Oculus Connect, Facebook Connect, Meta Connect. No matter what the companies call their annual XR developer conferences, it has been almost 10 years since the first Connect was held - either in person or exclusively streamed online. Despite the impact of the pandemic, all these conferences have one important thing in common: none of them have used their core XR technologies to enable virtual connections among people. Why is that?
Started by Oculus in 2014, Connect was the earliest place where early adopters could gather and learn how to make their games and applications run on the first consumer-grade VR headsets. Engineers, designers, and creative individuals from around the world would flock to this event in California, making it one of the preferred destinations for the VR developer community to get their hands on new hardware, showcase projects, and master new technologies. Although the "magic of startups" has gradually transitioned from the original Oculus founders to the Meta Mothership, this live event is still seen by VR developers as a place of legendary status and a great venue for networking and learning.
Since 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Connect has completely transitioned to an online format. No more hot items, no free candies. For three years, there have been no post-event drinks. Although this year marks the first "in-person" attendance since 2019, the event only allows a "limited number" of participants to enter the halls of Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, forming a sharp contrast to the massive conferences held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in Silicon Valley.
Let's forget about the first six years of this conference for now. During the past three years, Meta has only provided remote experiences - standard pre-recorded livestream videos for developers who wish to "attend" the event live, assuming they all have VR headsets ready to go. I'm not talking about the Meta Connect room held in Horizon Worlds last year, which hosted all the major keynote presentations in a series of theaters, allowing you to watch them in VR with a group of strangers. I'm referring to bringing the metaverse conference center to where you might logically think it should be.
While only Zuckerberg and his team know why Meta has not launched a true VR version of Connect, we can speculate.
Limited field of view
Let's assume that Meta wants to bring future developer conferences into the metaverse. If it relies only on pre-recorded flat videos like now, people may not attend live because they can always watch later, more conveniently without wearing a headset, which means there is no real conference. If there is a segment similar to live broadcasts, including roundtable discussions and Q&A sessions with participants, maybe people will be willing to stay up for a while in the late night in the Eastern Hemisphere to see what's going on.
The emerging social VR platform, Facebook Horizon Worlds, launched in 2020, is slowly starting to adopt basic features that other more successful applications like Rec Room, VRChat, and Roblox already have, and these apps can also be used on various devices outside of the Quest platform. Meanwhile, Horizon Worlds is only available to Quest users in select countries, including the US, UK, Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Spain. Statistics show that the majority of people on Earth do not live in these countries.
Image provided by Meta
The company's social platform is only now slowly gaining stickiness by offering more high-quality proprietary content, such as the latest hero shooter game Super Rumble, which Meta clearly sees as the core of bigger and better things. One day, its in-house metaverse might become the default choice for users, but the company's Reality Labs team needs to surpass the above-mentioned social apps, which have taken an early lead and have a wider distribution.
Nevertheless, the past few years of COVID-19 could have been an opportunity to accelerate the development of Horizon Worlds by hosting conferences and integrating third-party developers into the platform, although this could be a risky move. While attending parties to watch keynote speeches may be a fairly normal behavior in reality, it is not so common in social VR (as we have seen in HorizonMeta（前身为Facebook）计划将其Connect高峰会议转化为虚拟现实（VR）版本，但面临一些挑战。Meta的社交VR产品Horizon Worlds仍在开发中，并且尚不够成熟。一个完全虚拟化的会议可能面临许多问题，例如网络连接中断、音频延迟和不负责任的参与者行为。此外，实现大规模支持，让数千人的头像在同一个共享的虚拟世界中漫游，也是一个技术挑战。不过，Meta正在努力提高头像渲染质量。
此外，一些附加功能可能被忽视，例如临时走廊聊天、排队时的旁人对话和场外派对。如何在VR中再现这些活动也是一个难题。与此同时，Connect是Meta展示新硬件并让开发者体验的重要活动之一。
然而，由于2020年末发布的Quest 2已被视为行业最成功的消费级VR头盔，开发者普遍选择为其构建应用程序。Quest 2的成功源于首款独立式VR头盔Quest的基础。然而，尽管Quest 2被广泛使用，但它无法展示Meta在变焦光学、视网膜分辨率和光场透视等领域的最新进展。
总之，将Connect转化为虚拟现实版本对Meta来说是一个艰巨的任务，尽管面临技术和概念方面的挑战，但Meta正努力克服这些问题。Quest 2节奏加快，带来了显著的移动芯片组性能不足问题，使开发者不得不进行大量优化，有时甚至需要从头构建应用程序。Meta决定不将其核心技术作为开发者连接的方式，并错过了解决这些问题的机会。今年9月的Connect活动将揭晓Meta是否会回归线下活动以及Horizon Worlds是否会举办更大规模的虚拟活动。然而，Meta可能不会完全或部分以有意义的虚拟效果来举办活动，除非能解决社交虚拟现实的痛点。或许下一代混合现实头显能够解决一些问题，实现线下参与者和虚拟参与者一同参与。可能Meta对Horizon Worlds的实现缺乏信心，许多开发者可能已不再需要Connect，将其虚拟化也没有意义。在评论中分享您的想法！
