You may think you spend too much time on Facebook but its founder thinks we’ll all live in a virtual reality one day. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, has big plans for the metaverse and wants it to be so good you won’t want to leave.
Zuckerberg recently told tech podcaster Lex Fridman: “A lot of people think that the metaverse is about a place, but one definition of this is it’s about a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.”He added: “I think that’s a reasonable construct.”
In Zuckerberg’s metaverse, humans are represented by legless avatars. The billionaire recently demonstrated how individuals could create their own worlds from a completely blank canvas. He used a Facebook Live video to show how his legless avatar could enter the metaverse and start creating a whole new scenario from nothing.
To do this, he spoke to an early concept version of a new AI assistant called Builder Bot. Meta plans to spend the next five to 10 years building an immersive virtual world, including scent, touch, and sound to allow people to get lost in VR. In a recent update on future plans, the billionaire founder revealed an AI system that can be used to create fully customized worlds to your own design and is working on higher-fidelity avatars and spatial audio to make communicating easier.
In the version of metaverse currently available from Meta, humans are represented by avatars without legs, but Zuckerberg says future versions will be more realistic. But his recent comments to Fridman suggest that while they are building the metaverse, what people are using today is simply a complex virtual world.
The latest discussions around the concept of a metaverse suggest it is actually a ‘point in time rather than a virtual place. That point comes when we spend more time in the virtual world than the real world, a time when we wake up, put on the headset, and stay there for more time than we spend with the headset off – interacting, shopping, going on dates, working and going to school in the virtual world.
