“This is the physical world intertwined with holograms,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said after pulling a pair of black glasses from a metal case on stage.
“Right now, I think the right way to look at Orion is as a time machine to the future, which I think will be very exciting,” he added.
The Orion glasses are made of magnesium alloy and powered by chips designed by Meta.
Users will be able to interact with the glasses through hand tracking, a technology that helps work in a virtual or mixed reality environment and interact with it without the need for separate controllers, as well as through voice and a neural control interface placed on the wrist.
Zuckerberg described Orion as a “developmental suite” and said Meta plans to work on making it smaller, sleeker and less expensive for consumers later.
Shifting towards the “metaverse”
Big tech companies have been working on augmented reality devices for years, though most of their efforts have failed, such as Google’s Glass.
Zuckerberg had shifted the direction of the world’s largest social media company in 2021 towards building “metaverse” systems that delve into the worlds of virtual and augmented reality, but high development costs and technological obstacles hindered product delivery.
Meta aims to deliver its first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, a source said ahead of the conference, by which time technological advances should drive down production costs.
Zuckerberg showed off how the AR glasses could display multiple small windows with WhatsApp and Messenger texts, video calls, and short Instagram video clips, though the presentation offered few details about the glasses’ capabilities.
AI Assistant
Meta also unveiled a series of improvements to its AI assistant software that sparked interest in Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, allowing users to scan QR codes and play music from Spotify in response to voice commands.
Later this year, the company plans to add video capabilities and the ability to do instant language translation between English, French, Italian or Spanish.
Meta also announced a set of new product offerings for its chatbot similar to ChatGPT, and plans to start integrating the program’s automatically generated profile pictures into people’s Facebook and Instagram posts.
Among the AI updates also announced at the conference was a voice update for the digital assistant called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands.
“I see voice as a more natural way to interact with AI than written text,” Zuckerberg explained.
The company said that more than 400 million people use Meta AI monthly.
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