meta brand facebook

Mega-roundup of Facebook Connect 2: all the news in a single place!

by Skarredghost

Hello everyone! As it is tradition of this blog, I have prepared a big fatty roundup with all the news announced at the latest Facebook Connect 2. For every piece of news, I have prepared a short summary and some links to go deeper… this way you are sure you haven’t missed any important piece of news from this important event. Are you ready?

Facebook becomes Meta (sort of)

The whole Facebook Connect has been about Meta. The event has not featured any important hardware announcement, because it was all focused on declaring the new shift of focus of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook executives have spent around 80 minutes explaining with many words, images, and videos what is the “metaverse”, why it is our future, why Facebook should invest in it, what could be Facebook’s business model in it, and how Facebook is already working on it. Zuckerberg has basically made a pitch for the press and the investors about Facebook’s new course.

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Then he has announced three pieces of news:

  • A new company called Meta will be created, and it will control all the products that before were under Facebook, that is: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Portal, Oculus, etc…
  • Meta’s products will be divided in two groups: the family of apps, that is the social media, which are the present of Meta; and the future platforms, that is AR and VR, which will be the future of Meta. Even the Quarterly Earning Calls will separate the two categories, so we will have a better look on how XR is performing;
  • Meta’s focus will be “metaverse-first”: that is, from now on, the main focus of the company will be building the metaverse. The company has stated that in 2021 it will spend $10B for the metaverse, and that in next years that expense will be even larger.

It is interesting to underline that Zuck wants to keep selling ads also in the metaverse, but he has bigger plans: he also wants to dominate the metaverse creators’ economy. He stressed many times how he wants to empower creators, and how he wants to provide free tools for content creators and cheap hardware for the users. He also explicitly talked about blockchain and NFTs. The reason is that if Facebook manages to become a big platform in the metaverse, it could take a share of all the transactions happening there: it could exploit a market worth many billions of dollars every year.

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The name “Meta” has been chosen because it means beyond, but especially (let’s be honest) because it represents the first four letters of “Metaverse”. Its logo seems a line bending to represent the infinite… but this is just how we illiterate people see it: according to Facebook blog, it is a logo that has been drawn with a Quest, and it is a logo that has to be seen in 3D and in motion because it is a logo ready for the metaverse. Mah, to me it is just a drawing of a line that a 12-year kid could make better, but I probably think this because I’m not ready for the metaverse.

The Meta symbol moving in a 3D space.

Zuck’s announcement has been reported everywhere, and this has been a very powerful endorsement for immersive technologies. Everyone with an internet connection has got to know that one of the most important companies in the world has even changed its name to focus on immersive realities and this thing called “the metaverse”. This has been huge to increase awareness on the topics we work on every day. But the problem is that many people outside our circles have misunderstood the message: some believe that it is the social media that is changing its name, others think that the “metaverse” is a closed dystopian VR world like “Ready Player One”, others believe that “metaverse” is a name invented by Facebook… my Twitter line was full of people scared about this future proposed by Zuck. We still need a lot of time and effort to educate people on what really is the metaverse and why it is a beautiful thing. We’ll get there, we have time 🙂

Zuck trying to explain what is the Metaverse at Facebook Connect

Read more about this news:

Oculus brands disappears

oculus facebook kill
I updated this image for you. Only one has survived… one and a half considering that John is a consultant (Original image by Dony Tamazone)

Facebook’s name change has had its ripple effect on all XR-related products, since now they fall directly under the Meta brand, and not under the Facebook brand anymore.

So Facebook Reality Labs will become just Reality Labs, Facebook Horizon will be Meta Horizon. And most importantly, the Oculus brand will disappear and will just become Meta: Oculus Quest will be the Meta Quest (yes, it sounds terribly, I know).

Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said that apart from some places where it will still be used, like in “Oculus Studio”, the “Oculus” brand will vanish away entirely. He says that “We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make”, but I don’t believe him at all. The Oculus brand already started being canceled away some years ago, and I already predicted years ago they would have ditched it away. And so it happened. So there was never an attachment, as there was never an attachment towards the old Oculus management (Palmer, Brendan, Nate, etc…). “Oculus” name was a problem because AR/VR is so huge that its related product should have fallen under the main brand of the company, to make it clear whose are those products. And in fact, now it happens that everything Oculus becomes Meta. It is a strategic decision that has sense, and I can understand that, but please don’t tell me that it was a difficult decision to make.

It is for me instead a very difficult decision to stand. I entered VR in 2014 after having tried an Oculus Rift DK2: it was the startup Oculus that made me love virtual reality. I have so many memories of the old Oculus products and also of the early team, which was made of people that were so natural and passionate, and that were a bit like me. Palmer wandering around in flip-flops was the emblem of those times. But now those times are gone and there is a corporate handling XR with lots of cash and an organized heartless approach. I know, this has accelerated a lot the development of immersive technologies, but inside me, I miss the old startup. Thanks for everything, Oculus.

Old oculus logo
The truth is that sometimes I miss you

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Facebook login on Quest won’t be mandatory anymore

Since Facebook doesn’t control Oculus anymore, because everything is becoming Meta, the Facebook login won’t be mandatory for “Oculus” devices anymore. Even better, all merged Oculus and Facebook accounts will be unlinked, and people will keep their purchases associated with the Oculus account. There will be solutions even for those who just had a Facebook account and not an Oculus one.

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Everything is now Meta (Screenshot of the event from Facebook)

Meta is studying new login options for Quest devices, arriving next year. I guess we will get a Meta login for Meta devices. Basically, the same as before, just with a different name. The data collection from XR headsets to offer targeted ads has to continue somehow. But it seems that Meta is also working on other broader options, and we will know about them in 2022.

My big question is: since this name change for Facebook has been in the works for a lot of months, why did they force us to use our Facebook login to then remove this requirement? Was it a way to test if it was ok to keep Facebook as the parent company or if it was better to choose a new one?

Read more about this news:

Content

beat saber 100m
Beat Saber made $100M on Quest alone… wow! (Screenshot of the event from Facebook)

Content-wise, Facebook (now Meta) has made some important announcements:

  • GTA San Andreas is coming to Oculus Quest 2. Zuck said it is a project in the works since many years, and everyone is pretty excited about it. Yes, it is a game from 2004, but entering GTA in VR will be tons of fun! What puzzles me is that Facebook has censored some slightly sexist dialogues in Resident Evil 4, and then now publishes a game where the main character can wander around shooting random people and having sex with prostitutes. It makes total sense.
  • Facebook has partnered with Vertigo Games to have 5 great games to be published on Quest 2. The first game will be After The Fall, to be published on November, 9th. Some of the other 4 will be taken from Deep Silver IP. And the best news is that these games won’t be Oculus/Meta exclusives.
  • Blade and Sorcery is coming to Oculus Quest on November 4 for $19.99 as a separate version called Blade & Sorcery: Nomad.
  • Beat Saber has reached the important milestone of $100M of revenues on Quest alone. This is an important result for a VR game and for the Quest platform. Zuck has also teased a new incoming mode… probably a way to skin your sabers, or some beautifications you can buy in the game
https://gfycat.com/kaleidoscopicdirtyilsamochadegu
  • Population One will keep hosting events to create a better community around the game
  • Meta has acquired Within, the studio behind the fitness app Supernatural. This way it is sure to control one of the best games in the VR fitness field: Meta has understood that fitness is one of the best three use cases of VR for the average consumer and wants to control it directly, without the risk of the competition acquiring the best games

Next year there will be the return of the Oculus Gaming Showcase, where we will see many more announcements about content for Quest, and we will also maybe have an update on the games that Ubisoft is building.

Read more about this news:

Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack

oculus quest 2 active pack
The Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack (Image from Upload VR)

Talking about Fitness, Meta has announced the release next year of the “Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack”, a set of accessories to better perform fitness activities on your Quest. It is comprised of grip handles for the controllers and a special facemask that makes it easier to clean the headset after you have sweat inside it.

This shows once more how Meta believes in the future of VR fitness. This is a piece of great news for us of New Technology Walkers and our fitness game HitMotion: Reloaded (try it now on App Lab!)… and also for our friends at XR Workout, Rezzil, FitXR, etc…

Read more about this news:

2D apps and WebXR apps arrive on Quest Store

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It will be possible to launch progressive web apps (PWA) directly from the Quest store without having to launch the Oculus browser. It means that 2D apps that use this paradigm will be allowed on Quest Store (if they get approved there) and App Lab. Meta is launching its own apps on the Store (Facebook and Instagram), and soon also other productivity tools like Slack, Dropbox, Monday.com, and also PlutoTV are coming. Considering that Quest supports multitasking for 2D apps, this is great to use the Quest as a tool to work: you could have Slack in one Window, and Google Doc in another, and work on a document together with your team.

Another important announcement is that also WebXR PWA will be allowed on the official store, too! This means that WebXR apps will have the same dignity of standalone ones, and this can be the first step to re-ignite a sector that has not grown much lately. Given the huge potential of WebXR and its cross-compatibility, I really believe in its future, and I am happy that Meta has taken this decision. It is also very cool that WebXR applications will be able to switch between 2D and immersive mode, something that is impossible for standalone apps on Quest. To help spread WebXR experiences (not only the PWA ones), Meta will also work on making the experience of sharing their links easier and will improve Oculus Browser to support them better.

Read more about this news:

Project Cambria

We all believed that Facebook was going to announce a new Quest 2 Pro, but it didn’t happen. And we all believed to have found what was the Quest 2 Pro in some videos in the Quest runtime… but actually, it was Project Cambria.

Zuckerberg unveiled that what was teased by all the rumors of these weeks, a headset with passthrough-AR, inside-out tracking controllers, more comfort, face, and eye-tracking, pancake optics, high display resolution, etc… is actually coming, but it won’t be a Quest, but a headset compatible with Quest content. At the moment it is just called “Project Cambria” and it will be a headset featuring high-end functionalities dedicated to prosumers. Of course, also the price will follow suit, but we don’t know what is the possible range.

Cambria is expected to ship next year. It seems that Facebook it is trying to satisfy two parts of the VR market: the idea is to get to the average consumer with Quest and to the prosumer/enterprise with Cambria. This is a smart move to dominate the market even more than now.

Read more about this news:

Oculus For Business will work on Consumer Quests

One of the most disruptive news of Connect has been the complete restructuring of Oculus For Business. Until now, companies interested in using Oculus Quest in their enterprise settings had to buy a separate version of Oculus Quest called Oculus For Business, costing $800, plus paying a yearly fee to have access to business-oriented services. The price was steep for many small companies that just wanted to buy a Quest for $300 and enjoy the advantages of virtual reality. And for price parity, companies were usually working with Pico and HTC that have always had a better approach in the B2B sector.

But now things may change: Meta will remove the Oculus For Business SKU, and everyone can just buy the consumer Quest 2 version. It will be introduced a new work-oriented login to be used alongside the consumer one, and with the work login, it will be possible to use VR apps without the same identity and data associated with the consumer user. It is not clear how this separate login functionality will work, and it is not clear how companies can have access to business-oriented services, like dedicated assistance or device management services for bulk installs. Most probably there will be a monthly fee that companies can pay to have access to these features.

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The news is massive because this means that all companies will be able to have access to a Quest starting from a price of $299, which is like HALF of the price of a Pico Neo 3, that has the same features as Quest 2. This announcement may disrupt completely the business sector, because having a great VR headset for a very cheap price may appeal to many companies. Pico and HTC still offer better services, and better guarantees on data management than a consumer device, so it has to be seen what companies will value the most.

The transition to the new business program for Quest is starting now in beta mode, and the full release should happen in 2023. I’m very curious about its consequences.

Read more about this news:

Project Nazare

Talking about augmented reality, Zuck has said that Meta is following two different approaches:

  • On one side, they are taking the small form factor of everyday glasses and see how much technology they can put in it. The first product of this approach is the Ray-Ban Stories glasses.
  • On the other side, they are taking all the features required to build AR-glasses and try to miniaturize them, to one day reach to the lightweight glasses form factor. From this second approach, the company has build a prototype called “Project Nazare”.
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Project Nazare is basically Facebook working on a device like HoloLens, and trying to make it arrive at a very small form factor: the goal is having glasses that are only 5mm thick. Nazare is just an internal prototype, and its release is still years away, according to Meta. It is very interesting that from these words, it seems that Facebook is not interested in releasing AR glasses for prosumers like Microsoft is doing with HoloLens, but it wants to enter the market with something already for consumers.

Read more about this news:

Presence Platform

Unity has built this nice demo using the Presence Platform

The best announcement for us developers has been the one of the Presence Platform, which is a set of tools to create more immersive mixed-reality experiences. This comprises:

  • Insight SDK: it offers improved passthrough capabilities, with the possibility of mixing real and virtual elements in MR experiences for Quest. It is also going to add Spatial Anchors, so that your MR experiences can remember a spatial location between different sessions;
  • Scene Understanding: a framework that understands the environment around you so that it can detect where are the walls, desks, furnitures, etc… In its first version, it will still requires the intervention of the user that defines where are the walls and the furnitures, but I guess that in the future this process will become automated;
  • Tracked keyboards: developers will be able to create productivity apps with the keyboard of the user tracked in VR;
  • Voice SDK: it will be possible to create voice-controlled applications, with voice understanding implemented thanks to Wit.AI, a service owned by Facebook
  • Facebook Avatar SDK: it is finally coming to Unity in December, so all developers will be able to integrate the latest Facebook Avatars in their applications. Unreal Engine support is coming next year
  • Interaction SDK: a set of facilities to develop applications with hands-tracking, that provides out-of-the-box tools for interacting with the UI and with objects in the scene. For instance, the virtual hands will be able to grasp objects in a natural way.
https://gfycat.com/basicshabbyaltiplanochinchillamouse

All these services are coming in the next months and I’m pretty excited about them because I am a big fan of mixed reality. In the next release of the Oculus SDK (that I guess will change its name) passthrough will exit the experimental phase, and so it will be possible to publish applications that implement it on the official Oculus Store and on App Lab.

Meta will release an experience called The World Beyond to inspire the developers about what it is possible to create with the Presence Platform

Read more about this news:

Cloud Backup

For us developers another amazing feature is coming: called “Cloud Backup”, it automatically saves on the cloud all the data related to a game, so that the same user can recover the status of a game even on another device with no effort. And since it is a feature implemented at the file system level, it comes also at no effort for the developer. This is just amazing.

Read more about this news:

Horizon lands to the home of Quest

There are some updates for the Horizon suite of social tools.

Together with Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms, there will be a new product called Horizon Home, that will substitute the home environment of Quest. Horizon Home will be your personal space in Horizon, the first thing that you see when you start your Quest. It will be social, so you can invite people there and perform simple activities like watching a movie together. In the future, it will also be possible to customize your home as you want. So… the home of Quest may reach features-parity with the one of Rift after many years.

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Horizon Workrooms is getting an update too and it will be possible to choose among different environments where to perform your meeting. Every environment will also support lightweight customizations that will let you add your own branding and posters. In the future, more customization options will be available.

Horizon Home will also feature a new home environment oriented towards productivity.

Read more about this news:

Spark AR updates

Facebook/Meta has announced some news about SparkAR, too:

  • SparkAR will improve the detection of all parts of the body of the user, adding body and hand-tracking to Spark AR Studio;
  • It will support effects triggered by specific locations in the world, and the possibility of connecting multiple AR effects across different physical locations
  • Facebook is working on new tools that Spark AR creators can use to place digital objects in the physical world and let people interact with them, realistically, with depth and occlusion. This feature should arrive in 2022 and will let people add to their scenes 3D objects, 3D texts, stickers and GIFs
  • Meta will offer a curriculum and a certification program for SparkAR, so people can certify their skills in creating AR filters (which are already a profitable market for creators)

Facebook is also creating a new app codenamed Polar that lets people who are complete novices to AR create AR filters in an easy way.

Read more about this news:

A big fund for creators

As I’ve said, Meta wants to become a dominant player in the creators’ economy and to do this, it has to attract many creators to use its tools. For this reason, it has established a new $150 million USD initiative to “train the next generation of creators building immersive educational content”. Meta also stated that it is “working with game engine developer Unity to help people gain the skills they need to create incredible AR and VR content.”

meta facebook creators economy
Meta is going to invest a lot of cash to grow its content creators’ ecosystem (Screenshot of the event from Facebook)

$150M is a good chunk of money, and it shows how Meta is fully committed to attracting creators and their content.

Read more about this news:

Michael Abrash

Michael Abrash didn’t have his usual session full of technical details and predictions for the future (not even a moment to show a picture of when he was young and looked like Napoleon Dynamite, as my friend Damo says), but he just performed a quick chat with Zuck, where it showed that the company is working on:

  • Realistic avatars of users dubbed Codec Avatars, which are constantly improving
  • Realistic hair simulation for the 3D avatars
  • Realistic clothing simulation for the avatars, with the fabric obeying to the laws of physics
  • Environment understanding with Project Aria, with the glasses trying to understand what objects you are looking at, so that to understand your intentions. So if you are looking at a lamp, and you perform a click gesture, the lamp turns on
  • EMG wristbands as input devices to write text in XR
emg meta facebook
A user writing a message using an EMG wristband (Image by Meta)

More or less, these were all things we already knew about. Hair simulation and clothing simulation were nice to see, though.

Read more about this news:

John Carmack

The god John Carmack has had his usual unscripted talk and I loved how he was very practical about the metaverse. He said that the metaverse is made of very practical technical challenges that must be solved, like the networking algorithms, the computational power of devices, UX, etc… and shouldn’t be treated just as something that we just dream of at a high-level concept like it is happening now. Also, he stated that he’s against building “abstract platforms” because a platform to be useful must be built for a practical problem to solve: only by developing something you can come out with tools that may be useful also for others. Platforms built to be general are never used in the end, because they don’t implement what the other creators actually need.

His practical approach, in a time where everyone is fluffing about a “metaverse” that no one knows how it turns out to be, is something that I loved. We must be practical, not write fluff. Do we want a stadium full of virtual people that attend a virtual concert? Cool. What networking protocol are you going to use? How do you render thousands of avatars on a device like Quest that has very limited computational power? How do you offer high-quality music through current devices? These are the technical questions to answer if we really want to build virtual concerts for the “metaverse”… otherwise, we are just selling smoke.

This is a dream… making it real is not so simple (Image by Meta)

He even said that he was against starting chasing the “metaverse” dream. And he is challenging Meta to be able to offer a Connect event in XR next year. The reason for the challenge is the one stated above: if Meta wants to build a metaverse, it must know how to handle all the technical hurdles of the metaverse, and so it has to start solving a smaller problem, like the one of hosting an event in VR. If it can’t prove to organize an event in VR, how can it build a full metaverse?

I suggest you all at least read the summary of John Carmack’s words on Ars Technica at the link below. It is a shower of reality on the metaverse.

Read more about this news:

Other news

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Other minor announced news:

  • Messenger calls arrive to Quest: you will be able to answer a voice call in Messenger from your VR devices;
  • Zuck has complained during Connect about how it is hard to be a product that lives on the platform made by others. He was clearly referring to Apple and its new recent restrictions about privacy of apps on the App Store. He even announced the name change to Meta with a “one more thing” statement, and this was clearly intended to annoy Apple people;
  • Zuck has also talked about privacy, responsible development principles, bla bla bla. He had a sad face while talking about these topics and he looked like reading a script. He was not that believable
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Mark with a very sad face talking about privacy in the metaverse (Screenshot of the event from Facebook)
  • Meta is enforcing verification on Oculus developer accounts via credit card number or phone number. Without verification it is not even possible to sideload content on your own Quest
  • New rumors talk about a smartwatch in the works by Meta, with a possible release in 2022
  • On a separate note, I suck at doing predictions for Connect: most of the things I had written didn’t come out as true

Read more about this news:

Some fun

Facebook’s announcements triggered the worldwide community, and we had lots of funny memes about it. See them here below!

And that’s it with this roundup! I hope it has been useful for you, and if it is the case, would you mind sharing it with your peers using the share buttons on this page? Thank you!

(Header image by Meta)

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