Mark Zuckerberg wants you to teleport with AR and VR instead of normal transport

While many offices around the world may have shut during the pandemic, some have slowly begun functioning - albeit with smaller capacities and for shorter hours. However, travelling without a proper Covid-19 vaccine rollout is still risky, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now stated that he is working to help people avoid that.

In an interaction on the increasingly popular Clubhouse app last week, Zuckerberg said that the company was developing Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies to help people move around virtually instead of using transportation. “It is going to unlock a lot of economic opportunity because people will be able to live where they want and increasingly work where they want and kind of teleport into place,” Zuckerberg said.

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“I think the progress is steady, I’m proud of what the team is doing. There’s a lot of foundational technologies to build. What augmented and virtual reality is really all about is delivering this sense of presence - this feeling that you’re really there with the other person..like being able to teleport without ever travelling,” the Facebook CEO said.

However, Zuckerberg said that there’s a lot of work to be done on the AR and VR front. There are all the graphics and visual systems that are required for immersion in the space. “There's a long path of technology that needs to get done to kind of get that to be as realistic as you would want on VR," he added. However, unlike VR, which takes up your regular field of view and blocks out everything that’s not on the VR display, AR is much more complicated.

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AR would prove to be even more challenging, Zuckerberg said. “If people are going to be wearing this around all day it needs to fit into a pretty small form factor, like glasses..you’re basically taking a lot of technology that doesn’t even exist yet and miniaturing it down so its a few millimetres thick and work all day with battery,” he explained.