exactly known for their overly expressive facial movements.
Zuckerberg, so it seems, knows this all too well. “I always get a lot of critique and shit for having a relatively stiff expression,” he told Lex.
But Zuckerberg explained that even this could be changed in the metaverse, where your emote and expressiveness could actually be tuned up or down to your preference.
Meta’s tech works by seeing your face and expressions and sending them “over the wire”, as Zuckerberg described it.
As impressive as the tech is, accessibility is still a long way off; not everyone can pop over to Meta’s Philadelphia lab to get their face and body scanned into the Matrix.
“The production of these scans in a very efficient way is one of the last pieces that we still need to really nail,” said Zuckerberg.
That $30 billion investment might just pay off yet.
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