Tim Sweeney stitched together an interesting vision of the future in a talk this week at the VRX virtual reality conference in San Francisco. He wants to build theMetaverse, the virtual world envisioned by Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash in 1992. That novel’s vision of a pervasive cyberspace where we live, work, and play has inspired many a startup including Second Life maker Linden Lab and Stephenson’s current employer, augmented reality glasses maker Magic Leap.
Many people have tried and failed to build the Metaverse, and I came across two new companies in the past week that are invoking the name in their own pitches. But Sweeney is unique, in that he has been a graphics wizard for the past couple of decades and he enjoys both predicting technology’s path and thinking about its ramifications.
I interviewed him about his speech after he gave it. I also bounced Sweeney’s predictions off another speaker, Tim Leland, vice president of technology management at mobile technology manufacturer Qualcomm. Sweeney told me he forgot about the Metaverse, particularly as early virtual worlds didn’t take off, but he has given it serious thought lately as VR came back.
Sweeney predicted that perfect augmented reality glasses would make TVs obsolete, as the smartglasses will deliver the equivalent of a 40-feet screen in front of your eyes. He also rattled Microsoft’s cage in calling for the platform owner to make Windows more open.
Those past comments were visible in Sweeney’s latest prognostications, and the newest predictions were wonderfully lucid. I suspect he is right in that it will take all of us, not just a single company, to make this happen.
Sweeney started close to home, nothing that the company spent tens of thousands of dollars earlier this year to create a real-time demo where a voice actress moved and spoke at the same time as a 3D-animated avatar named Senua from the upcoming Ninja Theory game Hellblade. Working with Cubic Motion, 3Lateral, and others, Epic was able to create an extremely realistic demo that showed Senua moving and speaking at the same time the voice actress did.
This kind of realistic avatar is possible because of outstanding performance of 3D graphics chips as well as realistic simulations that bring to live digital characters. Graphics technology has gotten 100,000 times better in the past twenty years.
“We are not more than several years away from having a human that is not that much different from reality,” Sweeney said. “This is going to change more over the next two years than it has over the past 20 years.”
Those digital humans were an essential part of Stephenson’s Metaverse, which is the cyberspace equivalent of our own world. But Sweeney also believes that the social part of the Metaverse is important too. He sees the beginning of this shared social environment in Oculus’ virtual reality demo of the Toy Box, where you can use avatars and touch controls to play with toys along with someone else in the same virtual reality room.
“The Oculus toy box is the beginning of a social experience,” Sweeney said. “That’s the first step. The next step is to have outward facing cameras and inward-facing cameras that pick up the movements of your face.”
When you can capture facial expressions accurately, communicating in the virtual world becomes as good as it can be in the real world. And while game developers have had a nasty time duplicating humans in video games over decades, Sweeney noted that the task at hand for the Metaverse is a lot easier because real humans will provide the realistic motions and expressions that the avatars in the Metaverse will mimic. You simply have to capture real people, not try to completely reproduce them and simulate them, Sweeney said in our interview. Sensors are delivering this to us today.
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Source: Venture Beat