[Amid the incessant hype about virtual reality and the metaverse, honest assessments and advice from an expert can be both refreshing and valuable. John Carmack illustrates this in the Ars Technica story below; the original version features additional sidebars and Carmack’s hour-long unscripted talk at Meta Connect 2022 (which is also available on YouTube). For related assessments, and some historical context, see “What happened to the virtual reality gaming revolution?,“ also from Ars Technica, and “Virtual reality will now ruin ‘The Office’” from Cracked. –Matthew
Carmack: “There’s a bunch that I’m grumpy about” in virtual reality
Lonely lecture as a VR avatar is a far cry from last year’s “thousands of people” goal.
By Kyle Orland
October 12, 2022
Last year, former Oculus CTO (and current Meta “executive advisor”) John Carmack threw down the gauntlet for Meta’s near-term metaverse plans. By the 2022 Meta Connect conference, Carmack said last October, he hoped he’d be in his headset, “walking around the [virtual] halls or walking around the stage as my avatar in front of thousands of people getting the feed across multiple platforms.”
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.
“Last year I said that I’d be disappointed if we weren’t having Connect in Horizon this year,” Carmack said by way of introduction. “This here, this isn’t really what I meant. Me being an avatar on-screen on a video for you is basically the same thing as [just] being on a video.”
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.
Pushing for quantity over quality
Take Horizon Worlds, for instance, Meta’s premiere product for socializing in the company’s version of the metaverse. On the one hand, Carmack said watching Mark Zuckerberg’s Connect presentation in a Horizon room alongside a few dozen other people Tuesday offered “some genuine benefits” over watching that same presentation on a laptop screen amid his cluttered desk.
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.”
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.
What’s the opposite of Quest Pro?
Carmack also seemed skeptical that the $1,499, feature-laden Quest Pro was the right product for Meta to be focusing on at this time. “I’ve always been clear that I’m all about the cost-effective mass-market headsets being the most important thing for us and for the adoption of VR,” Carmack said. “And Quest Pro is definitely not that…”
As a “counterpoint” to the push for the Quest Pro in the Meta offices, Carmack says he “personally still [tries] to drum up interest internally in this vision of a super cheap, super lightweight headset.” His rallying cry, he says, is a target of “$250 and 250 grams” for a headset that cuts out as many extraneous features as possible while still being usable (the Quest Pro weighs 722 grams, while the Quest 2 is 503 grams). That could help bring “super light comforts” to “more people at low-end price points.”
“We’re not building that headset today, but I keep trying,” Carmack said with some exasperation.
Carmack also cautioned that developing for the Quest Pro and then “crunching it down” for Quest 2 users could lead to some “tragically bad decisions” if you’re not testing on the cheaper headset as well. “The low-end system is going to be where all your real customers are,” he warned.
Judged on its own merits, though, Carmack said that the Quest Pro is “a very fine piece of engineering.” While the headset’s new processor offers “basically the same cores as what you get on Quest 2,” the additional RAM and improved thermal dissipation in the new headset lets it get much better performance and run at a higher clock speed.
Moving the battery to the back of the headstrap means the comfort of the Quest Pro is “broadly better” than on the Quest 2, Carmack said, especially for “less dynamic applications” where you can now sit in place “without any pressure on your face.” And while Carmack said he thought he would hate Quest Pro’s open-sided design—which allows users to see their real-world surroundings in their peripheral vision—it allows for things like referring to notes or looking at your keyboard while in the headset. “I don’t mind it as much as I thought I would,” he said.
Carmack also talked up the Quest Pro display, whose folded-over pancake lens optics means the VR image is “really clear right out to the edges,” not just in a 20- to 30-degree range in the center of the user’s view as on previous Meta headsets. That level of edge-to-edge clarity means you can now easily read text just by shifting your eyes across the screen, rather than shifting your entire head back and forth to find the clarity sweet spot, Carmack said.
On the downside, though, the clearer screen limits the effectiveness of foveated rendering techniques, which save processing time by only rendering the central part of a user’s vision at full quality. If you use those techniques on Quest Pro, it’s “more obvious that pixels are getting chunkier” in your peripheral vision, Carmack said.
And while eye tracking could theoretically help with that (by making sure you never see those chunky pixels in the center of your vision), the current 50 ms delay in figuring out where a user is actually looking makes that unworkable. “The eye can move a long ways in 50 ms,” Carmack said, “[and] we don’t have accelerometers on our eyeball” to help predict where it’s likely to go next.
Too slow, too clunky
Throughout his talk, Carmack seemed to reserve the bulk of his grumpiness for one core area of concern: “The basic usability of Quest really does need to get better.”
For instance, you currently either need to leave your Quest 2 on and plugged in to download frequent OS and app updates, or sit through a lengthy “update hell” almost every time you pick up the headset. That leads to a lot of VR sessions that are “aborted in frustration,” Carmack said (though he hoped that the Quest Pro charging dock could help with this problem in aggregate).
Carmack shared word of internal posts from Meta employees bemoaning a 20-minute, multi-reboot process to get an old headset ready for the Connect presentation that day. He also talked about tales of Quest owners who don’t even get their headsets out to show off to houseguests because of the anticipated hassle of setting everything up for a demo.
And once a headset is up and running, Carmack complained about how slow and awkward it is to connect to other people in Meta’s metaverse. “Our app startup times are slow, our transitions are glitchy,” he said, bluntly. “We need to make it a whole lot better… much, much faster to get into.”
Currently, when you invite someone into a Horizon room, “it ends up taking a minute for them to get into your space or environment,” he said. To really catch on, that process needs to be more like “responding to a text” and other quick tasks you do on your phone, Carmack said. That requires reducing the entry time from a minute to “a number of seconds,” he said.
In the near term, Carmack thinks a screen-sharing model is the best way to help achieve this. Since “people do basically everything on screens now,” Carmack said, there should be a simple, one-touch way to let users share generic screen content in Horizon (and get a view of the Horizon room back to the screen). A fast, seamless system that could do this would allow for “a lot of value to be unlocked.”
Carmack said he’ll keep pushing for that kind of fast, easy connection in the near term, “even if it’s not everything to everyone.”