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- Somebody tell me why this was never
in any of Meta's presentations.
How is me putting a phone camera
in the Quest Pro headset the most compelling demo
of VR I've seen in like the last five years?
But I have some hot takes on this whole metaverse thing
that I kept to myself for a little while,
but I think it's finally time to share them.
So buckle up, let's get into it.
So Meta's stock is down over 60% this year.
Facebook's growth has flatlined,
and their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg,
has doubled down on this commitment
to the whole Metaverse thing,
which they've continued to pour tons and tons of money into.
It's like, what is going on here?
But let's just zoom out a second
and start with some definitions.
VR is virtual reality, which is, you know,
putting a headset on and being completely immersed
in a new virtual world.
AR is augmented reality,
which is overlaying virtual things
on top of the real world.
I'm gonna use that a lot in this video.
Those two things, though,
are both particularly hard to demo.
You kind of have to try it
and use it to actually understand it and appreciate it.
So I know there's a lot of curiosity about VR,
especially lately, and it can be kind of hard to tell
if it's like, just another trend in tech,
like 3D TVs, whatever happened to those,
or if it's actually the future
that we'll all be living in like "Ready Player One."
Or maybe more like "WALL-E." Hard to tell.
Either way, there's basically one visible mega-company
that's clearly pushing all their chips in
on this definitely being our future.
And that's Meta, formally known as Facebook,
with their CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
This guy. This guy right here.
And he explained to me many times
that they really believe in this metaverse thing.
And he showed me all of this Quest Pro stuff right
before it was announced on stage.
So I got to form my opinions on it
before the slightly more cringeworthy presentation version
we've all seen.
The metaverse might have
a pretty terrible reputation already,
but let's try to take a step back,
look at it objectively like a piece of tech, shall we?
(upbeat chaotic music)
So like I said,
VR is one of those things you kind of have
to try to understand and appreciate.
But also, the spectrum of how much people care
about the metaverse is hilarious.
Like, all the way from not caring at all
and never having tried VR in their life all the way
to like serious believers,
like companies hiring a chief metaverse officer
and metaverse being in every headline
and just like a weird obsession with it.
So it can be kind of hard to give a single answer to this,
but I actually think it's pretty simple.
The internet as we have it right now
is mostly controlled by two things:
ads and devices.
And so if you control the ads,
then you're the one connecting people
to the things that they buy.
That's basically what Google does.
Like, Google's job is to know everything they possibly can
about people, and then show them ads for things,
not just on Google search results,
but all over the internet with Google AdWords.
Pretty much every company in the world
who does online advertising pays Google to do it for them.
So for as much as we talk about like the Pixel
and Google Chrome and Android on this channel,
Google is, at its core, an ads business.
And then if you control the devices people use,
then you very much have control
over what makes it to people's eyeballs.
Facebook has wanted to make a popular device,
but they don't make one.
Trust me, they've tried.
But now in 2022, as popular as Facebook is,
they have clearly saturated the market.
They've peaked.
They've begun their inevitable, very slow decline.
And so they've made their bazillions of dollars.
But now with things like the iPhone adding
that Ask App Not to Track button,
that took a multi-billion dollar chunk out
of Facebook's ads business.
Didn't really hurt Google as much
because people still go to google.com
and type in a box what they're looking for.
Google still knows a lot about people.
So bottom line.
Bottom line is Facebook is accepting that L.
You know, they dominated the early parts of the internet
and that was great,
but now the slow decline has begun,
and they're moving on to the next big thing.
And if you could look all around at all the technologies
that could maybe be the next big thing,
that one thing that keeps bubbling back up
to the surface has been VR and AR.
And so if Facebook, Meta,
can control as much of this VR future as possible,
the software, the hardware, the ads,
the things that make it to people's eyeballs,
then they will regain the control,
and the money, that they're after.
So cue them rebranding themselves to Meta
and pouring billions and billions of dollars
into that exact mission.
(upbeat futuristic music)
Okay, so this might be kind of a hot take,
but the Meta Quest Pro,
this headset, is $1,500,
and I'll explain the thinking behind that in a second,
but it is actually pretty good.
It's a pretty good,
technologically speaking, a pretty good headset.
It is much more comfortable than a lot of others I've tried.
So they've split the components now
between the displays and lenses in the front,
and speakers and buttons through the middle,
and then the battery at the back.
It is lighter than it looks,
but I think it's more about the balance and the weight.
Here you can see it feels like the balance point
is right in the middle there, which is better.
But then you put it on and you look like this.
Here you go. Boom.
And without the blockers on the side,
there is a little bit of a gap.
And you do have peripheral vision light coming
in from the sides and not the top.
Inside, there is a custom Snapdragon XR2+ processor,
256 gigs of storage, 12 gigs of RAM,
and then a slimmer set of displays and lenses.
And then the screens inside
are giving you 1,920 by 1,800 per eye
at up to 90 fps.
And it can do this decent, full-color passthrough
with the 10 sensors and cameras scattered
around the outside.
It's not the best passthrough I've ever seen,
but it does work and it lets you feel like you're
in a normal environment.
Plus, there's these new Touch Pro Controllers,
which have cameras and sensors of their own.
And they all charge on a single dock through some pins,
which you'll be doing often
because sadly the headset does just have like
a 1.5-hour battery life when unplugged.
But then there's also a suite of sensors
on the inside facing your eyes,
facing your face for face tracking.
Okay, right now I'm looking at an alien face,
but a little bit more interesting
than that is the alien face is, in real time,
showing what the headset sees my face doing.
And so every expression that I make,
every little facial movement
or the eye movements, the...
It's kind of a lot of the little things too,
like the little muscles on your face that move when you talk
and you make little microexpressions.
So if I was in (laughs) a virtual world
and trying to convey emotions to another person,
then they would see everything.
That's pretty cool.
VR and AR both worked pretty well through this headset,
but at the end of the day, it still is a pretty chunky,
it's a pretty big headset.
It doesn't fold down, either.
So if you wanna travel with it,
you need like a bag or a backpack.
This version might not be tempting to you.
Zuckerberg keeps telling me, you know,
people buy a new $2,000 machine
as their desktop computer all the time,
and this is maybe a replacement for that someday.
But this might not be tempting to you.
But theoretically, in a couple of years,
a new version of it is much, much smaller,
closer to like a regular pair of glasses.
And then even further down the road,
another version is even smaller,
maybe lightweight like Google Glass used
to be back in the day.
And then eventually it's an incredible,
actually portable piece of tech.
And so, theoretically,
if you pour enough money and talent into something,
it can become amazing,
which leads me to my next point.
(upbeat electronic music)
This is the real question here.
Every time I see a new VR headset pop up,
whether it's this like Pico Pro headset
or the Meta Quest Pro or anything like that,
the question is always like,
is this VR thing really actually gonna be the future?
Like, it's cool, the tech, and it works and everything,
but are we actually gonna be spending meaningful time
in VR at some point?
And the answer, of course,
depends on who you ask, obviously.
I feel like I've noticed
the younger the person is that you talk to,
the more likely they are to want to give VR a chance,
or to try it more often.
But if you ask Meta,
if you ask anyone in leadership at Meta,
the answer is yes, absolutely, 100%,
this is the future that we are all going
to be living in, using VR all the time.
Metaverse for sure.
Now, of course, they have to believe in that
because the whole company is a huge ship barreling
in that exact direction.
But also, watching the presentation of everything
at the Meta Connect keynote,
as miserable and awkward as it was, the more you watch,
the more it kind of crystallizes their whole plan, for me.
Basically, step one:
Think of all the things people normally do on the internet.
Step two: Make those things in VR,
and then pour tons of money into them.
And then that's kind of the whole plan.
If you get the time and you actually get
to watch through that presentation,
it happens over and over again
where basically they realized
that people do certain things in real life,
and then they want to bring that thing into VR.
Oh, you'd like to do this? Here's a VR version.
Oh, you do this other thing? Here's a VR version.
Over and over again.
And ideally, for them, anyway,
convincing people to use the VR version just will become
a matter of making the VR version really, really good.
Hopefully better than the real life version.
And that's where I think my hot take comes in,
which is that some of these VR applications
are actually scary good and starting to look better
than the non-VR version.
And for Meta,
if they can get enough of these things to be real,
then they'll be making this metaverse thing happen.
- Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen.
It's not going to happen.
- Okay, so some are easier than others, right?
Gaming, yeah. We've got some good games already in VR.
Now, we gotta work on getting more,
like a better variety of games,
better fidelity, et cetera, more immersion.
And pouring money into this ecosystem will entice developers
to rapidly improve games and make better games,
which is awesome.
But there's more to life than just games.
What else do people do all day in 2022?
Zoom calls? Okay, perfect.
Yes, they've got Zoom calls, but better.
They've built an entire virtual meeting room experience
where you can do video conferencing in VR with other people.
So, you know, if some of your friends
or coworkers don't have VR headsets, that's fine.
They'll show up as a floating video feed in the Metaverse.
But now with a bunch of people in meetings,
you can talk to the people around you,
you can do breakout meeting rooms instantly,
really good, immersive presentations, et cetera.
Now, currently, as you can tell,
these are all using these avatars.
And these, I think, are bad. They're pretty cringey.
I mean, you can customize them, of course,
with a bunch of different things.
Different hair and features
and outfits and piercings, et cetera.
Which is kind of neat, sure,
but you still end up feeling like a metaverse meeting
is just a bunch of Mii characters from Nintendo Wii.
But it's very much a stopgap because we also saw
that Meta announced this live avatar demo
that looked absolutely wild to me.
You can essentially use your phone
to take a scan of yourself,
and then the headset takes that
and puts a photorealistic version of you
into the virtual environment,
complete with that face tracking
and eye tracking and everything that we talked about before.
That is super next level.
So you can imagine now,
instead of just a Zoom call with coworkers,
a really good meeting is a bunch of people
from all over the world all in one room
with all the advantages of the eye contact
and relative audio positioning
and being able to like, lean over to the person next to you
and say something really quietly just to them.
All of this is stuff
that you can't really do in a Zoom call.
And so just replace these weird avatars
with the hyperrealistic ones
and they might be onto something.
But that's just meetings. That's not even that much time.
What else do people do?
Maybe they just work remotely, period.
Sure. Okay.
Then they'll build this whole metaverse,
this whole virtual office building for people to work in.
So if they work all over the world in different countries,
they can all collaborate in the same spaces.
But even the first thing I showed in this video,
which is just simply working on your computer,
which is a thing that many people do for many hours a day.
And the Quest Pro has native Mac support
that let me project my Mac's screen onto
these multiple, huge, virtual screens.
So you can take a huge, triple-monitor setup
wherever you go, basically.
You can just take this headset with you and do way more,
with fairly high resolution
that can again get better with time and more money.
They've poured money into Microsoft
to bring Office 365 and Word
and Excel and everything into workrooms natively.
They've poured money into Accenture
to give them like thousands and thousands of VR headsets
to get those people to use the metaverse
to work virtually all the time.
Basically, Meta can, and will,
dump a ton of money into this
because that's all they're doing right now.
There's like a common trope that like,
if you wanna make a bunch of money as a startup right now,
just make a virtual reality tech startup in some way.
And you'll eventually level up enough
to just get acquired by Meta.
It's no wonder chief metaverse officers became a thing.
That became a way
to like make it seem like you might get acquired by Meta.
But that brings us to the last thing.
♪ One more time ♪
(upbeat music)
- Really, there's only one problem
that I have with all of this,
which is that one company controlling the entire foundation
of this second-generation internet,
if you wanna call it that, this metaverse,
is a terrible idea.
So this comes down to Meta wanting
as much control over this future as possible.
Facebook was built on someone else's foundation.
They want to build the next foundation,
and then be the ones responsible
for everything that grows up on top of it:
the workrooms, the games, the experiences, everything.
So they're pretty visibly pouring
as much money into it now as possible
to get as far ahead as possible.
Now, plenty of other companies are developing
and making really cool VR stuff now
along those same lines, don't get me wrong.
There's the Pico headset I just showed you.
There are stuff from Google, stuff from,
I think we all expect in the next year
or so Apple to finally unveil their VR headset,
which I think will make Meta a little bit nervous
because Apple will for sure make sure
that's the best one for iPhone users.
But Meta has already, you know,
made so many connections and built so many technologies
and bought up so many VR companies and VR studios that,
it sucks, but it's like,
if there's any company that can be positioned
to bring this technology over the hump to make it a thing,
then it's Meta.
But the downside of that, especially this company,
having possibly that much control over people
and over the future of the internet,
and possibly doing crazy things like using eye tracking
to make sure you see certain ads,
is way too much for me to wanna root for it at all.
I've said it before, but when companies truly compete,
that is actually when we win.
When there's actually real incentive to get better
because competition makes them better,
that's when we get better stuff.
But man, Mark's metaverse money might make
the meta thing much more mainstream, or maybe not.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys later. Peace.