Getty Image / Josh Adelson / AFP
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan sat down with Andrew Huberman this week just days after the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) announced a $250 million investment over the next decade to build a revolutionary new ‘biohub’ in NYC. Dr. Chan and Mark Zuckerberg spoke about their mission to manage all global disease by 2100 as well as a mixed reality future full of holograms.
The CZ Biohub NY will be primarily focused on “creating disease-specific ‘cellular endoscopes’ that can detect early stages of disease in cells, monitor cell changes, and resolve diseases before they become untreatable.” And the New York Biohub joins the San Francisco Biohub which was founded in 2016 and the Chicago Biohub founded earlier this year.
The conversation about eradicating disease is fascinating and comes at the beginning of the conversation with Huberman. Interestingly, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says (at 9:53) “we don’t think that at CZI that we’re going to cure, prevent, or manage all diseases. The goal is to basically give the scientific community and scientists around the world the tools to accelerate the pace of science.”
That’s an interesting foreshadowing of another part of the discussion that comes at the 1hr28min point in the in the interview where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discusses a semi-near future altered by mixed reality.
Speaking about Meta’s newest Oculus and the new Meta x Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, Andrew Huberman says “those two experiences are still kind of blowing my mind.” Huberman says “what’s so striking about the VR (he) used today is how well it interfaces with the real room, the physical room.”
Mark Zuckerberg Describes A Future Full Of Mixed Reality
And that’s where we get to Mark discussing the fascinatingly futuristic ways Meta envisions the future. Huberman says while using Meta’s VR (Oculus) he “could still see people. I could see where the furniture was. So I wasn’t going to bump into anything. I could see people’s smiles. I could see my water on the table while I was doing this what felt like a real martial arts experience, except I wasn’t getting hit. Well, I was getting hit virtually. But it’s extremely engaging.”
Andrew Huberman believes this new VR experience from Meta “really bypasses a lot of the early concerns that Bailenson Lab– again, Jeremy’s Lab– was early to say that, oh, there’s a limit to how much VR one can or should use each day, even for the adult brain because it can really disrupt your vestibular system, your sense of balance.”
He says he “didn’t come out of it feeling dizzy at all” despite being able to ‘look to his left as someone enters the room while playing a game just as he did as a kid playing Nintendo.’ All of this is a lead up to Andrew Huberman asking Mark Zuckerberg “what do we even call this experience?” Here’s what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has to say about that…
Mark Zuckerberg: “Yeah. I mean, mixed reality is the umbrella term that refers to the combined experience of virtual and augmented reality. So augmented reality is what you’re eventually going to get with some future version of the smart glasses, where you’re primarily seeing the world, but you can put holograms in it. So we’ll have a future where you’re going to walk into a room. And there are going to be as many holograms as physical objects. If you just think about all the paper, the art, physical games, media, your workstation…”
Andrew Huberman: “If we refer to, let’s say, an MMA fight, we could just draw it up on the table right here and just see it repeat as opposed to us turning and looking at a screen.”
‘The Augmented Reality Experience We’re Moving Towards’
“And it’s an interesting thought experiment to just go around and think about, OK, what of the things that are physical in the world need to actually be physical. Your chair does, right? Because you’re sitting on it. A hologram isn’t going to support you. But like that art on the wall, I mean, that doesn’t need to physically be there. So I think that that’s the augmented reality experience that we’re moving towards.”
“And then we’ve had these headsets that historically we think about as VR. And that has been something that is like a fully immersive experience. But now, we’re getting something that’s a hybrid in between the two and capable of both, which is a headset that can do both virtual reality and some of these augmented reality experiences. And I think that that’s really powerful, both because you’re going to get new applications that allow people to collaborate together.”
“And maybe the two of us are here physically, but someone joins us and it’s their avatar there. Or maybe it’s some version in the future. You’re having a team meeting. And you have some people there physically. And you have some people dialing in. And they’re basically like a hologram, there virtually. But then you also have some AI personas that are on your team that are helping you do different things. And they can be embodied as avatars and around the table meeting with you.”
I, for one, welcome a future where we can virtually be anywhere we need to be while having autonomy over where we physically are.
Not having to travel across the country for overnight sales meetings would be incredible. Being able to physically replay a lab tutorial at home after class would incredible for aspiring scientists. The educational applications are really only constrained by our imaginations.
For the vast majority of the population, it is hard to comprehend this mixed reality future on the horizon. That’s due in no small part to how VR still occupies such a small percentage of the public’s attention. A 2021 article from Washington Post cited VR game spending as only accounting for 0.4% of spending on gaming.
But as we’ve seen with the rapid cultural shift in discussing AI, emerging technologies can take hold extremely fast. And it certainly seems as if this mixed reality future Mark Zuckerberg is describing is on the semi-near horizon.