On 11th October 2022, there was an event called Meta Connect 2022 which was being held virtually. Prior to this, the event name is Facebook Connect. This is the first “Connect” event after they rebrand their company name from “Facebook” to “Meta“.
They also rename the event as Meta Connect. In case you missed it, here we are sharing with you the top main highlights during the Meta Connect 2022 keynote event.
What is Meta Connect?
Firstly, Meta Connect is a virtual event that explores the building of the metaverse and the future of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Industry leaders will share the latest technologies in this one day event and developer sessions will cover how to use them.
Their goal is to bring the world closer together and deepen human connection through new experiences. Let’s go through the key highlights below…
1) Meta Quest Pro
This is the definitely the biggest announcement and most anticipated highlight during the keynote. Targeted at professional & business users, Meta Quest Pro is the major upgrade of Meta Quest 2. The pancake optic lenses made the Quest Pro become much smaller and lighter than Quest 2.
But the true Unique Selling Point (USP) of this Meta Quest Pro is the seamless mixed reality capability where you can see your real surrounding while navigating the virtual world. This will be very useful during virtual office meeting with other colleagues around the world.
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The price is USD 1,499.99 and you can pre-order it now. It is expected to ship on 25th October 2022.
2) Marvel’s Iron Man VR
Among all the games that they mentioned, we really excited about this Iron Man VR game. It is expected to be released on 3rd November 2022. You can visit the Quest Store for more info about it. Wish the game is there before Tony Stark died in “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019. Sigh…
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3) Knee Strikes with Supernatural
Okay, this is an awesome capability with VR fitness apps! At the end of the month, Supernatural apps is launching the knee strikes feature. This will enable you to better work your lower body part.
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Looks like one day we can also do stuffs like Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) in VR, rite? Can’t wait to recreate the scenes from “Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior” movie 🙂
4) Partnership with Microsoft & Accenture
During the event, Mark Zuckerberg announced the collaboration and partnership with two giants companies which are Microsoft and Accenture. Soon, you can also use your Meta Avatar inside the Microsoft Teams. That’s not all, later Quest 2 and Quest Pro user can also enjoy using Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Windows 365, Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune in their VR devices.
The most interesting of all is that, soon, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming will also be available at Meta Quest Store. During the key note, Mark Zuckerberg also invited Microsoft’s chairman & CEO, Satya Nadella to talk about it.
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After finished with Microsoft, Mark continued by inviting Accenture’s chair and CEO, Julie Sweet, to share their success story on VR and metaverse.
During her talk, Julie Sweet shared their experience of deploying 60,000 Quest 2 headsets to Accenture staffs and also the onboarding process of 150,000 people onto their virtual campus that they called the “Nth Floor“. What a number!!
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From what we understand, Accenture will continue to support the scaling of the metaverse in the enterprise sectors and to make the VR for a work a reality.
The alliance with strong and big companies like Microsoft and Accenture will definitely give Meta a push to support its metaverse vision. Like what Julie mentioned, it is a “Perfect Trifecta“.
5) Meta Quest for Business
Mark also announced that next year they will launch “Meta Quest for Business“. It is a subscription bundle for Quest 2 and Quest Pro that will include suite of features like work accounts, device and application management, premium support, access to integrations and many more.
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6) Avatars Will Have Leg
Right now, your avatar only has upper half body in VR. Soon, your avatar can have a full body including legs. According to Mark Zuckerberg, this is the most requested feature in the virtual world.
And he is really excited with it. Even he jumped in the mid-air during the keynote session to demoed the capability. See the picture below…
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7) Neural Radiance Fields
The Neural Radiance Fields is still in research mode. The main purpose is to easily reconstruct the 3D objects based on the real, physical objects just by scanning them. According to them, this approach can reproduce even the finest details of that object.
During the keynote, Mark used his smart phone to scan a teddy bear and here is the result…
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Looks quite real, huh?
8) Codec Avatars
Although this is the last highlight during Meta Connect 2022, but this is the eye catcher for us since as much as possible we would like to see real face in the virtual world instead of the cartoonish avatar.
Here we can see Mark Zuckerberg use his own face as the Codec Avatar which looks nearly real and he performed some of the facial expression like raising an eyebrow, squinting, widening eyes and scrunching his nose. It’s hard to distinguish whether it is a digital avatar or his own face.
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Lastly…
From the keynote by Mark Zuckerberg, we are quite relieved when the word “VR” and “virtual reality” are frequently mentioned by him. It shows that virtual reality is still relevant today and it is just the real beginning of it.
For more details and other highlights during Meta Connect 2022, you can read it at their website at https://www.metaconnect.com/. You can also watch from Meta’s YouTube channel as well…
You can also watched the recorded keynote sessions in their FB page at “Facebook Reality Labs“. If you would like to see other events related with VR, you can get it from here as well.
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