Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/12 – Meta’s VR Event; Microsoft’s Surface Event

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Wednesday, October 12th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Only two big stories, really.

Starting point is 00:00:42 We break down yesterday's MetaVR event, including the new high-end Quest Pro. But did Zucks show us anything that will get anyone excited about the Metaverse yet? And Microsoft's Surface event had a lot of surface refreshes, but was the big news, actually their integration of Dolly 2 with a new designer app. The productivity space is hot, y'all. Here's what you miss today in the world. of tech. The first major announce of the new meta era came yesterday at the Meta Connect conference when Meta unveiled the $1,49 Quest Pro headset, which offers eye and face tracking and color

Starting point is 00:01:22 pass-through video for mixed reality. It's shipping on October 25 in 22 countries. This is the high-end device codenamed Project Cambria that meta hopes will excite developers and seed the ground with higher-end technologies that will eventually trickle down to the mainstream, thereby mainstreaming the hardware necessary to make their vision of the Metaverse happen. Quoting the Verge. The Quest Pro will sit alongside the $399 Quest 2, which Meta will continue selling as well. But where the Quest 2 user base favors fitness, games, and other entertainment, the Quest Pro is aimed at businesses and professionals who can afford its higher price tag.

Starting point is 00:02:02 The Quest Pro is effectively a heavily redesigned Quest 2, with extra features. Its body uses a thinner stack of lenses, which meta says cuts its depth by 40% compared to the Quest 2. It fits on your head with a padded plastic ring similar to the Quest 2's optional elite strap instead of cloth straps, and its battery has been shifted to the back of the headset, rebalancing it. That helps offset the 722 gram weight, which is quite a bit heavier than the Quest 2's 503 grams, though the difference gets less dramatic with the separate 173 gram elite strap. Meta is touting two major new features you won't find on its older headsets. The first is a set of inward-facing cameras that track your eyes and face. These have

Starting point is 00:02:46 several uses on top of anything outside developers might do with them. They're supposed to let the Quest Pro detect whether it's fitted correctly and enable foviated rendering, which cuts down on processing requirements by only rendering fine detail where your eyes are pointed. They also power facial expressions on meta's avatars, which will be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to smile, wink, and raise an eyebrow when you do. The second feature is full-color pass-through video, a midway step between VR and holographic augmented reality. The Quest Pro uses high-resolution outward-facing cameras to capture images of the world and render them inside the headset, which can then place virtual objects in the room with you. That means you can do something

Starting point is 00:03:26 like pin a virtual picture to your real wall, or since this is a business-focused headset, use a set of virtual screens while still seeing the world around you. The Quest Pro uses Qualcomm's newly announced Snapdragon XR2 Plus, which Meta claims delivers 50% more power than the Quest 2's XR2, and it's got 12 gigabytes of memory instead of 6 gigabytes. It comes with 256 gigabytes of storage, and unlike the Quest 2, there's no option for a cheaper 128-gabyte model. It uses two LCD panels that give you 1,800 by 1928,000,

Starting point is 00:04:01 pixels per eye. That's about the same as the Quest 2 on paper, but Meta promises the panel design will give users 75% more contrast and 10% more pixels per degree of sight, among other benefits. You're actually not seeing all those pixels on the Quest 2, although it's not yet clear how different the Quest Pro design is. The Quest Pro is broadly a Quest 2 upgrade, but it's getting one major downgrade, a battery that lasts one to two hours rather than the 2 to 3 the Quest 2 offers. The rechargeable controllers are supposed to last somewhat longer than the headset, but you won't get the weeks of use you could stretch out of the Quest 2's AA batteries, end quote. Hmm. I know this is supposed to be not a loss leader exactly for meta, but sort of a flag planted in the marketplace

Starting point is 00:04:50 showing where meta wants the technology to go. They do want this thing to sell. It's not just a proof of concept. But I mean, that battery life issue seems like a major red flag to me. How are you going to convince the enterprise to use this device for meetings and the like? If after you use it for just one one hour meeting, you have to charge it before you can use it again. Let me quote from Ars Technica, which had a piece that I might actually put in the long reads this week. It was mainly talking about the history of VR gaming, but I still think this bit is relevant to what we're talking about here. Lange gave a simple example by way of comparison. Sending a text. Quote, if my head was the only place I could send a text. I'd never, ever go through all those steps, put on the

Starting point is 00:05:35 headset, turn it on, boot in application, and type it there, he said. But because my smartphone is five seconds away, I do it all the time. So as friction decreases, practical use cases expand, end quote. In other words, whatever you're doing in VR has to be worth a significant amount of trouble. Quote, right now, VR is great for a small number of things that weren't going through that friction, he said. So if it's an amazing, super immersive game, you can can play for an hour or two in one sitting, you'll go through that five minutes to get it all set up for that big reward, end quote. The big reward, in this case, is meetings. So I kind of don't see how this headset can overcome the relative lack of friction that a Zoom meeting has or even a

Starting point is 00:06:20 phone call, and this battery life issue only exacerbates that. But that's just one man's opinion, of course. Meta is forging ahead with their goal to make this a workplace device. They've partnered with Microsoft to bring Teams, Office, Windows 365, and Xbox Cloud Gaming to Quest VR headsets in the coming months. All of the gaming for the Xbox Cloud stuff will basically be sort of a screen sitting in front of your eyes. It's not the fully immersive gaming that full VR gaming would sort of suggest. Teams will actually use Meta's new and improved avatars, which Meta was eager to announce now have legs. So you can have your team's meetings in VR soon and also work on your Excel spreadsheets inside the Metaverse. Meta didn't forget the games either,

Starting point is 00:07:09 partnering with NBC Universal to bring VR, I guess, games isn't the right word, maybe experiences to Quest headsets in 2023 with not exactly games, as I say, but experiences from the office the TV show and also from DreamWorks and Blumhouse and Peacock's streaming app. Again, I think that would mean that you could watch the office on a virtual screen in front of your eyes. But since this was a major statement in Mark Zuckerberg's Titanic pivot for his company, I think it's worth taking a sampling of the reactions to yesterday's keynote. In The Verge, Darrell Etherington said, the MetaConnect keynote felt over-scripted and incredibly thirsty, his words. The long pitch for VR and the Metaverse came off as one of Tech's hardest cells in more than a decade,

Starting point is 00:07:56 quote. The presentation was basically a series of hand-wavy announcements, many reheated versions of prior ones, that aimed to define use cases and domains in which the Metaverse and VR would actually be useful to people. Zuck covered all the old standbys, social gaming fitness, and future of work, none looked significantly improved or capable of acting as a turning point in terms of mass adoption, and most had either vague or non-existent ship dates. One of the biggest swings involved a partnership with Microsoft, which was jointly announced by Zuckerberg and Sacha Nadella. Basically, Mark is so desperate to get people in the Metaverse that he's allied with an earth-while competitor in a move reminiscent of when Steve Jobs welcomed Bill Gates via

Starting point is 00:08:34 satellite link during the Macworld Boston keynote in 1997. That worked well, but it's not yet clear if this will. Nadella himself articulated the main and recurring theme of VR, quote, its early days, end quote. And Parmy Olson in Bloomberg said the keynote did nothing, at least in her eyes, to address the enormous skepticism surrounding this pivot, and suggested that this whole idea really should have been an R&D project, not Meta's future. The event, quote, underscored how Zuckerberg's obsessive and superficial formula for human connection is founded on things like realistic renderings of faces that can raise eyebrows and duplicating office motifs like sticky notes and whiteboards in digital form. Zuckerberg has badly misunderstood what

Starting point is 00:09:20 drives people to new platforms, which is unique experiences and incentives, not incrementally better graphics. Some of meta's developments in VR are neat, but Tuesday's presentation underlined how much they should have been a skunk works project and not the company's whole focus. Zuckerberg's pivot to the metaverse may well go down as one of the greatest corporate strategic errors of our time, and his stubborn focus on expensive hardware and futuristic services suggest a leader increasingly out of touch with how consumers actually use technology, end quote. So, file that away for future claim chatter when Zuck turns out to be right, and meta makes the metaverse the true next computing platform and all the critics look like

Starting point is 00:10:01 chumps. Though, meta's shares were down 4% on the day yesterday. That was all yesterday. That was all but this morning we got the annual Microsoft Surface event. And what did we get there? Well, first up, the Surface Pro 9 combining the Prox and Pro with an SQ3 arm chip or Intel's 12th Gen CPUs, available October 25th, starting at a thousand bucks. Quoting the verge. Microsoft is combining its Surface Pro X and Surface Pro lines into a single product this year, the Surface Pro 9. After 10 years of the Surface 2-1 concept, you'll now be able to pick between an SQ3 arm-powered processor with 5G support and Intel's 12th-gen core processors. And for the first time, you'll also be able to pick colors that extend across the entire Surface Pro 9 exterior, not just the type cover.

Starting point is 00:11:01 The choice between processors might actually be difficult this year simply because for the first time the Surface Pro 9 with SQ3 is the only model with built-in 5G support. Microsoft won't be offering 5G on its Intel Surface Pro 9. so you'll have to go arm if you want the mobile connectivity option. That's been a trade-off in the past based on app compatibility and performance, but both have come a long way since the initial Surface Pro X. The actual dimensions of the Surface Pro 9 are identical for both Intel and SQ3 options, and the only difference is in weight.

Starting point is 00:11:32 The MMWave Surface Pro 9 weighs 883 grams, while the Intel version is 879 grams thanks to the extra cooling. Both models start with 8 gigabytes of version. RAM as base that can go all the way up to 32 gigabytes on the Intel site and 16 gigabytes on the SQ3 model. Both start with 128 gigabytes of storage that can be configured up to 1 terabyte on Intel and 512 gigabytes on SQ3, end quote. Then we have the Surface laptop 5, available in 13 and a half inch and 15 inch versions with Intel's 12th gen CPUs, Wi-Fi 6, Dolby Vision, all available October 25th starting at $1,000 and up, quoting in gadget. There are

Starting point is 00:12:14 a ton of changes in store for the Surface laptop 5 because this time instead of supporting both Intel and AMD processors, the entire line will be based on Intel's Evo platform. That means in addition to the new 12th gen CPUs, you'll also get support for Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Other new additions include an updated PixelSense display that now comes with Dolby Vision IQ support, with the 13.5 inch and 15-inch models featuring the same 2256 by 1504 and 24-96-by-1664, 3-2 resolutions as before. And while the Surface Laptop 5's exterior is largely unchanged, Microsoft has kept one version that comes with Alcantara on its deck while adding a new sage green color option to the mix. General specs go up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, 1 terabyte of storage,

Starting point is 00:12:59 and integrated Intel Iris XE graphics. You also get some traditional features like an IR camera for Windows Hello Face login, along with a 720P webcam. dual farfield mics and omnisonic speakers with Dolby Atmos. Battery life also looks quite similar with Microsoft promising up to 18 hours on a charge for the 13-inch Surface laptop 5 or 17 hours for the 15-inch model, end quote. The Surface Studio has always been an intriguing product to me, so say hello to the 28-inch Surface Studio 2 plus with Intel's 11th Gen I7, Nvidia's RTX-3060, Dolby Vision, and 1 terabyte of storage available for

Starting point is 00:13:40 $4,299 or $4,499. The Verge. At the heart of the Surface Studio 2 Plus is still the same 28-inch pixel-sense touchscreen, 4,500 by 3,000, now with Dolby Vision support. During my brief look at the device, it still has that same impressive weightlessness to the display, almost like the pixels are floating between your fingers as you move the hinge up and down. One great improvement I did notice was at the rear of the Surface Studio 2-plus. It now has three USBC Thunderbolt 4 ports, which will be ideal for high-speed data transfers

Starting point is 00:14:14 needed by the types of creators. This all-on-one PC targets. You can even hook up three 4K monitors. There's only a single configuration of the Surface Studio 2 Plus, and it ships with the 11th gen Intel Core I7, 11370H, 32 gigabytes of DDR4 memory, and a 1-terabyte SSD. It's priced at $4,299 or $4,370,000. 499 if you want the stylus, keyboard, and mouse. That's a lot of money, even for commercial customers who want the wow factor that the Surface Studio 2 Plus delivers. For the rest of us, I'm still hoping that Microsoft delivers this as a monitor one day, end quote. Microsoft also

Starting point is 00:14:54 announced plans to integrate Dolly 2 with a newly announced Microsoft Designer app and image creator tool in Bing and Microsoft Edge. This might actually end up being the biggest announce of the day, in my opinion. Quoting TechCrunch. Seeking to bring OpenAI's tech to an even wider audience, Microsoft is launching Designer, a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics, and more to share on social media and other channels. Designer, whose announcement leaked repeatedly this spring and summer leverages user-created content and Dolly 2 to ideate designs with drop-downs and textboxes for further customization and personalization. Within designer, users can choose from various templates to get

Starting point is 00:15:39 started on specific defined dimensions designs for platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook ads, and Instagram stories. Pre-built templates are available from the web as are shapes, photos, icons, and headings that can be added to projects. Designer will remain free during a limited preview period, Microsoft says. Users can sign up starting today. Once the designer app is generally available, it'll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Subsubs, and have some functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn't elaborate. Another new Microsoft developed app underpinned by Dolly 2 is ImageCreatter, heading to Bing and Edge in the coming weeks. As the name implies, ImageCrator accessed via the Bing images tab

Starting point is 00:16:20 or Bing.com slash create or through the ImageCrator icon in the sidebar within Edge, generates art given a text prompt by funneling requests to Dolly 2, acting like a front-end client for Open AIs still invaded Dolly 2 service. Typing in a description of something, any additional context like location or activity, and an art style will yield an image from ImageCrator. ImageCrator will soon create images that don't yet exist, limited only by your imagination, Microsoft added. Unlike designer, ImageCrator in Bing and Edge will be completely free to use,

Starting point is 00:16:52 but Microsoft, wary of potential abuse and misuse, says it'll take a measured approach to rolling out the app. ImageCrator will initially only be available in preview for select geographies, which Microsoft says will allow it to gather feedback before expanding the app further, end quote. And finally, Apple might not have given me my requested touch ID button, but Microsoft also plans to release its adaptive accessories, including a mouse, programmable button, and adaptive hub on October 25th in Select Markets, quoting the Verge. The wireless system includes a programmable button, an adaptive mouse, and the Microsoft Adaptive Hub, which connects up to four Microsoft Adaptive buttons,

Starting point is 00:17:31 as many as three devices. The mouse is a small, square-shaped puck that can clip into a palm rest with a removable tail and thumb support. The mouse and button can be customized using a range of modular components, enabling users to find the best fit to suit their usability requirements. For example, the adaptive buttons let you add eight programmable inputs to your computer, allowing them to be used as a joystick or D-pad, end quote. And finally, finally, Microsoft says Apple will launch desktop Apple TV and Apple Music Apps for Windows in 20. and Windows 11's photo app will add iCloud integration as well. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/12 – Meta’s VR Event; Microsoft’s Surface Event

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