Meta has just launched Meta Motivo – a brand-new artificial intelligence (AI) model designed to bring lifelike realism to its avatars, with the potential to revolutionize the Metaverse experience.
While Meta hasn’t always been praised for its avatars, according to the company this research breakthrough allows its virtual agents to have more natural and realistic movements and could pave the way for “fully immersive agents within the Metaverse”.
As the Silicon Valley company continues to pour billions into its AI efforts, Motivo is just one tool the company has recently added to its arsenal. We explain how exactly this development is likely to shape experiences within the Metaverse and discuss if now is a good time for your business to join the virtual world.
Meta’s New AI Model Makes Avatars Move More Realistically
Following a pretty major AI spending spree, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp owner Meta has recently unveiled a shiny new AI model that the company claims will enhance its Metaverse experience.
The model, Meta Motivo AI, sets out to make virtual environments more immersive and lifelike by making its virtual avatars, or ‘NPCs’, more realistic. According to Meta, the AI model solves the problem of digital avatars lacking control over their bodies, allowing them to act more naturally as a result.
“This breakthrough research could pave the way for fully immersive agents within the Metaverse, leading to more realistic NPCs, democratising character animation, and unlocking novel immersive experiences,” – Meta stated in a press release
Much of Meta Motivo’s success can be attributed to the novel algorithm that it’s been trained on. The AI algorithm runs off information from unlabeled datasets and uses zero-shot inference capabilities that enable it to learn human-like behaviors without being supervised.
According to Meta, this development allows Meta Motivo to solve a wide range of whole-body control tasks, including motion tracking, reward optimization, and goal pose reaching, “without any additional training or planning”.
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Meta Doubles Down on Its AI Spend
Much like Silicon Valley’s other big players, Meta has been pouring billions of dollars into AI in recent years, with its capital expense forecast for 2024 hitting a record high of between $37 to $40 billion.
While these numbers may seem astronomical, it’s investment appears to be paying off. In addition to Meta Motivo, the company has also launched Meta Video Seal to try and tackle the deepfake crisis that’s eroding trust across the internet. The tool enables users to add watermarks to AI-generated videos, which are invisible to the human eye but are unable to be erased through blurring or cropping.
Like many other AI models that Meta has created, the company’s Video Seal is completely open-source. While this may seem at odds with the developer’s steep AI spending, the company believes that embracing open-source technology leads to improved innovation and security, due to increased scrutiny from its community of developers.
So, with Meta clearly making leap forwards in the spheres of virtual reality and AI, is it finally time for businesses to jump on the Metaverse wagon?
Should Your Business Be In the Metaverse?
While the Metaverse was a source of derision for many in its early years, billions of dollars in investments later, its reputation has seemed to have somewhat recovered.
Alongside Meta itself, several big tech players including Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia are currently investing in the company. The Metaverse has even collaborated with Microsoft Teams to create ‘Microsoft Mish’ – a platform that lets workers participate in shared immersive spaces.
However, claims that the Metaverse could transform the future of work seem unfounded for now. While the virtual reality platform’s users are growing – with Metaverse currently hosting 600 million active users worldwide – over 80% of Metaverse users to date are younger than 16. This is largely due to the popularity of the platform’s gaming ecosystem, with Metaverse’s most popular game currently being Roblox.
As Meta continues to improve the quality of its virtual world through consistent funding and open-source infrastructure, it’s likely that the boundary-breaking technology will influence the way businesses reach consumers in the coming years. Yet, for the majority of businesses content with carrying out affairs in the real world, we’d recommend holding off investing in a VR headset for now.
