carmack

10/31/22, 11:50 AM
(39) John Carmack Facebook Connect 2021 Keynote - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnSUk0je6oo
1/5
where we're going now if you have any thoughts on any of the topics covered be sure to share them right here in the
live chat because we want to hear your take some of the high points have to include
the mind-blowing developments regarding presence platform web xr and so much
more don't forget there's even more info on all of these topics in our phenomenal sessions that are now unlocked and can
be found right now via our connect 2021 playlists including mari's building an
accessible future in vr session which is such an important topic check that out
along with many of our other sessions with just fantastic speakers and dive even deeper into all the topics you're
excited about okay now it's time to take a time for the one and only
john carmack how exciting is this going to be he is the quintessential leader
cto everything that we're excited about so let's go to him right now
welcome to connect everyone so my process for these talks is that i basically go back through the last year
of internal posts and public tweets that i've made looking for things that are interesting and worthwhile to talk about
and then i try to roughly sort them into some kind of a coherent topic flow and then usually one or two days before the
show i wind up kind of feeding those notes over to comms to make sure nobody is going to absolutely freak out about
anything that i say and normally there's just a little bit of kind of gentle push back on a couple
things and only one time in the history of all the times that i've done this has anyone ever said it's like no don't talk
about this and that was about calling out slam or simultaneous localization and mapping before we had kind of
quest's insight tracking working which is really a silly thing in retrospect but
so i'm usually a bit of a counterpoint to the grand strategic visions because i'm all focused on the nuts and bolts of
things and i'm also usually the one that's a lot more kind of grumpy and unhappy with uh with the way things are
going as i always want more and faster progress but this year i really have a lot of things to be quite happy about by
far the most important is that quest 2 has been a really big success and it was
you know it was a heroic effort to get it out when it was last year in the space of all the headwinds that we had
but it was better faster cheaper one of those just rare combinations that you almost never get to have in a product
and while there's still like a couple minor things where some people do still miss the oled displays or the continuous
ipd adjustment it really was a fantastic product and the market has responded very positively to it i mean it would be
a really big danger sign if we had been able to do all of that and we didn't have this integer multiple uptick that
we saw with quest two over quest one but so that's a sign that things are looking good for that and the whole ecosystem
has been benefiting and it's been a really good thing but there's a bunch of other things that i've often talked
about in these past i connect talks that i've been complaining about how we should really have this why don't we
have this yet and a bunch of them did land this year uh airlink got released where we had oculus link out and it was
doing better than people expected internally lots of uptake for it and we had the existence proof of virtual
desktops streaming steam games and there was a lot of internal debate about this
about whether we needed to make completely custom hardware to be able to do wireless wi-fi
but we shipped it it's great lots of people love it it doesn't work for everybody not everyone has good enough
wi-fi for it to be a good solution for them but it does work for a lot of people and it's kind of funny how we've
got the obvious extensions to this where you've got airlink to your own pc
there's a bunch of language right now where they're kind of carefully protecting certain use cases but there's
obvious things that we'd like to be able to to offer i'd like to be able to offer where you should be able to airlink to
your friend's pc uh one small step from that to some kind of a cloud link where you could play vr games i am you know on
cloud servers onto your mobile system potentially anywhere now there's even more
challenges for that and there's always been this spectrum from obviously pure native is best wired link has the next
fewest problems wi-fi has the next fewest problems going all the way to cloud brings in a whole new set of
issues and we're going to have the exact same arguments that we always had on every single one of these steps it's not
going to be great for everybody it cuts off more potential users but there's going to be a bunch of people that can
find something like that valuable and in fact it's been almost funny how the
conversation has changed so much that cloud vr rendering is now almost looked at as a plan of record for some of the
metaverse options that we're looking at where cloud rendering couldn't get the time of day a year ago but now it's
almost looked at as plan of record to the point that i'm even gently pushing back a little bit on it with like oh you
know whoa hold up there's still a lot of challenges with cloud rendering there's a lot of negatives and other things that we need to factor into maybe we
shouldn't jump right to that but it's been great to see the progress and most importantly for me