Facebook co-founder and head Mark Zuckerberg said he sees huge potential in the development of virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. He believes that by 2030, people will be able to “teleport” to other places using smart glasses with VR support and meet each other at a distance with the most realistic effect of presence.
Mark Zuckerberg announced his vision of the near future development of digital technologies in a podcast interview for The Information:
“First of all, we are a social company. We strive to do things that help people communicate in a variety of ways, from personal text messages to videos and photos that you can post. The holy grail of social communication is the ability to feel as if you are personally communicating with another person. None of the technologies available today brings us closer to this, be it phones, computers, TV, or even video chats. We now have technologies that allow us to communicate and that, with varying degrees of accuracy, help us see what the other person is doing. But there is something else, completely magical, which gives a feeling of personal presence, the feeling that you are directly with another person – all this is already moving to the psychological level.”
Mark Zuckerberg considers VR and AR to be such technologies, assuming that in the near future they will help revolutionize social communication. He believes that by 2030, people will be able to use smart glasses with VR and AR technologies to “teleport” the wearer to other places, for example, to the homes of friends and acquaintances or to public buildings, the virtual presence of the user in such glasses will be so realistic.
The head of FB believes that virtual reality will give a person the opportunity, in fact, to feel his physical presence in another place, making face-to-face meetings with each other at a distance – which now cannot be provided by such VR devices as helmets. Such technologies can lead to the fact that people begin to move less, for example, on business trips. And reducing such travel, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, can help preserve the climate.
“Of course, people will continue to use cars, airplanes and all that. But the more we can develop this kind of teleportation (with the help of VR and AR), the better it will be not only for society, but also for the planet as a whole,” the head of FB believes.
“This will all lead to some absolutely amazing things, much more impressive than just calling someone or video chatting. You can just snap your fingers, teleport – and now you are already sitting in another place, and they settled on their couch and it seems to everyone that you are really close to each other, ” Zuckerberg reflects.
Another advantage of such “teleportation” Mark Zuckerberg calls the possibility of expanding the mode of remote work for company employees, which will significantly reduce the time and cost of moving to the place of work, because it will be possible to “just teleport to work.”
“We talked quite a bit about climate change before it really became very important. In the future, people may want to move less in space, or do it more efficiently, dispensing with travel in public or suburban transport,” Mark Zuckerberg added.
Another important moment in the development of VR for communication, Zuckerberg considers the creation of the so-called virtual human avatars – a digital 3D image of a person.
With the development of virtual technologies and related equipment, virtual avatars can make a real breakthrough in human communication.
“One of the things that inspires me a lot is technologies that allow capturing and tracking not only facial expressions, but also eye movements. Advanced sensors can provide extremely realistic avatars with which you can communicate with each other, – the head of Facebook said, which in 2014 bought the manufacturer of virtual reality helmets Oculus for $ 2.3 billion. – Most of all we are now busy with how to package more sensors in VR devices, so that a person gets as many opportunities as possible to feel the experience of direct communication.”
