Here’s what it’s like to develop VR at Meta (Ep. 513)
Over the last few years, Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he wants his company to be at the forefront of building the Metaverse, and that to do it, the tools and technologies underpinning VR and AR have to be open source. Facebook has seen great success with open source projects like React, so what does it mean, tactically, for developers who want to contribute to their VR ambitions?
On today’s podcast episode, we’re joined by Cami Williams, Engineering Manager for Platform and Reality Labs Advocacy at Meta. Cami has done the full FAANG tour with engineering roles at Apple, Google, and Amazon. But let’s be real, her most important job title has been our co-host Cassidy Williams’s sister.
Episode notes:
Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together.
We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like Horizon Workroom, Presence Platform, Insights SDK, and of course, React.
Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in VR.
Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games.
Blackbishop wins the Illuminator Badge for answering and editing 500 different questions on Stack Overflow.
Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Cami.
We’re taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday so no podcast this Friday…have a good one, and see you next week.
Tags: FAANG, Fract, Horizon Workroom, Insights SDK, Mark Zuckerberg, Presence Platform, react, Reality Labs, the stack overflow podcast, vr
13 Comments
This kind of complacent PR for a complete shipwreck like meta (a disaster financial- and ethical-wise, but results are also dubious) is not great under any standard, this kind of use of developers’ man-hours is a tragedy, from the point of view of resource utilisation (finite resources) it’s a crime against mankind. So yeah not great to see this on SO
It does not align with StackExchange’s recent efforts to be so-called ethically on good ground.
Unfortunately, considering SE’s conduct on the SE network, it sort of does. For the appropriate definition of “good” 🙁
i get your sentiment and share it in regards to meta especially, but it’s important to keep in mind that this line of thinking will only lead to a race to the bottom. surely the amount of resources used on niche software is also problematic? what about plastic toys? and so on.
Agreed. An alternate title might have been “Here’s how money and not questioning the motivations of my masters and the implications of what I do makes it easier to sleep at night”.
I wonder if these same people who are in tech who hate oil companies and put protest hashtags and emojis in their bios are capable of any self-critique or imagination. From the looks of it, not many do.
A crime against mankind? A tad dramatic. Cami is a developer advocate and this kind of content is beneficial for that position. I personally blame journalists who willfully ignore important metrics more than Zuckerberg for the stock price fall. They tried to make the current status of Horizon Worlds the only thing to judge for the billions invested, which admittedly is not at a state to show off, but the foundation they are building in hardware and services will be quite special one day, and I hope soon. There’s plenty of rational criticism and accountability questions to be asked, but by and large tech journalists have resorted to merely pointing and laughing at a product in its infancy. Meta should have communicated where the investment dollars are going much better, to be sure.
Love this one so much! I was thinking…. Is there a stack exchange site for all things VR? I noticed that Cami did not mention SO or SE as a source site for learning or sharing. Maybe it was forgotten or maybe it’s a pathway to consider. Wonderful episode, love everyone’s enthusiasm and future positive mindset.
[~Checking….. systems operational]
AS A FLESHY BIPED I TOO LOVE THIS VERY ORGANIC THINK PIECE. WONDERFUL. LOVE. PEACE. ORGANIC. SO.
Oh get a 2nd Life: https://secondlife.com/
Facebook/Meta doesn’t deserve a free ad. This is terrible.
Facebook/Meta doesn’t deserve a free ad. This is terrible.
Please invest in better audio quality. I want to listen to your podcast but it’s unbearably high pitched and tinny.
My comment ended up on a random article. I don’t log into SE these days, so it doesn’t end up on Meta either.
Can you please fix the extremely annoying issue with the «reply» button below comments?
This applies only to mobile (Safari in iOS, etc).
When the button is tapped, the site instantly scrolls to the new comment section. This is rather annoying. The page content constantly flyes up and down on my screen, when I try to scroll the comments section, and read the comments. Change it so that the button responds to tap up, not tap down.