Meta Connect 2023 and the Meta Quest 3 Mixed-Reality Headset, with Updates from the Virtual Event Livestream: Do *YOU* Want Snoop Dogg as Your Dungeon Master, or Paris Hilton as Your Detective?

UPDATE Sept. 28th, 2023: If you’re looking for a good, concise summary of the Meta Connect 2023 event, TechCrunch has you covered.

The Meta Connect 2023 virtual event will start on September 27th, 2023 (today) at 10:00 a.m. PST / noon CST / 1:00 p.m. EST / 5:00 p.m. BST. Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) will stream the event live on its website. You can also watch the stream on YouTube, Twitch, and via the official Meta page on Facebook. The event will start with a keynote by Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who is expected to officially launch the Meta Quest 3 headset, talk about its features, and give an update on where the company is planning to go with its virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and extended reality (VR/AR/MR/XR) initiatives over the next few years.

As the BBC reported yesterday, Meta is facing growing skepticism about its metaverse plans and their impact on the company’s bottom line:

Remember the metaverse?

For a while it dominated tech news. A virtual reality world that would be so immersive, so engaging, that we would want to spend part of our lives in it.

Driving the metaverse narrative was Mark Zuckerberg.

The tech billionaire was so committed that in October 2021 he changed Facebook’s name to Meta…

No one could accuse him of a lack of ambition.

But almost two years on, Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse is in trouble.

In April, he was forced to deny that he is now jettisoning the idea.

“A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse,” he told investors in April. “So I just want to say upfront that that’s not accurate.”

On Wednesday, the company holds its annual VR event called Meta Connect.

It’s a chance, perhaps, for Zuckerberg to again explain his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting its focus to an extremely unprofitable VR venture.

How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are eye-watering.

Reality Labs – which as the name suggests is Meta’s virtual and augmented reality branch – has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year.

Part of the losses reflect long-term investment. Meta wasn’t expecting short-term returns. But the worrying fact for the company is that, so far, there is very little evidence that this enormous punt will work.

I fully expect an announcement that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social VR platform, will be rolling out to non-VR/flatscreen web and mobile users. Using a Meta Quest 2 test unit purchased for the virtual reality lab project I am involved with at the University of Manitoba, I have paid several short visits to Horizon Worlds, and I am, to put it politely, not a fan. Horizon Worlds is something even worse than boring—it’s soulless. It looks and feels like it was put together by a bureaucratic committee of engineers that was given a task to do, in order to report back to the executives that they did something, but the builders had no real understanding, appreciation, or love of what social VR is and can be. To be frank, I don’t believe that expanding Horizon Worlds access to web and mobile users is gonna bring a hell of a lot more users to the platform. In my opinion, it’s a dog that needs to be taken out back and shot, to be put out of its misery. 🐕

I also briefly tried out Horizon Worlds’ corporate cousin, Horizon Workrooms, and as I have said before on this blog, I find it very hard to believe that any company would actually use this product for a real-world business purpose. In fact, Meta has commanded its employees to “fall in love with Horizon Worlds,” a sign that even their own staff don’t want to use it. (Ironically, Meta is among the many tech firms now requiring its employees to actually show up in their offices 3 days a week, or face termination. I’m quite sure that that strict little edict from HR is really, really gonna encourage more Meta employee uptake of Horizon Workrooms!) I expect some more announcements of integrations with products like Microsoft Office and Zoom, but I’m not expecting anything that is going to make corporate bean-counters sit up and say, “hey, we gotta buy a fleet of headsets, immediately!”

Like many of you, I will be watching the Meta Connect 2023 event live, and I will be updating this blogpost with news as it happens. Stay tuned!


UPDATE 9:28 p.m.: I forgot to mention that somebody—probably Mark himself—is going to proudly announce that the avatars in Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms now have legs. Yawn.

Mark Zuckerberg: Hey, look! Our avatars have legs!

Second Life: Isn’t that just adorable. Meanwhile, our avatars can look like this…:

MX123

Second Life: …and your avatars look like this:

(And yes, I know, comparing a social VR platform like Horizon Worlds to a flatscreen virtual world like Second Life, which also has a 20-year head start, is not fair. But honestly, Meta’s avatars have a long, long way to go, in my opinion. Obligatory editorial.)


UPDATE 11:28 a.m.: I’m signed in to a livestream from one of the virtual reality YouTubers I follow, Virtual Reality Oasis, which apparently is starting half an hour before the actual Meta Connect event with a bit of a pre-show, perhaps. I will probably stay on this channel, for the additional commentary by this YouTuber (there’s also a very active comment stream to follow), but I might switch to another source later on. I will be making full use of two monitors here at work on my desktop PC—one for watching the livestream, and the second for blogging on the fly!


UPDATE 11:40 a.m.: Mike’s Virtual Reality Oasis livestream has started; apparently, he is located in a “side office” near backstage or behind the scenes at the Menlo Park auditorium, where the Meta Connect event is taking place (I think I got that part right!). He and another VR expert (whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch) will be providing some colour commentary and even taking questions from the over 3,700 livestream viewers. (Unfortunately, this livestream video was marked private after the event, so I cannot link to it.)

UPDATE noon: Meta has just announced a 30-minute delay to the start of the event, which is rather disappointing. Apparently, instead of an indoor stage, this event will be taking place on an outdoor stage in Menlo Park. I will be able to view and post blog updates until around 2:00 p.m. my time (Central Standard Time), so I am only going to be able to comment on the first hour-and-a-half of Meta Connect.


UPDATE 12:18 p.m.: I’ve switched to a different livestream, this one by IGN, with almost 7,000 people watching. Virtual Reality Oasis was reporting problems with both video and audio from the Meta Connect livestream, so I’ll be switching back and forth. (I could also watch it via Facebook, but I’ll be damned if I have to set up a Facebook account just to do that! Back in 2018, I kicked Facebook to the curb, and I have zero intention of returning to its surveillance-capitalism embrace, with the sole exception of a Meta account I set up for the test unit Meta Quest 2 headset I got.)


UPDATE 12:31 p.m.: The show has finally started!

Mark starts off with the usual piffle about “the power of human connection”. 🙄 He’s talking about being in a room with a mixture of real-life humans and holographic humans and embodied AI tools. Mixed reality, smart glasses, and AI are key to what Mark calls the metaverse.

Mark introduces the Quest 3, which he calls “the first mainstream mixed-reality headset” to applause from the crowd, followed by a brief presentation of various examples of this mixed reality in a number of games and apps. Xbox cloud gaming is coming to the Quest later this year.

Augments are persistent, spatially-anchored digital objects (like digital portals and photo albums you can hang on your walls). You can double-tap on your headset to return instantly to the real world.

Now he’s talking about content, including new titles. Meta Quest 3 has twice the graphics performance of any previous headset and is 40% thinner than the Quest 2. Roblox is launching for the Quest, which is going to bring a lot of younger users to the headset!

Mark teased new Horizon content, saying that the visuals are improving. He also talked about tools for business, citing productivity and work apps. Coming soon is something called Meta Quest for Business, with integrations with apps like Office 365 (something that was previously promised). Lack of details is very frustrating!

Meta Quest 3 is shipping October 10th for US$499 (Mark slipped up and said “August 10th” LOL!).


UPDATE 12:47 p.m.: Now the talk switches to artificial intelligence, which is hardly surprising since that is where all the hype went after the previous metaverse hype cycle (which included Mark renaming his company from Facebook to Meta!). A new tool, called Emu (Expressive Media Universe) is an image-generation tool similar to DALL-E 2. You will be able to use AI chat to create stickers (wow, groundbreaking!🙄). AI editing tools will be added to Instagram next month, with a cute demo of Mark applying various textures to his dog, Beast.

(Right now Mark is just spouting AI word salad, and my eyes are rolling so hard they disappeared into my skull.)

Meta AI: your basic assistant you can talk to like a person, help you answer basic questions and requests. Based on Llama 2 large language model, through a partnership with Microsoft and Bing search. Emu: is built into Meta AI with the “/imagine” prompt built into various apps.

Max the sous-chef AI who will help you come up with a recipe, etc. Lily, the personal editor AI that can help you brainstorm and improve your writing. Lorena the travel expert AI to recommend a good national park to take the kids to. These are three of the many different types of AI chatbots Meta is dreaming up to answer queries and entertain you. Meta actually appears to have hired actors and celebrities to play these roles! (Honestly, this is kinda creeping me out.)

Oh, sweet minty Jesus, Snoop Dogg has been cast as your Dungeons & Dragons dungeonmaster. Nope, I’m out…NOBODY WANTS THIS, MARK. I never want to see that cursed image again!!! Who the fuck thought this was a great idea? Mark brought his keynote to a screeching halt as he fumbled with his cellphone to “chat” with Snoop Dogg (who I’m sure is being paid a pretty penny to give up his likeness for this ridiculous idea).

Snoop Dogg is your D&D dungeonmaster! (NOPE.)

Among the many other “experts” who signed on to be the face of a Meta AI chatbot is Paris Hilton, who role-plays your “detective” (I kid you not):

NOBODY ASKED FOR THIS, MARK!!!

Dear God, and there are plans to insert these and other AI chatbot avatars into Meta’s version of the metaverse. (I personally would pay good money to avoid any metaverse that has Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton in it, kthxbai!) And this is not the first time Paris Hilton has tried to imprint herself upon a metaverse: click here to read all about the MATERIA.ONE/Staramba Spaces metaverse debacle, which offered Paris-Hilton-themed NFT metaverse parcels. (Hulk Hogan was another celebrity involved in that particular mess, too.)


Here comes the part where Mark pays lip service to safety and security, since there are some serious user privacy concerns associated with all this new, AI-powered tech (something which Meta has notably been egregious about in the past). “I’m really optimistic about this,” says Mark, and once again, my eyes rolled so far back I was staring at my brain. Yeah, sure, Mark, I really want to have my every conversation with Detective Paris Hilton strip-mined as yet another opportunity to provide data to sell to advertisers for the next Cambridge Analytica scandal. 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 As a commenter stated on the r/technews subreddit (source):

Does anyone else think AI chatbots are just another way to harvest data about people by engaging them in conversation?


Now Mark turns to the next generation of Ray-Ban smart glasses, which I must confess look a lot like regular glasses with slightly thicker arms. These new glasses will include Meta AI, so you can bring Snoop Dogg or Paris Hilton wherever you go (shudder). Next year, a software update will make these glasses multi-modal, so you can read signs in foreign languages, for example, which sounds kinda cool.

A brief video was shown where you will be able to livestream what you see from your own glasses to others, using as an example a racecar driver who is presenting what he sees to other viewers watching on their cellphones. These new glasses are available starting Oct. 17th for US$299.


UPDATE 1:16 p.m.: Mark has wrapped up his keynote, and is passing the torch to Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who in previous years has not shied away from speaking his mind and even criticizing what he sees as some missteps the company has made. He’s talking about the ability to double-tap on the side of your Meta Quest 3 to switch seamlessly between mixed-reality and pass-through of the real world.

You will no longer have to manually set up your play boundary in the Meta Quest 3, which will automatically map the room you are in, and the objects that are in that room, when you put the headset on:

(There are some livestream skips happening now, so I might miss something.)

Okay, I am taking a break, but if I have time later on today, I will add more.

UPDATE 2:02 p.m.: Here’s an article from Variety on the new line of Meta AI chatbots, which apparently also includes Kendall Jenner/Kardashian roleplaying as your “big sis” (gag). Here’s a quote from that article:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in unveiling the new AI chatbots, said the company wanted to create AIs that have distinct personalities, opinions and interests. “This isn’t just gonna be about answering queries,” he said. “This is about entertainment and about helping you do things to connect with the people around you.”

For now, the celebrity chatbots respond in text — their avatars don’t actually speak their responses. Zuckerberg said voice for the AIs will come probably early next year.

The line-up of Meta AI celebrity chatbots includes Kendall Jenner of the Kardashian clan

UPDATE 5:44 p.m.: Wow, I thought I had been sarcastic in my remarks about these AI chatbots, but the people over at the celebrity subreddit r/Fauxmoi, are savage! Here’s just a sample of their comments (source):

Ah yes, all the people you’d regret starting a conversation with.

Lmao I hate this.

Also: “Kendall Jenner as Billie, no-BS, ride-or-die companion” 😂 So funny, coming from someone with even less personality than a robot.

It’s giving Black Mirror.

Sounds horrifying. Hopefully it flops hard enough to discourage more companies from doing shit like this.

What the hell is this? Like what is it supposed to be/do? Paris Hilton is ‘Amber’ who is your detective friend to help you solve whodunnits. So they’ve taken real people and turned them into avatars but then also they aren’t really THAT person, they’re someone else brand new who has a completely different personality? What’s even the point?
Please can someone explain??

Meta is embarrassingly out of touch with the world, in a very “hello, fellow teenagers!” kind of way…

So, as you can clearly see, I’m not the only one who thinks this is just weird. I’m left wondering how much of that $21 billion Meta Reality Labs spent this past year went to pay for all these celebrities to agree to be the faces of their chatbots. And I wonder how they’re going to feel when (as is almost inevitable) their chatbot starts to act up and spit out unacceptable or incorrect responses to user questions? What will Paris Hilton do when the chatbot who wears her face goes rogue? I’m quite sure she did not think through all the potential implications of signing away her likeness on the contract Meta dangled in front of her! It really is very Black Mirror.

UPDATE Sept. 28th, 2023 2:54 p.m.: I have gotten busy with my full-time paying job as a university librarian, so I haven’t had much of a chance to watch the rest of yesterday’s virtual event. Once I do, I expect that I will have more to comment on!

UPDATED! Visit the Metaverse Festival in Decentraland, October 21st to 24th, 2021

The Metaverse Festival is a four-day celebration of music, culture, and creativity in the blockchain-based virtual world of Decentraland (DCL), starting today and running through to October 24th, 2021. Here’s a sitemap with coordinates (you can see this in a larger size on the Metaverse Festival website):

The festival boasts an impressive lineup of over 75 performers, including 3LAU, Alison Wonderland, deadmau5, and Nina Nesbitt. You can get details on when and where to catch your favourite artist on the Decentraland events listing. A complete lineup of performers is on the Metaverse Festival website, which features a suitably trippy design:

A four-day celebration of music, culture and creativity in the virtual social world of Decentraland, the Metaverse Festival is a grand collision of light, sound and portable toilets.

It’s the first event of its kind – a fully decentralized celebration of music that offers a weird and wonderful brew of world-class headline acts, mind blowing stages, games, exclusive artist merch, collectibles and more.

So, on October 21, dress your avatar in your very best wearables and jump into an experience like no other.

And if this is your first time in the virtual world, be sure to take a look at our Festival FAQs, which explain how you can be a part of the fun.

We can’t wait to see you in the metaverse!

Gah, that word again…”decentralized”. Decentraland may be many things, but one thing it is most certainly not is decentralized. Everything runs on Decentraland’s own servers, on Decentraland’s artificially scarce and increasingly expensive virtual land (called, of course, LAND).

It just irritates the hell out of me when PR people cavalierly toss around meaningless descriptions like “a fully decentralized celebration of music”. And “the first event of its kind”? Second Life would like a word. Festivals in virtual worlds have been around for years, people.

Apparently, even Paris Hilton herself is making an appearance at Decentraland’s Metaverse Festival (hmmm, I guess she gave up on Staramba Spaces/MATERIA.ONE, another blockchain platform which I savagely reviewed here and here on my blog). God only knows what she’ll be doing up on stage (probably trying to deejay).

Anyway, that’s enough kvetching for one day. If you want to visit the Metaverse Festival, you will likely need to set up a wallet (here’s a quote taken from the Festival FAQs document):

The best way to fully enjoy the Decentraland experience is to get yourself a digital wallet. Digital wallets work as your personal account, keeping all your digital assets (such as NFTs, LAND, cryptocurrency) and in-world progress safe. And when you return to Decentraland, you just need to hit ‘connect’ and you’re in.

You can still enter Decentraland without a wallet, by signing in with your email address (via Fortmatic) or as a Guest, but you won’t have the chance to – for example – receive daily rewards and airdrops, trade in the Marketplace or log in with a different device using the same ID and avatar.

Learn how to get a wallet with our simple Beginners Guide.

Got all that? Cryptonewbies might also want to refer to the blogpost I wrote when Decentraland first opened its doors to the general public: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Get Started in Decentraland (and Some Caveats for New Users).

Have fun and enjoy the festival!

You can follow what’s going on in Decentraland via Twitter and Reddit, or catch up the latest news via their blog. You can also join their official Discord server.

UPDATE Oct. 23rd, 2021: I have been informed that Decentraland actually is decentralized; Jin (one of the 600+ members of the RyanSchultz.com Discord) shared the following paragraph from the DCL FAQ:

Does Decentraland run on top of its own blockchain?

Decentraland uses the Ethereum blockchain to store and verify information about LAND ownership and LAND content. It does not run on its own independent blockchain. Content within Decentraland is hosted and served to users via a network of community-owned content servers.

So, I stand corrected! Thanks, Jin 😉 Here’s the GitHub for the software if you want to set up your own DCL content server (and, of course, you need LAND!).

Pandemic Diary, March 5th, 2021: Broken Together

One of my favourite songs is a duet by Amy Grant and James Taylor called Don’t Try So Hard (even though I consider myself an agnostic, I still love Amy Grant’s voice and I am still a big fan of her music, which I listened to endlessly as a teenager in my church youth group days).

So, I tossed it into YouTube Music to spin up a radio station of related songs, and up pops a song from Casting Crowns, Called Broken Together. It’s actually a good song:

How I wish we could go back to simpler times
Before all our scars and all our secrets were in the light…

Maybe you and I were never meant to be complete
Could we just be broken together?
If you can bring your shattered dreams and I’ll bring mine
Could healing still be spoken and save us?
The only way we’ll last forever is broken together

And “broken together” seems like an apt two-word description of what all of us, collectively as a society, are going through with this soul-crushing, dream-deferring coronavirus pandemic. I find myself wandering through my rarely-left-behind apartment like a zombie. I pause on my way to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup, and suddenly feel the weight of painful reality come crashing down upon me again, and I lean against the wall and close my eyes for a minute, and steel myself to continue. Keep going, keep moving, keep breathing. Keep living.

The next three to six months of the pandemic are going to be hardest stretch of the marathon yet, I fear. It doesn’t help that I have little to no faith in Brian Pallister’s incompetent, pompous, and adversarial Conservative provincial government here in Manitoba, which has largely mismanaged this crisis almost from day one.

For example, take a look at this map showing the locations of vaccination clinics in two neighbouring provinces, Saskatechewan to the west, and my Manitoba to the east:

God, when you wish you were living in Saskatchewan, you really know your life is going sideways. 😉

(OK, I was joking, people. It was a joke. Check the emoji! Please put your pitchforks and your tar and feathers away. I already got almost-cancelled last week, and I have zero wish to repeat that experience.)

Sometimes my anger, verging on pure volcanic outrage, is the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, the only thing that propels me through my day. But anger is exhausting, and I am already bone tired. So sometimes—often—it slips into depression. I took three sick days from my paying job last week, something I am not proud of. But it was necessary. I need to take care of myself. I am broken.

So many of us are now feeling broken, yearning for the simpler, pre-pandemic times, and that brokenness, and that need to connect, is expressing itself in society in unexpected and weird ways. We now gather and commiserate on Clubhouse and in Twitter Spaces instead of our local community bars and coffee houses.

Last night, as I was listlessly scrolling for some much-needed socialization on Clubhouse, I came across one room with Lindsay Lohan and her acolytes, and a second room where Paris Hilton was presiding over her minions (what, is this 2006 again?!??). All we need is for Britney Spears to pop up on Clubhouse (Free Britney!) and then we’d have the Unholy Trinity riding together again…I mean, if that isn’t a sign of the impending apocalypse, what is?? (Thank God, Margaret Cho was discussing female comedians and comedy with her usual acerbic wit in another room. Some sanity still prevails.)

Everything old is new again: two-thirds of these people were in Clubhouse rooms last night (surely this must be a sign of the impending apocalypse)

Use whatever technology you can muster—Clubhouse, Twitter, FaceTime and Zoom, and yes, even social VR and virtual worlds—to maintain our connections, our togetherness, in this time of brokenness. Reach out to each other. Comfort each other.

We can be broken, together.

Stay safe and stay healthy!

MATERIA.ONE Update: Land Auctions Have Been Postponed

Staramba land auctions have been suspended

Earlier this year, I was invited to take part in the beta test of the virtual world called MATERIA.ONE, by a company named Staramba, which is better known for its 3D scanning systems and motion capturing. I signed a strict NDA (non-disclosure agreement) as part of that beta test, so I cannot share anything that I saw when I paid a visit to the platform. You can read more about the demo here on the Staramba website.

If you don’t remember, MATERIA.ONE (formerly known as Staramba Spaces) is banking heavily on celebrity endorsements, including Paris Hilton and Hulk Hogan.

It would now appear that Staramba is among the companies who have been impacted by the slower-than-anticipated consumer uptake of virtual reality. Today I got an email from the company, which stated:

We announced some time ago that we are going to launch our next auction for spaces in our VR world called MATERIA.ONE in summer 2019

As we announced in our corporate news earlier this year we need to adapt our strategy. As current market research shows, VR is growing strongly, but it is yet to become a mass market. So in line with our mission to create the best VR world for our community and to enforce our USPs against competitors, we decided to postpone development of certain product features into the near future. As a result we will also not organize another auction of virtual spaces this year or in the near future.

This does not mean we will not do any auctions in the future at all, but rather at a point in time when it makes sense for you as current and potential investor in such property. We will keep you posted.

Now, I have absolutely no idea what “USPs” stands for. From the context, it would appear to be something associated with intellectual property, perhaps? I don’t know.

Look, I am just going to come out and say it: I don’t believe that Staramba is ever going to be able to get MATERIA.ONE off the ground. Being good at 3D scanning and motion capture is one thing; building a virtual world from scratch is another. The whole idea of buying virtual parcels of land associated with celebrities was a crazy one to begin with. Why would anybody spend their hard-earned money to buy MATERIA.ONE’s cryptocurrency and then spend it on so-called “bidding rights” to virtual plots of land associated with Paris Hilton, Hulk Hogan, or some soccer star, with absolutely zero guarantee of any interaction with the actual celebrity?

I notice with amusement that over 254 spaces are still up for grabs in the Paris Hilton sector. (The last time I checked, it was 412, so obviously somebody has thought that investing in this was worthwhile. I am of the opinion that greedy crypto investors will put money into anything if they think they can make a buck off it. Hellooo, CryptoKitties?)

Given the lacklustre response, I can understand why Staramba has called a halt to the proceedings. This whole project needs a complete rethink.

If you’re interested in following the progress of MATERIA.ONE, you can visit their website, or follow them on Facebook and Instagram.