Janko Roettgers, senior reporter at Protocol, joins Cheddar News to discuss his exclusive interview with Mark Zuckerberg and what consumers can expect from Project Cambria.

Between Bells

What to Expect from Meta's Project Cambria VR Headset

between bells on cheddar news and baker for chad and we're not getting a sneak peek at facebook's upcoming high end virtual reality headset project Cambria. The device features cameras that will pass high resolution, full color video to the headset screens. And it also includes cutting edge features that the company can't yet include on their Oculus Quest line up. So joining us now to discuss is Janko Rutgers, senior entertainment reporter with protocol who is very lucky, had an exclusive interview with Mark Zuckerberg. Janko is such a pleasure to have you here. Thanks so much for joining us. You know, this device is said to give users access to its presence platform, so walk us through what this is and and how is making VR feel more natural and normal for us here. Sure, and thanks for having me. So the presence platform is basically a collection of technologies that's supposed to make virtual reality feel more real feel more realistic. That includes hand gestures, that includes voice interaction and it also includes what you just mentioned taking the outside video and putting it into the headset. So if your viewers have a quest headset at home, they know that there's a couple of cameras sort of on the front side of it that are nowadays primarily used to keep track of your controllers and things like that. But they can also be used to pipe this video into the headset and right now it's limited by the quality of these cameras but on the quest, those are great scale. The video is sort of washed out as you can see in the video actually right next to me here right now. But still you can do interesting things with it where you overlay virtual objects over it. You combine this real world view with virtual reality and I saw a couple of demos that they showed to me. So there was like a monster walking through the space, there was holes opening up in the floor and I could start to like fish for fish. Yes, I could also do that with the hammer and destroy the floor in front of me, all those things, that's a lot of fun stuff and meta wants people to use more of these things. So they are making this past through features available to develop us this week. So we should see a lot more of this coming to quest headset soon and then eventually also to the Cambria headset when it gets released later this year. Okay, so some of that footage was pretty amazing that we were able to sort of get from your sort of reaction when you tried this out. And by the way in your interview with Zuckerberg, you talked about roadblocks and Fortnite being in the V A VR game for so long, how does he sort of plan to sort of compete with those big titans with stuff like this? Yes, it's interesting and Fortnite and roadblocks obviously primarily our services or games that are played on your phone, on your desktop, maybe on game consoles. So it's a little bit of a different league because matter has its own social media platform horizon, but just by the nature of their being far from your headset out there, obviously the user numbers are far lower. And Zuckerberg knows that one thing he told me was, well we do know how to build big services at scale, we have instagram, we have messengers, we have billions of users, we know how to do these types of things. But he also realizes that we are won't have nearly as many users anytime soon. So later this year, at some point in the coming months we are going to see a web version of Horizon, there is going to be a mobile version of Horizon. So he wants to compete with that. But at the same time, he's also betting on making these high fidelity experiences available through headset and he thinks he has a leg up there because it's just on the forefront of pr for such a long time. Okay, so your ankle, where does ultimately Mark Zuckerberg think the company and the metaverse is going to go here? I mean, he has said in the past, look, it's gonna be many companies Microsoft others that are gonna play a role in the metaverse, but do you ultimately think at the end of the day, he wants to sort of own the metaphors No, he, I asked him about that and people have said, well just by giving the company that name, it sounds like you want to monopolize this and he kind of rejected that and said everybody is going to work on this. It has to be open. People have to be able to go from one platform to the other at one point you may even have an avatar on medal's platform and then you can take it to Fortnite or you can take it to roadblocks and it's going to be more compatible with each other at the same time, he believes. And I was interesting to talk about that with him that metal is spending obviously on this. They are having a very hard set, they're also building a ar glasses and it's sort of unique in the industry because right now there's many companies are doing either one thing or the other. So Microsoft is betting heavily on a r there's magic leap, which is in the ar space as well, many things both is going to play a big role in the future, so by having both by spending billions of money, billions of dollars rather on being on both of these platforms and owning the hardware, he thinks meta is going to be in a good position to host some of these other experiences in the future, but also to play a big role with their own metaverse platforms. Janko obviously, Project Cambria is one of many different hardware pieces that met is working on, Do we know when they might be available for purchase? Have they sort of given you any indication when people might be able to get them? Well, Project camera is supposed to come out later this year and I got to try it out. Um they told me this was not the final version and they put it under black cloth. I couldn't look at it closed in and just prop it on my head. It was very interesting though because I got to feel this, this is a lot more comfortable in the quest. If people have tried the quest before, it's a very heavy head, it's a relatively heavy headset and everything is on your nose. So it's sort of uncomfortable if you wear it for a long period of time. This new headset has a better weight distribution. As you already mentioned, it gets color video in the resolution is higher, so it's a lot better at the same time, they are going to sell this as a high end device and they're primarily going to sell it to people to use in the enterprise for work maybe for design meetings and those types of things. So it's not primarily a gaming headset, but I would imagine over the next couple of years we're going to see some of those features that are first going to be introduced with this high end heads that come to future versions of the quest as well. Really fascinating stuff and very jealous that you got to try all this stuff out, Janko Rutgers, senior entertainment reporter over a protocol. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.