Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a flurry of new AI and mixed reality products, including a future version of holographic glasses, at the company’s annual Connect developer conference on Wednesday, as the social media company seeks to stay ahead amid an industry-wide race to define the next phase of computing.
Zuckerberg showed off a prototype of its Orion holographic smart glasses that allow users to see digital objects overlayed over the real world and which he said can be controlled with brain waves through a “neural interface.”
The glasses are not currently available, and Zuckerberg did not provide a specific time frame on when they might be available or at what price. The prototype provides a glimpse of the future that the company is working toward, he said.
The holographic smart glasses use an entirely new type of display, Zuckerberg said as he donned them. “This is not pass-through, this is the real world with holograms overlaid on it,” he said.
The glasses “do voice and AI, hand and eye-tracking, but theres one more way you’ll be able to interact with the that’s pretty neat – neural interface – send a signal from you brain to the device,” Zuckerberg said.
In a bit of theatrics scripted for the audience of Meta software developers and partners, the glasses were brought on stage in a silver metal briefcase handcuffed to the bearer’s wrist.
The Orion glasses, which have proven to be a technical challenge for the company’s engineers, would represent a major leap forward for Meta, which currently offers a far more limited type of “smart glasses” device. Meta showed off updates to the popular, existing RayBan smart glasses that it makes and sells through a partnership with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica. These glasses don’t have mixed reality features but have voice-based AI capabilities that can do real time language translation, as well as take notes and make reminders for users, such as remembering a parking space number.
Celebrity AI voices
Meta has invested tens of billions of dollars in recent quarters as it builds out is computing infrastructure to support a new generation of compute-intensive generative AI models amid intense competition from Google and Microsoft. And the company has integrated its AI tools across its portfolio of internet apps including Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp.
Nearly 500 million users now use Meta’s AI products, Zuckerberg said, claiming that Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI in the world. The company rolled out new features for its AI products, including voices of celebrity actors including Awkwafina, John Cena and Dame Judi Dench. And it announced the next version of its Llama large language model, Llama 3.2, which the company said can understand both images and text.
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Clad in a black T-shirt and dark, slim cut jeans highlighting a recent image makeover, Facebook’s 40-year old founder touted the progress at the company which now employs more than 70,000 workers and supports more than 3.27 billion users on its various products every day.
“Its been a very busy year. A lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about for a long time – it’s happening – we can start to see how the future of computing, human connection are gonna look and it’s pretty awesome,” Zuckerberg said.
Among some of the other products unveiled Wednesday: a new, $299 version of the Quest mixed reality headset.