Mark Zuckerberg on how video chat needs to evolve

The goal of the metaverse is not to build technology for people to interact with; but rather, build technology for people to interact with each otherSpatial audio and eye contact technology are just two features to drastically improve on current video meeting technology, for exampleEstablishing a presence is the most difficult problem

Mark: phones, TVs, etc try to deliver experiences that feel high fidelity but at no point you feel like you are in it....  You can't have side conversations on Zoom. 

“We're basically mediating our lives and our communication through these small, glowing rectangles. I think that that's not really how people are made to interact. A lot of the meetings that we have today, you're looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That's not how we process things, either.”

I am generally pretty skeptical about this transition, in part because Zuckerberg keeps talking about it as a radical improvement in our sense of “presence” online. I think both the mass adoption of—and the frustrations we all feel about—Zoom has shown that there is still a massive amount of headroom left in terms of improving the quality of straig... See more

I care about this existing, not just virtual and augmented reality existing, but it getting built out in a way that really advances the state of human connection and enables people to be able to interact in a different way. That’s sort of what I’ve dedicated my life’s work to. I’m not sure, I don’t know that if we weren’t investing so much in this,... See more

The key question: how do you replicate presence?  Mark says Meta wants to make the most human thing possible: visual presence, spatial audio, temperature, olfactory system, touch, etc.