Facebook Presents: The Journey to the Metaverse

[Music] [Music] [Music] and now a session brought to you by our underwriter facebook the journey to the metaverse please welcome andrew bosworth vice president of facebook reality labs hi everyone i'm peter rubin a contributing editor at wired and the author of future presence a book about virtual reality and human connection i'm pleased to be with you today to talk all things metaverse with our guest andrew bosworth the vp of facebook reality labs bosworth or baz as most people know him graduated from harvard in 2004 and after a stint as a developer at microsoft he joined mark zuckerberg at facebook in january 2006 where he created news feed and many early anti-abuse systems some of which are still in production after working briefly on optimizing site speed and reliability baz established and ran facebook bootcamp a six-week program designed to help grow the engineering team and maintain its culture he then led the integration of the messenger and chat products while improving stability followed by 10 years as the direct lead of groups messenger and video calling teams he's also been the engineering director overseeing events places photos videos timeline privacy mobile monetization and feed ads so just about everything you can imagine within facebook most recently he served as a vp of ads in business platform where he led engineering product research analytics and design and in 2017 he created facebook's umbrella ar vr organization which was in 2020 renamed facebook reality labs that's where he drives all of facebook's efforts in augmented reality virtual reality the metaverse and consumer hardware across oculus portal and research andrew thanks so much for being here today that's a mouthful thanks for getting through it it really was uh it's just about everything like i said you can imagine but but we're obviously here to to concentrate on this sort of last part uh not final part most recent part so to unpack a little bit what exactly is facebook reality labs for people who are unfamiliar with it and what's your vision for it yeah facebook reality labs is to some degree i think facebook's um response to what has been a real plateauing of progress on mobile development platforms you know we came up in the web which was this tremendous period of growth and then we got to harness the power of mobile phones which has been just a tremendous period of advancement for technology but the phones that we have in our pockets now are pretty similar to the ones that we had three years ago and they probably will be pretty similar three years from now and as wonderful as they are and they are marvels there are many things that they do not do perfectly they don't do as well as we would like and facebook has a long track record of investing well ahead of a technology um being able to exist when we have the idea that it could exist and in particular with a focus on how we can connect people better uh you know one of the critiques that i think is often levied around the phone and i agree with it is that we have to choose between the people we're physically with and the phone in our pocket we can do they're both great but we can we have to kind of do one or the other we see a future where these things are less mutually exclusive and people are more empowered to work or socialize wherever they are on the world um without the kind of limitations that come with not being able to be physically present with the people you're with but also not having to choose between those connections and the connections with the people that you're physically with so what does that mean uh concretely from sort of a product perspective what has frl rolled out what are they looking to roll out what have they announced to support that idea yeah it's a broad range so things like portal which is kind of a best case scenario for this kind of interaction where hey we've got a high-res camera on both sides we have full richness of facial expressions it's not as good as being there but it might be the next best thing but then as you add people video calling starts to break down i think most of us will agree and so virtual reality creates this tremendous opportunity to connect with people and not just to communicate and to share ideas but to have shared experiences um you know one of the ways that we bond together with other people is we we go through experiences together silly things like bowling or profound things like school and and emotional experiences that we have together those are hard to do over video calling but they can be done in virtual reality and so we have our oculus quest 2 headset in the market right now it's a standalone headset it's the most accessible headset in history you wrote the book on it so i don't want to oversell it but i think uh so far i stand by that claim uh and of course we just launched our ray-ban stories product in partnership with luxottica which is about being out in the world and being able to capture memories and being able to talk to people while still having your ears eyes and hands free to be present in the world around you and of course all this is working towards the direction of more complete augmented reality where in addition to cameras and microphones and speakers we potentially have displays integrated into our glasses that allow us to see digital artifacts in the world around us so we're sort of swirling around this idea of a metaverse without what feels like to me at this point a concise definition so so how are you defining the term how are you and facebook defining the term and then i want to get into sort of how it's been used in the past and what those distinctions might be yeah the metaverse is a it's both something that is um uh with us in very small portions this is actually pretty cool you and i are far apart we're having this conversation if you swapped me out with an avatar we'd still be having this conversation and that's possible today with virtual reality and and real reality that's which is that's cool um but it's not very evenly distributed as the future so often isn't and it doesn't really feel like a cohesive thing uh if you think about the apps that we use on our phones or the websites that we use those are little digital worlds we go there and we have our own little identity they have their own physics things that you can and cannot do they have their own mores things that you should and should not do and they're just not very connected to each other they're kind of independent when i go to one world i'm there when i leave and change apps i go completely to a different place what if there was connectivity between these things what if there was embodiment what if we could take um digital goods with us from place to place what if we could take our representation of our self with us from place to place so for me the metaverse is the stitching together of these currently separate digital spaces and the watch word for me is continuity that feeling that it's continuous the feeling that i'm the same way that when i leave my house and i go to my workplace those are very different physical places but i'm still the continuous self uh that i am uh in in the physical world so for me um the metaverse is this idea and part of the reason it's so vague is because it's so early uh and that is a big shift for us as an industry frankly to be having this conversation as early as we are that's informed by i think the last you know 10 years we've seen that sometimes the public and regulators feel surprised by technological change and that's not healthy for anybody you know one of our first principles in facebook reality labs in fact our first responsible innovation principle is never surprise people uh so we're trying to have this conversation um out in the open well in advance this technology being delivered in any integrated form the word metaverse obviously has been around for 20 years or more through through science fiction and in fact it began bubbling up around consumer gaming experiences like pokemon go roblox fortnite uh the writings of venture capitalist matthew ball got into the metaverse a lot a few years ago yet facebook pretty remarkably didn't start using it explicitly until this summer um with interviews that mark zuckerberg gave with your own speaking about it what was behind that shift for you speaking about it that way rather than a collection of experiences through oculus or portal or whatever that you had rolled out up to that point we'd certainly been using it internally as a concept as a north star for work like our horizon software which is a virtual space that people can go and explore today through oculus but eventually more broadly um we had been using that internally what what triggered us to start using it externally and be more explicit about it was exactly what you said actually it's it has become a topic of conversation in the industry and that's a topic that we wanted to participate in fully um and so we're not trying to be coy about our ambitions here we've certainly been talking if you go back to ocus connect three four five years ago even mark is talking about these same ideas of uh virtual spaces that allow us to uh connect and have novel experiences and it doesn't have to be in virtual reality by the way we access virtual spaces all the time through our phones and our computers but these virtual spaces so we all the the primitives were kind of in place but the actual word that stitches all together wasn't in the common mainstream lexicon until this year and so we decided to start using it then and we also in these other experiences that i mentioned these are all kind of pocket uh pocket metaverses if you will they give you some of the experiences of a metaverse but they're all very self-contained so in practicalities kind of what phase of the game are we in as a whole uh technological society as a whole with the metaverse and what needs to be put in place for it to really succeed and break out of those pockets i think most of what we have today are universes and they can be very rich universes but they are self-contained they don't really connect to one another and so yeah you've got a roblox universe and a pokemon go universe and you've got a facebook universe and an instagram universe and there's not a tremendous amount that connects them um and i think that is exactly what we hope the metaverse will address we hope there will be greater continuity between these digital spaces and british connectivity in commerce in services you know if i have an avatar and i get clothes for that avatar can i take those with me to different places um and so that is in my opinion what makes a metaverse is when you have the connection between them so we're the very very early stages the places that we think i think we're doing the best as an industry are in communication so messaging apps whether it be whatsapp or discord or snap are stitching people together across the physical and the digital and across digital spaces um and i think that's very exciting so communication right now is the first layer i kind of think of that if you'll forgive my nerd references as like subspace communication from the star trek universe like we've built the substance communication relays so i can be in one universe you can be in another universe and we can still communicate that's cool that's a start um but we've got to do much more we've got to do teleportation we've got to do transportation we've got to be able to actually move me from where i am to where you are and then have me not show up as a completely different person uh so that that really hinges on sort of interoperability right like in order to get from place to place to place and like you said bring whether it's your avatar whether it's goods that you have purchased or made for that avatar for your personal surroundings or for your work life or anything else that's that's a feels like a a big hurdle especially when so many of the companies involved are kind of these these walled gardens of sorts so so how do you put protocols into place to identify that at sort of all levels like the the stack that is needed the sort of substrate for the for the metaverse to exist uh is is hugely broad so how do you start to build openness into that as you're building it together yeah there's a tremendous amount of um challenge here as you note from a standpoint of um there's a trade-off when you're interoperable the more interoperable something is the less optimized it is so it's it's can make it hard for performance it can make it hard um to be as polished um it can be as hard to make the privacy security and integrity guarantees that people want to make that the modern consumer expects so there's real trade-offs however the difference i think with the metaverse is um really about creators and i mean creators really broadly whether they be developers whether they be people who sell even physical goods people who will have storefronts want to reach all the customers they don't want to reach some small subset of the customers and so there is a precedent here which is the web the web is a protocol based system and it does the web has security integrity and privacy trade-offs associated with it i think we know that now um but it's been a tremendous engine of commerce a tremendous engine of information and so there are going to be areas where the companies that exist today and companies that are coming up now and companies that haven't even been founded yet are going to compete furiously to the great benefit of consumers uh in the local devices the consumer is using in the storage uh the cloud storage that they're they're using there's also going to be areas where the incentive for the industry is for us to identify standards and practices that allow interoperability because we our consumers are not going to want to buy something in one universe and then have it be trapped there and so there's a combination of competition and industry standards which i think are all going to be the north star here is the consumer experience this none of this happens if we don't succeed in building a consumer experience that feels cohesive to the average person i hear you say that that interoperability the more interoperable something is it comes at the expense of privacy security and i think of course you know of course the person who is heading up all this stuff at facebook would say that how do you how do you frame that up in in a way that sort of acknowledges and contextualizes the the struggles that facebook has had over the past few years in uh undoing its own mistakes and convincing people that they're that they're on the up and up with regards to this well yeah nobody's more informed about privacy and the challenges around it than facebook is uh after the you know the conversations that we've been having with the public with regulators over the last decade but really let's be honest it's a bigger problem than facebook it's an industry-wide problem um and it goes much deeper than the last 10 years it goes back 30 or 40 years if you look at the challenges the things that the you know the eu has struggled with cookie banners cookies you know are one of the founding protocols that um that power quite a bit of really good stuff on the internet like being able to log into a website not having to log in every single page load um and so there are really trade-offs that are implicit uh between these pieces and one of the things that we are working on doing having this conversation now years in advance of it being material to the average consumer is trying to you know return the kind of conversation to the public in advance of the technology being built so that there is already some dialogue happening before anything really changes for society um you know face recognition is another kind of example like this where you know it's got tremendously powerful good uses it's also got risks associated with it i don't want unilaterally for facebook or any device that i build to be trying to set standards on that i'd like us to be a conversation that we have collectively as a society so we have many many examples here where we have to talk about you know the functionality integrity privacy security trade space and where we want to land on that as kind of a society so in talking about this one of the things that supercharged the development of all these technologies over the past few years not to put to find a point on it has been facebook itself whether it was buying oculus for between two and three billion dollars uh almost a decade ago creating facebook reality labs which has pumped more money and excel arguably accelerated the timeline of a lot of these technologies uh faster than they have been at any point in the past there's a titanic first to market upside for you as a company uh how does the metaverse how do you build an open metaverse in a way that uh that that sort of lets you leverage that without transforming it from the very beginning into some kind of oligopoly i'm not sure the history of technology bears out the assumptions that we so often have about it i mean if you go back i really do think of ar and vr as being a pioneering set of technologies uh on the order of the work that was done in the 50s and 60s on computing itself you know at xerox park and at stanford research institute and if you look at xerox you know you don't have a xerox phone in your pocket um in fact the the mainstream the desktop pc popularized by ibm i bet you don't have an ibm phone in your pocket in fact by the end of the desktop era you didn't even have an ibm desktop necessarily um and so there isn't i'm not saying and likewise you know the famously you know the web came along and was something that disrupted microsoft and the phone came along and disrupted the web um the history of technology doesn't obviously favor the incumbent it's easy to spend a huge amount of money and an investment in technology and have the timing wrong have done it wrong have somebody fast follow and then identify the mistakes that you made and do it better and and you know if you go back and if you haven't seen the documentary on general magic which had the vision really for the iphone in the mid 90s and just and just struggled to execute against it i think it's i think we all benefit as a society when money is going into research that has the very real material opportunity to improve our lives um i think we're all pretty happy that we have phones in our pockets um i don't think we're uh crying any tears over the loss of xerox park or xerox as a company uh doing what they were doing then it's worth noting they did get paid there with the laser printer uh that also was invented there so it completely paid for their entire investment but yeah so for me i think the history of technology is certainly companies like ours and apple and and google and microsoft investing well ahead of returns um but there isn't it's not obvious that being there first necessarily means you um you're given the segment uh those names that you ticked off uh are are the ones you would expect and they're also the ones that would signal that there are some some regulatory conversations ahead to be had what are some of the the broader issues you anticipate uh needing to grapple with in public over the next three five ten years yeah we you know we've really been deeply engaged with regulators in conversation for a long time now um and i think you know certainly some of the conversations are ones that we're already having uh privacy privacy from whom privacy from governments privacy from corporations uh what kind of control do people have safety and integrity how do we give people control and enforce good behavior without violating privacy and norms there interoperability these are all the stuff that we expect to be working on um the competition is fierce right now uh you know there's a tremendous amount of investment obviously uh people have been uh microsoft has been investing for a long time through their hololens program uh we know apple has a large investment certainly tim cook has talked a lot about his enthusiasm for augmented reality um so the investment the competition right now is fierce um but at some point as it starts to hit consumers and become mainstream consumers i think some of the things that we've talked about so far and some novel things that we just none of us considered before because we couldn't foresee everything will become you know topics of conversation for the public for the press and for regulators and we'll have to address those as they come well i was i was saying that this sort of rebirth of virtual reality uh and i'll say it again i think that the the folks who are in a position to do so have a real opportunity to to build this in a way that anticipates the the things that led us astray maybe with the with the first go-around of the internet so uh looking forward to seeing how you and all your colleagues in the industry do that looking forward to how seeing you and others hold hold you accountable for that um and i think there are a lot more conversations like this to be had in the future thanks for your time andrew really appreciate it thanks for having me for our next session brought to you by our underwriter facebook on the journey to the metaverse please welcome nick clegg vice president of global affairs and communications [Music] hi everyone thank you so much for joining us today thanks to the atlantic for having us nick it's good to see you good to see you too yeah so what an eventful week it has been for facebook obviously you had the wall street journal's facebook files come out the company responded last night to its investigation into instagram and its health with teens um i noticed yesterday that the company said that they may perhaps be providing the decks of the data discrepancy to congress when facebook goes to appear before senate committee on thursday why wouldn't facebook just release all of the decks make them public so that we can sort of see for ourselves what this data says as opposed to taking your word for it yeah yeah we'll do that we'll do that so so in the next few days we'll release it to congress and to and then to the to to public scrutiny as you as you quite rightly say the decks don't remotely i mean for anyone who for those who still have an open mind uh uh rather than what one one reads from the headlines if you to read the decks and then compare it with some of the assertions that you know instagram is toxic for all teens and so on i don't think any reasonable person once they've actually seen the decks or indeed read the post that um pretty ttr head of research put out yesterday i don't think any reasonable person would say that the research sustains that claim at all um but you're quite right of course people should be the judge of that themselves and so yeah we're just we're just um making sure that all the t's are crossed and the eyes are dotted so that we can release it both to congress and then and then to the public in the in the next few days in the next few days okay interesting and i kind of want to just get your take then nick on the whole wall street journal investigation writ large i mean you are addressing one piece of this by releasing the decks for the instagram part but they put out a multi-layered series are you going to be releasing more of the data that is affiliated with that investigation as time goes on or is this going to be limited just to that instagram piece i mean for those of you people who read the series it's based on you know documents that have been picked out from of course the sea of documents and and email exchanges and papers and discussion papers that of course swell around a company the size of facebook and they'd be deliberately provided and leaked by someone who clearly feels they have some points to make um it's just the nature of of journalism about and i'm not i'm not blaming the journalists that's what happens when you when you when journalism based on leaked material which is leaked for a particular purpose and is is leaked deliberately to try and cast for often obviously much wider and more complex interconnected issues in a particular like you just lose a lot of context are we going to spend all our time litigating each and every single one point no i don't think that's i don't think that's going to serve um much value i i but we did feel that you know particularly for people who use our services and parents who have teenagers using instagram you know to read headlines saying that instagram is toxic for your teenager is a pretty that is a particularly um you know as a particularly sort of pungent thing to say and we just felt it was it was duty-bound to try and provide people with a much more rounded picture by the way it's not just what our own research shows crucially it's what all external research shows which is it actually intuitively i think kind of makes sense which is that for the vast majority of of teenagers for the vast majority of time it's a really positive experience a good experience but for those teenagers and gosh i mean i'm my mid 50s we all remember what the turbulent time it is to be a teenager for those dealing with issues which many teenagers you know do at some point in their in their teens whether it's sleeplessness or loneliness or or depression or body image issues for a minority of them for some of the time it's not a great experience and it's i mean i i do think it's kind of right that facebook asks itself those questions because we can't solve the lives that teams have for themselves and many of these things are things which would you know arise anyway but we do need to of course ask ourselves that if there are teams who even if it's only a minority of them for only some of the time who feel they're having a bad experience and we need to work out what more we can do and so um as adam merceri the head of uh instagram was saying today we're we're we're looking at new um uh tools which i think will be helpful for teens going forward so we're looking at something which will would nudge a team away from if if we see that if our systems see that they're looking at repeatedly looking at particular content which might be associated with negative a sentiment that we sort of nudge them to look at other centers or even for them just to take a break just to literally just take a break from from from instagram and make that much easier so that they can just take a break step right out of it for a while and then sort of pick it up from where they left off these are exactly the kind of things which come on top of many many changes you know whether it's limits whether it's hidden words whether it's restrict that we've done to deal with issues that are surfaced both by external and and and internal research and i hope notwithstanding that the back and forth you get in these kind of press cycles i hope when the sort of dust settles people will see that we're just sincerely trying to kind of like external researchers are trying to work out what the complex relationship is between individuals given their own individual circumstances and their lives and their use of social media you know it's interesting it sounds like you're trying to be thoughtful about this is what you're telling me but i think the argument to a lot of people would be look facebook rushed to build some of its products and now we're dealing with the unintended consequences facebook and instagram you know put out this notice that they were going to create something for kids and then this morning adam missouri said okay we're going to hit pause because we need more time now that you're heading into the metaverse do you think that you are rushing into this you know to sort of dodge some of these other real world problems that are happening or do you think this is something that is an extension of what you're building well before i come to the metabolism on the instagram kids i mean let me be clear we really do think instagram kids is is the right thing to do because we all know and i've got you know kids myself we all know that kids will use social media they don't tell the truth about their age it's difficult sometimes for parents to know exactly what their daughters and sons are up to so doing what you know i think other companies on youtube tick tock of developing a tool where you'd have tweens so between 10 and 13 able to use instagram but without ads and with full parental controls seems to us to be a safer experience than in a sense having all the kind of the the you know kids playing cat and mouse with their with their parents at the moment and by the way one of the things we're going to but the reason the reason we're pausing is not because we think it's a bad idea but because we understand that people have concerns that many questions are raised we want to take the time to take this to to get it right to talk to parents to talk to experts to talk to policy makers and so on um and and we hope what we can do is kind of demonstrate the value and the need for this product um by by doing so but we're not you know it's not we're not doing so because we think it's bad idea we actually think it's a very good idea but by the way in the meantime we'll continue to do some work which i think will be helpful which is to provide on an option opt-in basis parents with uh of course with the cooperation of their teams um the ability to have you know greater oversight of what their teams are doing on instagram so you'd have a sort of parental supervision control a new tool for teen users of instagram so look i think this is all i think this is positive i think it is us trying to be thoughtful this is us sort of pausing in order to do um the work in a thoughtful way going forward now when when you say you know are we in a sense are we just rushing forward willy-nilly on the metaverse and not looking left right not not pausing for the thought not kind of working out what the guard rails should be i actually think what we're going to do with the metaverse couldn't be more different than that caricature because here's the thing as boz i think alluded to earlier this technology is still in its very very early stages this technology the ar and vr technology is going to take at least 10 15 years to come to maturity so unlike the past when you know if you look at the eruption of social media um a decade and a half ago i work at facebook for a company that's only what 15 16 years old as i often say mark zuckerberg formed facebook i think the day after the week after roger federer became first became number one in world men's tennis so the federer era is longer than their facebook era this is all erupted globally in a very short period of time i think the metaverse is going to be very different this is going to be a much much more gradual and deliberate and therefore i hope kind of almost sort of more thoughtful process of building technology whilst also asking the wider ethical regulatory legal and societal questions it how can i put it's almost it's it's very different it's almost the it's almost the opposite to that now long abandoned slogan of move fast and break things what we want to do by contrast with the metaverse is move forward methodically over time and collaboratively with other folk in the industry with researchers with policy makers and so on and i think that's why we can do this if you like just because of the nature of the technology because of the nature of the ambition of that technology we can do this quite different to the way that you describe in the past and certainly not at some breathless breakneck or irresponsible pace but facebook's business has always been reliant on really steady but you know extreme growth and so if you're getting into the metaverse while other competitive companies are also trying to break through doesn't that create some sort of competitive disadvantage if you're going to be as slow as you claim to be going well look it is definitely a new departure for for us that is undoubtedly true this is quite a different um direction it well it's different it's it's a sort of it's an extrapolation of what facebook has always done because it's all about enriching human connection it's also it's all about as as uh boss said it's sort of in a sense moving from as a 2d to a 3d internet it's embedding that sense of presence um and also really embedding that sense of continuity as people inhabit uh or spend time on the metaverse in the future but of course it's it's different in the sense that we're going to be um providing the hardware um that that that accompanies the metaverse for for many folk who want to enjoy it in its full its full richness but crucially the pace of all of this is not really set by a sort of business strategy it's just that the technology will require years and years of multi-billion dollar investment going forward before they really reach their full their full potential um you know we will look back in in years to come and look at you know the stellar glasses which we which we launched in cooperation with luxottica the ray-ban the stellar glasses um just just a few weeks ago as an ex unit and they're great fun to use but we'll look back on them as you know extraordinarily sort of primitive tools but but but it'll take some time before we look back on this uh technology in in that light and that's why we have the opportunity now to to ask ourselves these these these wider questions because look here's the thing sarah facebook is neither going to build own or run the metaverse on its own i mean in fact even if facebook did not exist the metaverse investment in arv technologies is going to progress anyway and and i think so i think the big question is how can we collaborate across the industry to make sure that when users use the metaverse they don't get if i can put it then it gets sort of stuck in the apple metaverse the epic metaverse the facebook metaverse the google meta verse we're gonna have to work together to try and create standards of interoperability so that people can move from one part of the metaverse to the next because what we don't want is a sort of corporately balkanized and fragmented metaverse and that requires standards norms interoperability um all sorts of technical um specifications to allow uh people to travel from one part of the metaverse to the next so if you for instance have your out of our avatar and you buy some clothing for that avatar in one part of the metaverse you want to be able to move with your with with that clothing from one part of the metaverse to the next that is going to take some doing it's going to take some time and here's the thing it's going to take a level of cooperation between what are in in other respects ferociously competitive players in the tech space which i hope we will be able to develop in the months and years to come what you're describing to me nick sounds a lot like what facebook did for content with an independent oversight board it sounds a lot to me what your colleague david marcus recently described to me with the dm association right a third party that facebook is a part of but works with partners to help establish norms are you thinking about or in talks to create a third party sort of governing body that would sort of oversee everything that's happening as the meta first builds out we're certainly having discussions which you know haven't come to fruition yet so i i'm just not in a position to say much more about them um and they're not crucially they're not they're not in my gift or that of facebook to see where there is a way in which um the industry players that are all making significant investments in this space could find some forum some safe and sensible space where they can you know compare notes and work on some of these common standards together because as i described earlier if you don't do that at the outset and that can be either through you know voluntary cooperation amongst um industry players or it can over time of course also be framed through some kind of you know regulatory uh entity or impulse as well but if you don't do that and and i do feel strongly about if you don't do this at the outset and start getting the ball rolling so that we can you know have those discussions across the different um uh you know slices of the metaverse cake that we're all working on then in the end the people who will lose out will be users because it it it'll just it just won't become the sum of its parts and that's what we want to try and create here no one can do it on their own no one should aspire to do it on their own i think it's a good thing that no one can do on their own wants to live in a in a in a metaverse um sort of you know owned and governed by one one entity uh alone um and yeah in in short sarah i think i i don't quite know what it kind of looks like right at this stage but the point of your question which is that you know in an ideal world you would have a forum where those discussions take place i think that's that's absolutely right and that's one of the many sort of exciting non-technical non-engineering things that need to happen to accompany this journey on the metaverse so that we we we innovate institutionally and regulatory just as we innovate technically in an engineering sense one of the things i noticed when you built facebook 1.0 on desktop and then in facebook 2.0 came out and mobile was that we're now just starting to understand how those different technologies when not regulated at a certain pace adequately created a lot of inequality around the world how are you thinking about whether or not the metaverse would create inequality uh as you're trying to build this out and you're starting to dedicate more resources to research policy etc well i think the first thing to say is i mean since you mentioned it we we need to do more research and we need to do that research now and not just sort of play catch up later and that's why i can announce you know here that now that we're we're launching a two-year 50 million dollar investment fund for external researchers and programs around the world and that's a really important point we're not we're not sort of doing this just with you know a small clique of researchers on on the west coast we're we're very keen to make sure that this fund elicits and supports research around the world we're working for instance with the organization of american states on skills development for students creators and small businesses uh business owners in latin america who who want to explore the metaverse across africa we're supporting three organizations called africa no filter electric south and amisi 3d to to amplify african voices using immersive technology we're working with women in immersive tech supporting men and underrepresented groups who are driving europe's virtual augmented and mixed reality sectors and of course with the university working with princeton soul university and the university of hong kong who are doing some research into safety ethics and responsible design we're supporting the national university of singapore on privacy and data use so i hope this program it's a start 50 million over two years i've elaborated on some of the partners that we have identified already and i hope we'll be able to announce more partners and more programmes soon i hope that will provide a an ecosystem of thoughtful research you know spreading across integrity safety privacy data use all of which we need all of which to which we don't have perfect answers yet we're not pretending we have perfect answers yet but we do need to make sure that we um provide the support we can to research so that we can collaboratively come up with those those those answers and as you say i hope that would be of some use that external research to regulators who inevitably over time will be asking themselves the same questions you know as they as they read and hear more about the metaverse regulators are quite understandably going to start thinking oh what's our role here what's the role for regulation and i hope some of this research will will furnish them with some of the data and and prompt some of the answers which they need to arrive at themselves nick we have uh just about run out of time but one very quick question for you which is you're talking about investing up front and all this research and all these policy uh considerations in the metaverse as opposed to just moving fast and break things so in reality when is the average person going to actually feel and get to experience the metaverse is it a five years from now thing or 20 years from now thing when does it actually happen well you you can experience it now and actually you can experience it on your on your phone or your desktop you know you can use um you can have access to horizons and you can buy if you if you can you know oculus two wonderful headset i do my weekly team meetings on on a monday um in the metaverse we all have avatars we sit around a table we have a whiteboard uh we have um this amazing sort of blended thing where you can actually look at your at your desktop even though you're in in the metaverse so it is here and now but we need to make sure that the hardware is affordable that people have access to it we want as many people to have access to this as possible um and of course the the ease of use the sense of presence is is is eventually going to evolve from you know being an avatar of yourself to actually being a hologram of yourself so i think it's only until we get to that stage that you know you and i and future center will be able to have this conversation and i'm not looking at you through a camera or a flat screen but we kind of literally feel we are sitting not just an avatar of ourselves but we are sitting right you know um in the same kind of room together together even though we're physically not in that room ourselves i think that is going to take some time but the the the current manifestations of the metaverse they're there they're here now they're here now everyone can um you know join the journey and i and i hope many people do nick clegg thank you so so much for your time today and thank you again to the atlantic for hosting this great conversation thank you thanks very much you

2021-09-29 10:29

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