Meta unveils AR glasses prototype, Zuckerberg's 'time machine' to future

California: Facebook owner Meta Platforms showed off its first working prototype of augmented-reality glasses, called Orion, during its annual Connect conference on Wednesday, as the California company sketched out its aspirations for products that would bring the virtual world into the real one. "This is the physical world with holograms overlaid on it," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said after pulling out the chunky black glasses from a metal case dramatically brought to him on stage.

"For now, I think the right way to look at Orion is as a time machine," he said. "These glasses exist, they are awesome and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting." Meta also showed off new AI chatbot capabilities for its services and a new Quest mixed-reality headset. Meta shares registered a record closing high on Wednesday, up 0.9% at $568.31.

The Orion glasses are made of magnesium alloy and powered by custom silicon designed by Meta. Users will be able to interact with the glasses through hand-tracking, voice and wrist-based neural interface. Meta plans to work on making it smaller, sleeker and more low-cost before releasing it to consumers later on, Zuckerberg said.

Big Tech has been developing AR devices for years, although the most notable ones have been failures, such as Google's Glass glasses.

Zuckerberg positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum opus when he first pivoted the world’s biggest social media company toward building immersive “metaverse” systems in 2021. Delivering products, however, has been hampered by high development costs and technological hurdles.

Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, said there was no doubt of Meta's aspiration to make virtual- and augmented-reality products as mass-market and affordable as possible. But he added that users were "still wary of AI" and needed some convincing.

Meta aims to ship its first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, by which point technical breakthroughs should bring down the cost of production, a source said before the event.

Zuckerberg did not demonstrate Orion's capabilities directly
during his announcement, instead playing a video showing how
people reacted to the device when they tried it. The video
showed a few glimpses of text messages and images displayed
through the glasses, and the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen
Huang, was prominent among the testers.

The closest thing to the prototype currently is the Ray-Ban
Meta smart glasses, which initially inspired little interest but
caught on last year after Meta added an AI assistant. Meta
announced AI enhancements to those glasses this year, making it
possible for users, for example, to scan QR codes and stream
music from Spotify in response to voice prompts.

Later this year, the company plans to add video-generation
capabilities and the ability to perform real-time language
translation between English and French, Italian or Spanish.
Zuckerberg held a live conversation with Mexican mixed martial
arts fighter Brandon Moreno demonstrating the language tool, in
which the glasses spoke translations from English to Spanish and
vice versa.

Meta also announced a raft of other new product offerings
for its ChatGPT-like chatbot, as well as plans to start
automatically injecting personalized images created by the bot
into people's Facebook and Instagram feeds.
Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the
digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to
voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant
sound like celebrities including Judi Dench and John Cena.

“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of
interacting with AI than text," Zuckerberg said.

The company said more than 400 million people are using Meta
AI monthly, including 185 million who are returning to it
weekly.

In keeping with its strategy of sharing the AI models
powering its digital agent for mostly free use by others, Meta
released three new versions of its Llama 3 models, although it
withheld the models from the European Union in light of
regulations there.

Meta also announced an entry-level version of its Quest line
of mixed-reality headsets, the Quest 3S, which will start at
$300, and cut the price of the Quest 3 introduced last year.

The company has been plowing tens of billions of dollars
into its investments in artificial intelligence, augmented
reality and other metaverse technologies, driving up its capital
expense forecast for 2024 to a record high of between $37
billion and $40 billion.

Its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the
first half of this year, according to the most recent
disclosures. It lost $16 billion last year.