Meta advisor John Carmack is the digital pioneer of the videogame “Doom.” He isn’t really moved by Zuckerberg’s idea of the metaverse.
“There’s a bunch that I’m grumpy about,” he said during “Carmack Unscripted” — an hour featured at Facebook-turned-Meta’s Connect 2022 conference earlier this week.
These comments were made after Zuckerberg’s self-praising keynote presentation was released. The talk covered how the metaverse was taking huge leaps in the advancement of virtual reality.
“Last year I said that I’d be disappointed if we weren’t having Connect in Horizon this year,” said a legless, pixelated Carmack, standing in a digital Horizon Worlds house.
“This here, this isn’t really what I meant,” he added. “Me being an avatar on-screen on a video for you is basically the same thing as [just] being on a video.”
In his “unscripted” speech, Carmack stated that he did not like the new Quest Pro headset either. He agreed that the accessory had significant technological improvements over Meta’s Quest 2, which was released exactly two years ago, but the battery life is ridiculous, and it’s massively expensive.
“I’ve always been clear that I’m all about the cost-effective mass-market headsets being the most important thing for us and for the adoption of VR,” Carmack said during the event. “And Quest Pro is definitely not that…”
He stated that CEO Zuckerberg is under the immense pressure of making things work at the metaverse and is finding it hard to work through the technological limitations of contemporary VR technologies.
But he also argued that ‘Meta is currently too focused on and “paranoid” about the quality of its Horizon Worlds spaces and avatars and should instead try to get as many people into those spaces as possible.’ Development in this domain won’t be done with a $1,499.99 VR headset.