Boyz N The Metaverse
Meta Vs. Everyone
"I don't know why ... they 'trust me' ... dumb f*cks" - Mark Zuckerberg
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Mark Zuckerberg has never been a bitch! Since running Facebook out of his Harvard dorm and going toe to toe with the Winklevoss twins. He has scaled Facebook to one of the world’s greatest corporations. Rejecting a $1 billion buyout from Yahoo in 2006 with the quote, “This is kind of a formality, just a quick board meeting, it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We're obviously not going to sell here.” Imagine being 22 years old and being offered $1 billion to sell a company you built in your dorm room. That decision proved to be the correct strategy as Facebook grew into the defacto social media juggernaut that it is today. That can be chalked up to him being a great businessman, but what made him Street Certified was when he entered a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu tournament by himself, no security, and only disguised with a covid mask, then won Gold! At that point, I knew Mark Zuckerberg was “bout that action!” When Elon Musk challenged Mark to a fight… his response was? “Send Location…”, officially making him the black air forces of tech CEOs! Mark doesn’t play games. Remember to like, comment, and subscribe to help Medallion XLN create the new internet.
The best hands money can buy
Since Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his parent company from Facebook to Meta. Everyone has been anticipating the unveiling of the metaverse. As time has gone by, I think I am starting to understand the strategy for this new phase of the company. Along with maintaining Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Quest, Meta’s new phase seems to be focused on building infrastructure-scale technologies that can be integrated into business-grade applications. Anyone following Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist knows how crazy the AI models are that Meta has been releasing for free. We all know about LLAMA 2 large language model, but there is also AudioCraft for Music generation, CM3Leon for image generation, and Open Catalyst, an AI model to help further the research in material science. Very exciting innovations from Meta AI but what about the Metaverse?
The Butterscotch Varifocal and Flamera Protypes
Led by Chief Optimal Scientist at Meta, Yang Zhao, the next generation of Meta’s VR headsets are the Butterscotch and Flamera prototypes. Each headset represents a different goal for cutting-edge breakthrough technical challenges facing the metaverse. Butterscotch varifocal is a VR system focused on achieving visual clarity to closely match the human eye. It has a goal of achieving 20/20 vision while using the headset. The motors in the headset work to control the focal distance in each eye. In layman’s terms, Butterscotch is solving the eye strain and dizziness we get from using VR headsets for too long. The Flamera with its bug-eyed design is focused on realistic Mixed Reality pass-through using light fields. In standard XR headsets, the camera does not align with the eyes creating a lot of distortion and placement correction which becomes noticeable when the software tries to resolve and render various depth of fields. Meta Research Scientist Grace Kuo was quoted as saying, “By starting our headset design from scratch instead of modifying an existing design, we ended up with a camera that looks quite unique but can enable better passthrough image quality and lower latency.” The design for the Flamera is very cool to look at and evokes a cyberpunk aesthetic.
The Butterscotch Varifocal and Flamera headsets
Overall, I’m very excited about the work that Meta is doing to move the metaverse forward. Meta is doing amazing work in the realms of XR/AR/VR and AI. Now that all the hype around the metaverse has died down, Meta can innovate without the stock swinging wildly. The announcement of the Apple Vision Pro did a great job of breathing new life into the VR space. Apple is amazing at marketing, they were able to create a separate and distinct lane for themselves with their offering. Competition is great for this industry, all we need now is Google Glass 2.0 and the industry will start moving forward. As Mark Zuckerberg would scream, “Thug Life!” - no that’s Tupac, but at this point who can tell the difference?
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