Name: Brainstorm Tech 2023: Making Sense Of The Metaverse
Uploaded: 2023-07-11
Duration: 15 min 51 s
Description: Vishal Shah, Vice President, Metaverse, Meta In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE

Vishal Shah, Vice President, Metaverse, Meta In conversation with: Alyson Shontell, FORTUNE  

Brainstorm Tech 2023: Making Sense Of The Metaverse 

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As for every industry, the tech world is continuously redefining its future with one disruption at a time in the not so distant path. One said disruption was the rapid adoption of the metaverse, but many of us are still trying to figure out what even is the metaverse and do we even like it? Right. So Google Merriam Webster defines the metaverse as a hypothetical combination of multiples coexisting across multiple possibilities. But for the general public blockbusters like everything everywhere all at once and spider verse may have helped decode the concept a little bit more. On the other hand, the urban dictionary always a good source of information is not as kind, it defines the metaverse as the matrix or, and I'm quoting here a product of Zuckerberg's endless quest to make all of our lives worse, sorry mark. But we also checked in with A I Google Bard simply states that the metaverse is a persistent online world and a form of entertainment. So it's fun to ponder, of course, the realms that are still being worked out right now. But obviously, this poses numerous problems when it comes to navigating the bigger concept for wider adoption. Joining us now to talk all things. Metaverse is metas ahead of Metaverse. Vishal Shah. He'll be interviewed by Fortunes, fortunes editor in chief Alison Chantel. Hi, everybody. Hi, Michelle. Thanks for being here today. Thank you. First stage interview in three years since you took the job. So we've got a lot to catch up on. But first, I want to remind all of you where we were in 2021 things were a little bit different. Then Snoop Dogg was building in the Metaverse. He was building soup. First, people were paying 450 K just to be his digital neighbor for Apes were growing wild and all the rage City predicted that the metaverse would be worth 13 trillion by 2030. And most of us were working from home with no hope of returning to the office in sight today. Totally different landscape. Metaverse divisions within companies like Disney have been shutting down. Even Meta's own employees have sometimes wondered, do we still care about the metaverse? Are we still important? They asked out of town halls, the revenue for the Metaverse group at meta has shrunk actually from 2.2 billion in 2022 sorry from 2.3 billion to 2.2 billion last year, the operating costs have increased. And in March Mark wrote something that had a lot of people sitting on edge. He said our number one investment now is AI which caused a number of publications to declare the metaverse is dead. The vial is the metaverse dead. Uh I hope not because I'm really uh out of a job. Uh So, no, um look, I think the metaverse hype is dead. I think we were in a hype cycle like any new thing and those that invested last year because it was the hype. Yeah, they lost conviction. We didn't invest for the hype. We have been investing in this space for years. The opus acquisition was 2014. We believe in this next generation of computing and we're invested in it for the long haul. And so we've always said, you know, when we re branded the company in 2021 this was a long term investment 10 plus years, we continue to believe deeply in that, but it's not going to get delivered in a year. So I'm actually pretty happy that there was both a hype and a cross of disillusionment last year. It was tough to live through that, of course, ourselves. But now we can put our heads down and build because that's what it takes to build something difficult. We have to like iterate and do it publicly. Yeah, I mean, you definitely entered your role. I think it was July 2021. When you started in about October 2021 there was the rebrand of Facebook Two meta all in on the metaverse at the peak of the hype cycle. And then the pendulum swings the other way and now there's extreme skepticism that this is even a real thing. What have been your big learnings in that time as you've been leading through ultimate hype and like ultimate skepticism. What has worked and, and as a leader you have to make the tough calls of what to kill, what to walk away from and how have you been doing that? Yeah. It, it, it definitely was difficult in the sense that there was a lot of excitement and it felt like anything we put out there was going to kind of ride that hype cycle. But that was part of the challenge is that I think even we bought into the hype more than the brand. The rebrand went better than we thought it would go. We were hoping we'd have to really convince people that this was a thing that we cared about. But it was, you know, everyone kind of latched on to it. And if you didn't have a chief meter or something at your company, you were doing something wrong, the thing to focus on. I think that we learned really was if you're making a long term bet, know that it's a long term bet, what are the steps to getting to that end game, not trying to get there really too quickly. So for us, for example, we launched Horizon World, which is our product in the metaverse, not the metaverse as a whole, but you know, our universe in the metaverse. And I think it was right to launch the product because you can only iterate on something inside the building for so long, you've got to put it out there and get people to use it. So I think that was the right call. But then you have to iterate and say, ok, what's working? What isn't, there were certain parts of the product that had a lot of friction that weren't working. So we said we have to stop shipping new things and get the core to be to be healthy. The entire horizon team today is not gold on growth. It's gold and retention. So it's not gold on getting more people on to it or user numbers or even is it engagement is the attention? Like how is our attention? OK. It's retention. Are we, we're building something new and when you build something new, you can't just expect it to work on day one. You have to iterate anyone that's built a new product knows that you can't, you don't want something on day one and it just works. You have to put it out there and you have to iterate. Now we did it in a really public way because obviously we branded the company, but we are now focused on some of those fundamentals. Are we getting the core mechanics right? Are people coming back and enjoying the experience? And yeah, there's ways to help scale but really focusing on those fundamentals and knowing that it's iterative because we're convicted on the end game is really important. Now, I think that where part of the conflict is, is obviously the tremendous spend going into a product that clearly doesn't yet have the product market fit that it ultimately, you would hope a $10 billion a year investment for a company would have. So, do you feel like was there, was there too much investment going in? Is there? I mean, it's your group. So you probably don't feel that way. But I think from the outside and from investors perspective, it's a bit too much, too soon before it's really proven. Well, I think it's important to kind of calculate that assessment across all the spend. It isn't just in the things that people see today because it's a long term investment. It, some of it's in the hardware that people use, say Quest two most popular VR headset in Market Quest three coming later this fall, we think it's really impressive in terms of the steps we've been able to take to make that product better. That's one area of investment is. VR there's work on augmented reality and glasses, some of which people have seen with Ray Ban stories, but there's a massive amount of investment that hasn't yet been made public because it's stuff that we're still building. And so the entire investment is broad and then there's the software we're working on horizon world, we just talked about avatars and our digital identity. Some things we're constantly iterating on a billion people have made an avatar. And so there are, there's scale on some more software investments that are a smaller part of that overall reality lab spend because it's stuff that we can build today. And a lot of what my team is trying to do is say, not just what hardware, what software do we build for the hardware? But how do we take some of these software experiences and bring them to devices that people have today? How do they exist on phones? How do they exist on computers? Not just on next generation hardware, which is where a lot of the I think progress in the short to medium term will be seen on hardware up today, not just hardware tomorrow. So what has been working? I mean, are you leaning into gaming? What is like, where is there, the little fire that gives you guys the hope and the promise that this is worth continuing to do. So the most time spent in VR today is actually in social use cases and that actually gives us the most again conviction on that on that end because that's why we set out to build this in the first place like we can't replace this. Me sitting here looking at all of you in this physical space that isn't going away nor do we think it should. But we can't always do this, we can't always be in a space together like this. And so how do we create experiences that feel as close to this as possible? Even if they're not this? So social experiences are working. Gaming certainly is an early vertical, especially in VR that's had some product market fit and increasingly fitness is the category that we're seeing some of it through people who were gaming and then found fitness. But increasingly people who are finding fitness to be really valuable and are buying headsets for fitness. And what's I think really interesting there is it skews more female, it skews older and it's not just people who, you know, used to go to the gym and now replace that with using a headset. It's people who are uncomfortable going to the gym who didn't feel like they had a place to go, you know, focus on their health and now they can in the comfort of their homes at a price point that, you know, is far more affordable than other things that are out there. So I'm going to turn it to the audience for a question after this one. So be thinking Apple just launched the Vision Pro. So a lot of fanfare, it was quite different than the meta Bursary building looks like there are no controllers. It's all eye tracking, gesture control. A bit more realistic, a little less cartoon feely. What was your reaction? What does it feel like when Apple is coming for the product that you're working on. Well, first, I think it's actually really, really great that more people are investing in this space. Like I genuinely mean that it brings more validation to the overall portfolio of investment, more developers focused on building here, good for consumers, really because at the end of the day, more choice and more competition makes a better product. Now that said, I think we are approaching the space differently. Our vision is to build a metaverse for everyone, not just for a few. And that accessibility point reflects in things like price point and the investment in software that is social by nature. And so I think there's plenty of space for lots of folks in the ecosystem. I just think our, our vision tends to be a little bit more democratic, a little bit broader in terms of accessibility and a bunch of our decisions from the hardware we've chosen the software we're building really are focused on really show that that kind of focus uh audience. Any questions for one in the back, Jeff? Um Hi. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg famously said legs are hard. I'm just wondering how the legs are coming along. Uh He said a lot of famous things. I don't know if that's like his most famous thing, Urban Dictionary, I guess had some other things to say. No. So OK, I was asking me this question backstage. It would be good to get a little bit of context. So legs are hard for a couple of reasons. One, a big part of the VR value proposition is being embodied in a virtual space. So you want your physical movement to be reflected in the virtual world so that it feels like you're there. So when you move your hand, you want your hand to move, when you move your head, you want your head to move. We have tracking on hands and on your head. So we can get that to be pretty accurate. We don't have any tracking on legs. Therefore, it's harder for that to directly be directly, you know, directly reflected in your embodied actor. So that's one reason. The second reason is if you think back a couple of years as we've gone through this journey, the compute envelope on the headset is fairly limited. It's a mobile chip set, we're trying to get as much interactivity in a space as possible. So every additional kind of computation on your body is a computation that we have to take away from making the environment more interactive. So it's literally a trade off of making a bigger space with more people in it versus each person having more fidelity. And so we were working with both of these trade offs over time as both of these things are luckily changing, we have more sophistication on tracking and we have a larger compute envelope now. So yes, we're working on bringing legs to the platform, you'll start to see them hopefully later on this year and they are hard. But maybe for reasons that people didn't quite internalize because there's some technical constraints but also some kind of computational limitations. Yeah. I mean, I was fascinated by that because I did the demo yesterday of the latest tries and workplaces and you can wink in your avatar winks, you can raise your eyebrow, it raises eyebrows. The person giving me a demo in San Francisco was wiggling in his chair and I could see even though he didn't have legs, his like legless chair was moving. So it was just fascinating to hear that like legs are a big challenge, but you're committing to legs by the end of the year, we are awesome. OK, soon you will have legs. So A I obviously a huge investment going into it for meta and from everybody, Ar Mar has said actually A R glasses are the holy grail and then the metaverse. How is it all tied? How's that pipeline tied? And how are you working across groups in that vision? Yes. So AI both is an important bet for us in the future but has been a big part of our existing apps and even the hardware that we've shipped today. All the ranking in Facebook and Instagram advertising, all powered by A I A lot of the computer vision that we put into tracking hands and environments in VR headsets to get standalone headsets working well, all powered by AI I think what's really interesting kind of going forward is in the same way, we really lowered the barrier for creation tools on phones, you know, five or 10 years ago, none of us thought we could create compelling content on a mobile device. But we can now because we've lowered the barrier to entry for creation. But if you have a good idea, it's easy to create something. I think that same challenge exists in virtual worlds today where to do and build anything compelling to build a space like this, you need today to be able to write code and not everyone knows how to do that. And so where I think A I can play a really interesting role is how do we take it so that if you have a great idea, you can, whether you talk to an LM powered bot or you know, interact with these creative tools to build spaces and to build environments that are interactive just by using your voice or just by using your thought. And this idea of lowering the barrier to content creation is an extension of the journey we've been on for years, you know, in terms of the stuff we've done in our apps. And so the reason that's important to tie to your point about how everything gets connected together is getting more creators building for virtual environments where they're fully immersive ones like this. Or even virtual objects then are great for VR they're great for mixed reality where you have a blend of the physical world and the digital world and eventually for the A R and A future that as you said is the holy grail that we're looking for because there's more content that exists that people can interact with. So in the last few seconds we have here, what's your revised timeline? Now knowing how hard this project is the long term vision of it? When am I going to actually use the metaverse every day? When is the skepticism going to end? And people are going to be like, I see what Bichell has been working on. I don't think it's a, it's like a light switch where one day you will suddenly feel like you're in the metaverse. Whereas one day, the day before you weren't, I think it will be an iterative process over the course of many years where digital experiences will get better, feel more real and you will find more value in them. But we want the products to be valuable, not for us to pitch something on a stage and expect you to just adopt it. All right. Well, we will wait. Thank you, Michel. We appreciate your time and your honesty. Thank you. Thank you.