META'S NEXT REALITY: META CONNECT

E83 META'S NEXT REALITY_ META CONNECT

Transcript

Dalton Anderson (00:00.504) Welcome to Venture Step podcast, we discuss entrepreneurship and trends and the occasional book review. Recently, Metta had their Metta Connect where they discussed the next steps of products and vision for the Metaverse and Meta going forward. And there was a couple things that did go well and a couple of things that didn't. And today in this episode, we're going to be touching on the things that I think Metta did great.

and some of the stuff that didn't go so well. But in my opinion, it's a little bit different, right? It's nuanced where you're pushing the limits of technology, live demos. I give them a lot more credit than I gave Google because I didn't like Google show at all. So I think it was, was well done. Was there mishaps? Of course. But when you're doing anything live, these things happen. But in this episode,

We're going to touch on some of the things that I think are important. I'm not going to walk through the one hour and 40 minute video. Normally I got to talk about all the specs. If you want a spec video, then there's great, great people out there that are way better than Oliver B at any of those things. That's not my mojo. I think my mojo is providing insight on where I think things might go or my opinion on how things went. So.

We just start off with...

I think people's opinion would be like the star of the show would be the Quest 4. And the Quest 4 has all these amazing, amazing improvements, Like their lenses are smaller, the resolution that they're able to fit in each eye is closer to 4K an eye instead of 4K total, which was very confusing.

Dalton Anderson (01:59.342) because when you're buying it, they say 4K and you think it's 4K resolution, but it's 2K, a little bit less than 2K on each eye. And it was like 3,800 total. So it wasn't even 4K all the way. And then it was in different eyes. Did not jive with that at all. But what I do jive with is that they're making improvements, right?

the headset's lighter, it's better. mean, it's just overall better. mean, the technology has improved immensely since the last Quest and I have my lovely Quest.

I in my closet and I like to use it sometimes. I mean, it's a cool thing. I don't know, I don't know. Like besides watching TV and doing different things on the Quest, I'm not really much of a Quest gamer, right? I tried some Quest games, never got into it, but I did like painting or I enjoyed...

watching TV-ish. What I think was cool is to watch a movie in the Quest, where you put it in the movie theater mode and it's very immersive. And once you do that, you're like, wow, okay, now we're cooking here, like we're onto something. And during this connect, they had discussed that they're releasing

a

Dalton Anderson (03:36.344) Horizon TV, they're releasing Horizon TV and it's coming with Disney +, Hulu, ESPN, and they mentioned some horror film, film company, and Universal Studios.

And so there's stuff coming to this.

TV platform within Quest. And this platform is going to be providing what they're talking about is now it's getting to the point where it's almost a movie theater like experience without the sound piece, of course, in your house. So you have this professional setup that you could just have at any time on a whim, just put it on your face.

which I think is really cool. And so I thought that was probably one of the key keynotes there where I was like, I could see the vision there. I could see how that makes sense if it's super easy for people to watch some movies. I think my main issue with Quest is like it's immersive or non immersive depending on what you're doing. Like it's mixed reality or virtual reality. And if you don't know what that means, just mixed reality is where they, whatever you

wherever place you're at, there's stuff overlaid on top of it or like interacts with your reality. Like there's games that use your place, like 3D scan your place, and then you map it all out with the 3D scans. It accepts your room or your area. And then you play a game within your area over like your reality, which is pretty neat.

Dalton Anderson (05:24.575) and it interact, it's interactive and it affects like your walls, your roofs, your floor, objects in your house, whatever. And then there's virtual reality, which is fully immersed. You're fully immersed in a different reality, hence virtual reality. So those are the two things. But I think the main issue with both of those is no one can really see you. Like no one knows what's going on. Like you don't know what your friend sees and how cool it is and funny.

are options where you can Bluetooth set up, like there's like Bluetooth connect where you set up your VR headset to your TV or whatever device you have that connects and other people could watch you, but it commonly disconnects and it doesn't necessarily work as well. Like there's a lag time because you're transmitting everything from the VR headset to the TV and then people are looking at it.

And so there's quite a bit of lag time on what you see and what other people see. Not too much, but it's definitely noticeable.

Dalton Anderson (06:33.739) But I'm not here to harp on the quest, right? I think the main issue that I was trying to get at is it's immersive for one person but not for multiple people. And I don't have four quests lying around where we get beers with my buddies. I'm like, all right guys, let's head home, let's head to my house, let's go get on the quests. It's not the same thing as getting on Xbox with your friends or PC or whatever. Whereas, I mean from my perspective,

like this casual gaming thing is more of a social experience. And I don't feel that at the moment these VR headsets enhance the social experience.

appreciates.

Maybe it's a, what's the counting term when they take all the depreciation?

not straight line.

Dalton Anderson (07:30.497) licking on it, but you know what I mean. It's just like the experience is not as good, 100%, without a doubt. All right, but that being said, it's gonna be sick. And then there was the announcement of new.

new products and features for meta ray bands and just meta glasses in general.

And so I think the main thing that went wrong on this one is

Well, everything's alive and...

Dalton Anderson (08:17.341) it didn't seem like they had a backup plan in place where they just moved on. I have seen some live demos from Google where things sometimes just didn't work live demo and they had a backup like already already in place. Like if this doesn't work, then you know, we'll do this. And I could get the reason why maybe they didn't do it was because they felt so confident that it would work. They tried it so many times, tested it.

that they were confident that I was just gonna work 100%. These live demos, things like this happen. I remember one time I was presenting to a high up executive at my company and I was telling them about these different issues that we were having and I was demoing something to them and something that would always work, like a whole team of people are using it, randomly broke live demo and I had to pivot live demo. But you know what I did?

backup ready just in case that happened because these things happen during live demos. I can't explain it. Like your code would work. It's already been ran like 400,000 times by users, your system, you, and then you get in a live demo and it randomly breaks. I can't explain it. It's referred to as the demo gods. So let me share my screen and I'll show you what I'm talking about. So I'm to play a little clip from the keynote.

Let's see, this is right one. So in this clip, they're gonna be talking about this live AI that they're rolling out in an update. So I'm gonna share, I'm sharing my screen, you can see it now. But basically, it's a failed demo and you're about to find out why.

Roll the clip.

Dalton Anderson (10:23.374) Are you serious? You just got an ad?

Dalton Anderson (10:38.638) This is conversation focused. I'm, oh, sorry. It's live AI. It's like 30 seconds forward in the video, my bad. So I meant if you guys wanna pull off to the side, close your eyes, lean back your seat. This is your moment right now. Minute 40 and 32 seconds.

Dalton Anderson (12:19.309) So this live AI did not work alive. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? I think pushing these things out and doing these live demos builds a lot more trust than it does these recorded scripted videos that you'll get from Apple. Like Apple never does a live demo. These things that you see are these pre-scripted

Dalton Anderson (12:51.711) everything is polished, there's no character to it, nothing's spontaneous, nothing's on the fly. It's never gonna be the point where Steve Jobs whips an apple out of his pants and says, here's the new way that we're gonna be using Compute. It's in your phone, it's in your hands, you can touch the screen. It's not that vibe, it really isn't. And Meta as an old company, Meta's

quite old nowadays. Like it's not crazy old, but for tech in the way that they have dominated for so long, like you could become complacent. They are innovating and not everyone agrees with the pursuits that they're taking, but I think that their investments are slowly paying off on the metaverse. I really do think that the metaverse would be like probably one of the places that you would go for a lot of things.

If you wanted to go to school, you could maybe go to school in the metaverse, learn things. Some of these apps that they have where you can learn new skills is really cool. Like there's an app to help you with public speaking where you speak in front of people and then the AI in the crowd interrupts you and tries to take you off track and all these things. You can learn how to paint. You can do 3D, know, 3D device modeling and

CAD stuff, which is pretty interesting. You can do architectural work. I mean, just the amount of stuff that you could do in a meta quest, I don't think people realize, one. And then two, it's really cool. But once again, I don't feel, that's the place where it feels collaborative, where everyone's got a meta VR headset or.

Like if, even if I didn't have a meta headset and I had something else, like I could talk to my friend, no problem. And that might be true, but it's not the same thing as, hey, you wanna just take a phone call on my phone and I call up my buddy, we talk. It's not like that. There's not that pool of people yet. And if there are a pool of people, it's the six and eight year olds. You go on there and it's a lot of young kids.

Dalton Anderson (15:15.085) especially if you're playing around in like Meta Horizons, like if you're trying to check things out, like these Horizon Worlds things. I was like, oh my goodness, I have to turn off the communications here, because this is just so annoying. I'm just trying to check this out. I'm just trying to check out this world here. I don't need people screaming at me. interesting, regardless. What I'm really getting at here is these live demos that are failing.

It means the company's pushing, like the means the company's being genuine in and making mistakes. Like it makes the company more human in that regard where they're genuinely pushing the limits of what is capable and they're not afraid of making mistakes live to their shareholders and their customers. And they don't really, it's fine. It is what it is. It's part of innovation. that's the truth.

And as soon as a company goes away from live demos and they start doing these scripted releases and this and that, I have an opinion that the company slowly dies. I don't think Apple's gonna die now. It's gonna be a long time. Unless they change their route. They've got a great product. They've got these things, but the most recent release that they had,

They're saying it's the thinnest iPhone they've ever had. The thinnest iPhone. Have you seen the, they expanded the camera and made a camera bump similar to the Google Pixel and then they're not including that into the width of the camera and they're saying it's the thinnest ever. They literally shoved a bigger battery and more sensors and that's where they put a lot of the sensors at and they put the battery at the bottom.

confusing. But regardless, companies need to do live demos and they need to have mistakes. People respect this, especially the engineers.

Dalton Anderson (17:23.061) And so they messed up with the live AI. And then there was another part where this is probably one of the most incredible things that they talked about in the keynote was

the neural interface for the new meta glasses, like the meta screen.

Dalton Anderson (17:50.251) This meta screen that they built was, it's an in-screen.

Dalton Anderson (17:59.177) It's kind of hard to describe, but basically it's a TV within your lens on your face. And it's kind of like Google Glass, I what they came out with way back in the day. And you can look at your messages, look at your photos, take things. You can control the camera and the interface with subtle movements and your brain. So you use this little watch and you dictate what you want to do and then your

your hands help facilitate that, but it's quite crazy. And it is an insane innovation, and I'll just share my screen so you can see it.

Dalton Anderson (18:51.822) What's going on here? My video is buffering. I've got plenty of internet.

Dalton Anderson (19:02.022) my goodness.

That's hilarious. Here we go.

Dalton Anderson (22:36.309) I'm going to stop the video there.

What happens is Boz calls about four times and is unable to pick up the phone. And so they come out and they do a live transcription or like, guess, live transcription of the conversation. Like later on, they do a face to face, they show a different feature of the glasses, which is pretty sweet. And then they.

they just move on, they just move to the next thing, right? But once again, the technology is so, so, so sick. I don't even understand how they did that. I'm having a hard time comprehending how they do it. I'd have to read a paper, I bet there's several papers about it.

Like this is how we pick up the signals and this is how we're translating onto the UI and the screen and all this other stuff. Crazy, crazy, crazy things. And they've been talking about doing this for a couple years now. Like it's been in the works, but just haven't been able to do it because I'm sure it's freaky hard.

Dalton Anderson (24:03.65) just think it's incredible that they're doing that. Blows my mind, doesn't make sense technology. And that's what we're looking for. That technology helps people dream. It helps people look and see what else is out there. Look for the beyond. That's what you want. That's what I want for humans. I want humans to explore, to look out into the world and to wonder and to experience.

And the really only way to do that is to live outside your box and create a new box ongoing. You're just constantly going one box to another box like a nomad in a strange world.

Dalton Anderson (24:53.622) So the two, like the in-lens intelligence, as I mentioned before, crazy, crazy. And then another thing that they were talking about that was pretty interesting was the Meta Horizon engine. The engine is this engine that they're rolling out for Meta and like virtual reality and such.

to where you can create these in-depth high fidelity spaces or generate objects for MetaHorizons.

And some of it was using AI like, okay, can you add some objects here and specify the objects with a prompt and then it just does it. But it looked incredible. Like it looked really sharp. And then they talked about the TV thing. But the last thing that I thought was pretty interesting was their new release of their Oakley glasses. And I wanna share that.

Dalton Anderson (26:09.216) And I was like, wow. Another ad? Wow. Let me mute this. Normally have YouTube Premium, of course. Like who doesn't have YouTube Premium? And if you don't have YouTube Premium, you're missing out for sure. But let's, share this.

all over the place right now.

Clean, there go.

Dalton Anderson (26:45.131) screen.

Dalton Anderson (30:36.398) Okay, so those are the glasses that they're rolling out. Also the house and.

I think what's really interesting about those glasses and how they're positioned is they're positioned with this lifestyle slash.

Dalton Anderson (30:58.638) adventurous lifestyle that you need to be on the go, capture any moment. And it's not positioned as like the Ray-Bans. The Ray-Bans are more casual. You're getting drinks with your friends and you want to say something funny or capture a moment or cool lighting, just have a quick photo and you can post it. This is you're doing things, you're doing events, you're going places, you're traveling, you're being crazy, you're doing adventures.

your venture doing, you're doing side quests. That is the exact product positioning of Insta360, GoPro, and DJI, DJI, think DJI, DJII, DJII, yes, it's DJI, my bad. So DJI.

That's the exact positioning of those products, right? But none of them have this vertical integration to where you could take the video, take it, AI gets processing, the processes, the video for you, puts it together, snips it up, boom, packages it, press a button, publish it to your, your platforms. Like super easy. Like, whereas I have a GoPro, you have to buy the GoPro. You've got to hunker it around and it's

only thing it does is take videos. And there's gonna be always a group of people that are like, I want the best, highest fidelity videos.

But the people that they really like hits hard are people going on runs or doing little events to where they don't want to lug these things around. They just want to be on the fly. And it's actually more on the fly than a GoPro or an Insta360. And Insta360 is kind of on the fly because you don't have to care about your take because it's a 360 video. so like whatever, know, whatever you get, you can edit post. Whereas this, you,

Dalton Anderson (33:06.742) care less and whatever you're looking at is being recorded because the camera is in the center of your screen so you don't have to worry about it.

If I were these adventure companies like GoPro, DJI, Insta360, I would be for real worried.

just the fact that

Dalton Anderson (33:34.85) This kind of thing can be captured at this fidelity. 3K fidelity is good, that's decent. On a pair of glasses, and the glasses have like an eight hour recording time.

why worry about carrying a camera if you don't really need it? Like if you're not serious, and the GoPros and Insta360s aren't serious cameras either, so they're really capturing the niche enthusiast slash adventurer.

Dalton Anderson (34:14.798) I don't really see a strong offering compared to just it has better image quality. Yes, for sure, 100%. But is the image quality that much better? Are you legitimately recording stuff in 8K all the time? Because I know when I have a GoPro, I'm just recording in 4K because 8K takes up too much space. And I don't have unlimited SIM cards. And then I've got a.

upload all that stuff to cloud or let it sync to the cloud and it takes forever in any case. So what do I do with all of

Dalton Anderson (34:52.686) I don't know, I mean, they were really getting me with the Garmin stuff, like the Garmin integration, I've got a Garmin, I've convinced so many people to get a Garmin. One of my colleagues at a company, his name's Andrew, I'm sure he doesn't mind me mentioning, he was convinced to get a Garmin, not by my, just by myself, but his other running friends. And everyone who's gotten a Garmin has said it's been a game changer. They're like, this is life changing, man. Like, thank you.

And I'm like, don't worry about it. And I just look at the stock price and I'm like, I'm like an oil baron now, but with activity watches. I wish that would be pretty sweet, but not, not the case, but big fan of the garments. If you're interested in any watches, I would go with a garment garment all in all in anyways.

I think those are the main things I wanted to chat about. I there was cool stuff with the horizon and there's awesome things that they're doing with the Quest 4. The main thing I want to disclose or not disclose, discuss was the glasses, the failed demos. That's important. That means a company's innovating and they're being honest and they're pushing and they're getting stuff done and they're confident. If you're not confident to demo your product live,

You're not confident in your product. Simple. Just keep it simple. That is the truth. And so all these companies that are talking about these features, it's not live. It's bullshit. Call it how you see it. If you can't do it live, how are you saying you could do it? That's when one of your buddies is like, yeah, man, I'll get out there on the court and I can dunk. I can dunk.

I'll dunk all of you punks. And then you get to the basketball court and they're like, man, my ankle's feeling a little achy. I don't know, it stays out the right day. It's overcast and the sun's not hot enough. My rubber's not getting heated up. I don't got enough grip on my shoes. And you're like, what are you talking about, brother? Put your shoes on.

Dalton Anderson (37:22.198) and get it done. And they're like, no, no, no, I can't today, can't. I'm feeling a little, my stomach hurts. My tummy's hurting.

And you're like, all right, man, have a good one. Peace. It's just so funny. It's so funny. Everyone knows a person who's talking out their butt about different things, either their importance at work or some relationship they have with their partner or something that they've got going on that they're just over-extravagating the whole thing. And then you're like, all right, well, let's see it live.

They're like, hold on, hold on. I will, I will, would, but I've gotta show you at the right time. It's gotta be the right time.

The right time is now. We'll never know, we'll never know. This could be my last day and I'll never know that you could do what you say you're gonna do.

Yeah, so funny that companies don't live demo. Embarrassing. I would be more embarrassed if a company that I was running wouldn't live demo than if a live demo failed. That just means you don't believe in your product. Simple.

Dalton Anderson (38:45.986) But of course, eventually I'm gonna get all my stuff squared away, right? I'm doing this live demo as well. One take, no edits, just whatever garbage I put in is the garbage that comes out. Normally it's just garbage, right? If you made it this far, you love a little garbage. eventually I'm gonna get these guests on the show. I know I've been talking about that for months. Almost died though, so really catch me some slack there.

and I'm gonna start working on my insurance projects. They're gonna be pretty cool, I think. So if I don't say myself, right, it's gonna be incredible. Honestly gonna be on the forefront of innovation. Blockchain, cloud analytics. What are we saying, more bug words. AI integration, LLMs, chat, agentic workflows.

Dalton Anderson (39:44.83) Web, what is it, Web3 now? Web3, Web2.0. Peer to peer payments.

my goodness, I'm cracking myself up. You may not think it's that funny, but I do. So, I that's what matters at the end of the day, right?

Okay. Wait, wait, wait, there's somebody, there's somebody, somebody.

Dalton Anderson (40:26.318) yeah, appreciate everybody. Well, wherever you are in this world.

Have a good afternoon, good morning, good evening. Thanks for listening in. Talk to you next week. See ya, goodbye.

Dalton Anderson (40:46.785) session. I almost messed up. I've got to end it.