Carmack: Theres a bunch that Im grumpy about in virtual reality – Ars Technica

Enlarge / "This here, this isn't really what I meant," Carmack said of last year's promise to attend this year's Meta Connect conference in the metaverse.

Meta

Carmack's vision didn't come to pass Tuesday, as a jerky and awkward Carmack avatar gave one of his signature, hour-long unscripted talks amid a deserted VR space, broadcast out as plain old 2D video on Facebook.

That set the tone for a presentation in which Carmack said that "there's a bunch that I'm grumpy about" regarding the state of Meta's current VR hardware and software. While that grumpiness was somewhat tempered with talk of recent improvements and hope for the future of virtual reality, Carmack seemed generally frustrated with the direction Meta as a whole is taking its VR efforts.

On the other hand, that's a far cry from his vision for "arena-scale support with thousands of avatars milling around... at least hundreds in large rooms... in a completely uniformly shared world." Carmack said he wants "to be present with a live audience in a virtual space where everyone who wanted to could stay afterwards and talk as long as they felt like it."

"Last year I said that I'd be disappointed if we weren't having Connect in Horizon this year... This here, this isn't really what Imeant."

Former Oculus CTO John Carmack

If you could achieve a truly virtual conference space like that, "you could just give people a free headset and still come out ahead" compared to the hassle of putting on an in-person conference, Carmack said. That kind of broadly shared world is a difficult technical challenge, Carmack said, and while Horizon "definitely can't handle it now... it's not an insurmountable [challenge]."

Carmack also mentioned some "public mockery about avatar quality earlier this year," a seeming reference to a low-detail Mark Zuckerberg avatar that went viral in August after Meta shared it online. That reaction has caused "a lot of people internally [to be] paranoid about showing anything but the highest-quality avatars."

But Carmack expressed some heavy skepticism at that push for avatar fidelity. He expressed a preference for spaces filled with a lot of low-detail avatars to Meta's push for the kind of nearly photorealistic "codec avatars" that eat up too much processor power to allow for crowded virtual rooms. "We've got a finite amount of resources on our headsets here, and cloud rendering won't save us in many cases," Carmack said. "I definitely lean towards optimizing for quantity and not quality."

And while Carmack said he was happy with the current state of Meta's avatars, he noted that his Connect presentation was taking place in a "custom build of Horizon" designed to guarantee the level of detail on his avatar never dropped. He also turned off the much-ballyhooed face-tracking features on his Quest Pro headset, because, in the software's current state, "there's at least a decent chance that I would do something very embarrassing-looking" in a very public setting.

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Carmack: Theres a bunch that Im grumpy about in virtual reality - Ars Technica