That he Meta version Meta being a fiasco is something that no longer surprises anyone at this point. In fact, after learning that even within the company they weren’t particularly excited about the idea, or at least its flagship app Horizon Worlds, John Carmac decided to join the negative trend to show some disappointment while also calling for caution about ambitions around the Metaverse.

John Carmack is known for being one of the co-creators of Doom and is considered the “father” of Quake, although for more than one, perhaps his technological contribution to the world of video games is more prominent than the titles he was involved with. . However, for several years he was a consultant on the technology direction of Oculus (before he was CTO), the virtual reality headset company that was bought by Facebook years ago, in addition to being an executive advisor to the parent company. , Meta.

As we said before, the legendary former member of Id Software gave his opinion on the state of the Metaverse a few days ago at the Meta Connect 2022 conference and expressed a combination of things that believes they could have been done better with others in which he shows relative optimism about Metaverse app development and virtual reality in general. Of course, it appears that the speech was previously recorded and not actually broadcast live (ie the recorded video was broadcast live).

The funny thing is that John Carmack spoke using his Metaverse avatar, which looks a lot better than Mark Zuckerberg, although the absence of legs seems a bit disconcerting. The developer explained the recent work at Meta and its goals for virtual reality, but not before acknowledging that some of the goals that were set last year have not been met.

After the introduction, Carmack dives into the technical aspects of the recent developments made at Meta on both the hardware and software levels for virtual reality. One of the main themes was to say that developers should focus on what they can achieve now rather than their long-term goals. That sounds a bit like an admission that the Meta was too ambitious, but who knows.

There are also some inconsistencies. While Meta now seems to be making getting more realistic avatars a priority, and has a project called Codec Avatars that is going in that direction, Carmack said he preferred to focus on generating large amounts of computationally cheap avatars using available hardware because the price, at least for now, has aiming to be a stepping stone in the expansion of the Metaverse. In addition to the €1,700 Meta Quest Pro, the Meta Quest 2 currently costs €450. Carmack expressed his desire to sell a virtual reality headset with a base price of $250 to contribute to the massification of the Metaverse.which we’ll see if it works out with the upcoming Meta Quest 3 that’s currently in development.

A former member of Id Software has called for a toning down of ambitions around the Metaverse and the apps that may be in it, as Meta’s intention is to create an open ecosystem through its software development kit (SDK) to use avatars in virtual reality environments and other third-party applications hillside. Carmac on the other hand believes that the Metaverse’s possible takeoff depends on some app or game helping it emerge in a similar way to how Doom and Quake were in their day.

We’ll see if one day the Metaverse takes off, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen in the short term unless something comes along to make it spectacular. Titles like Fortnite and Roblox, each with their own focus, seem to be in a better position than Zuckerberg’s invention, which seems to have drowned in its own ambitions, at least for now.