Meta Platforms’ Vishal Shah told attendees of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual leadership meeting that the brave new virtual world his company is conjuring will offer vast opportunities for marketing and promotion without the physical constraints of real estate leases, supply chain snags and geographic inconvenience. Appearing virtually, Shah revved the engines at “The Road to the Metaverse” tour, promising brands an exciting ride, albeit one that may take 10 years to hit cruising speed. Meta is stepping on the gas to get there, investing $11 billion in its Reality Labs VR unit last year.  Read more

A new technique for machine learning that allows computers to use algorithms that turn 2D images into 3D is stirring a lot of excitement in the worlds of games, computer graphics and AI. The approach relies on “neural rendering,” which uses a neural network to generate 3D imagery from multiple 2D snapshots. A merger of concepts from the worlds of computer graphics and artificial intelligence, neural rendering gained steam in 2020 when researchers at Google and UC Berkeley demonstrated how a neural network could photorealistically capture a scene in 3D after ingesting several 2D snapshots. Read more

Meta Platforms released its Q4 earnings on February 2, at which time several media outlets have become quite exercised over the fact that the company’s flagship social media platform, Facebook, reported that daily and monthly active users were “1.93 billion on average” and “2.91 billion,” respectively, in both Q4 and Q3, i.e., “flat,” as in zero growth. While sequential quarterly analysis can be a useful metric, it is more relevant when analyzing startups. For mature companies, a year-over-year analysis that compares like quarters is the Wall Street norm. Launched in 2004, Facebook turns 18 this year. Read more

Meta and Snap both appear to have re-focused their social media strategies on video, leading to speculation they’re chasing TikTok, famously the U.S.’s “most downloaded app of 2021,” which at 94 million handily topped the 64 million of the second most popular, Meta’s Instagram. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts last week that even though Instagram’s Reels is the company’s most rapidly growing format, “we also have a competitor that is compounding at a pretty quick rate, too.” ByteDance’s TikTok, Zuckerberg said, “continues to grow at quite a fast rate off of a very large base.” Read more

Dimenco’s new stereoscopic 3D display has been called “breathtaking” and the future of screen viewing. The Netherlands-based company’s Simulated Reality Pro gives the impression of images coming out of the screen without special eyewear. Dimenco defines Simulated Reality (SR) as immersive technology somewhere between augmented reality and virtual reality. Dimenco’s display tech relies on visual parallax and perspective-shifting to provide its SR experience. The viewer’s eyes are tracked by an in-unit sensor that serves discrete left- and right-eye views rapidly enough to read as a single image, allowing you to “look around” the picture elements. Read more