Meta Connect spotlighted many Meta products, but the star of the show was Orion, an AR glasses demonstration device that points the way to the next generation of AR.
I enjoyed attending Meta Connect in person this year at Meta ’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Meta Connect inherits its name from the previous Oculus Connect conference, where Meta would announce its latest VR headsets from the Oculus brand, which has now been absorbed into the Meta brand.
This year’s event was a healthy mixture of the company’s many efforts in VR, AR, AI and wearables. Since Meta has so many ambitious projects happening in parallel, it was a great year to attend in person. I’ll start by reviewing the updates to existing products, then turn to the real star of the show: Meta’s Orion AR glasses.Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have been a runaway hit for the company, selling more than 700,000 pairs in the year since the second-generation glasses were launched. These figures surpassed virtually everyone’s expectations, and I believe this success is a big reason why Meta joined Ray-Ban’s parent company EssilorLuxottica to sign a 10-year partnership deal in September. We may yet see the brands kick their partnership into higher gear with more aggressive marketing campaigns beyond what’s been seen at Ray-Ban, Sunglasses Hut and Lenscrafters stores. I’ve had the pleasure of using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses for the last year and have writtenAt Meta Connect, the company also announced a new limited-edition clear frame design for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses with all the visible electronics plus new UltraTransitions GEN S lenses, which transition from clear to tinted in about 15 to 20 seconds. Meta made a limited run of 7,500 pairs, which sold out within a few days of the announcement, and gave away a good number of those pairs to press, analysts and influencers in attendance at Meta Connect. I got to try them out and now use them as my primary pair of glasses because I can use them indoors . Meta also announced new capabilities for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including live translation, new AI-enhanced vision capabilities and accessibility for blind people with Be My Eyes. Meta also added new audio partners Audible and iHeartRadio for added listening capabilities, plus it expanded existing integrations with Spotify and Amazon Music.At Meta Connect, Meta announced a new entry-level VR headset to replace the Quest 2. The new headset is a cost-down version of the Quest 3 with cheaper lenses, displays and design. It lowers the price of entry for mixed reality while simultaneously broadening the market and enabling Meta developers to access one bigger, more cohesive pool of devices. The Quest 3S becomes the $299 entry point, and then as you increase storage, you end up with Quest 3 with 512GB at $499.Election 2024 Swing State Polls: Trump Leads Sun Belt, Harris Leads Up North—And Pennsylvania’s A Tossup Harris And Trump’s Biggest Celebrity Endorsements—Arnold Schwarzenegger Breaks With GOP To Endorse Harris, Buzz Aldrin Backs Trump The big deal with the Quest 3S is that it sells for $299 but still features the same processor as the Quest 3. This will make things easier for developers to target one performance profile for their games. Meanwhile, the Quest 2 can be phased out as the “budget” headset. This move also establishes mixed reality at a $299 price point, enabling developers to build MR apps that can reach way more customers and work across both Quest 3 and Quest 3S. I think this headset will be very popular this holiday season as people shy away from the overpriced PlayStation 5 Pro console and look for a gaming alternative with substance. Thankfully, the Quest 3S will also be getting a ton of new features such as Hyperscape, which uses Gaussian splats to create 3-D scans of places. There are also a bunch of AAA VR titles includingMeta AI is at the heart of much of what Meta does today; for example, it’s embedded inside Messenger and Instagram. It also drives many of the Ray-Ban Meta capabilities, which allows the smart glasses to improve and expand what they can do. Those capabilities such as live translation are powered by the new Llama 3.2 model, which brings multimodal capabilities to Meta AI and enhances vision and voice. This is also the model for which Meta has both 11B and 90B parameter versions that it designates as “medium-sized,” while it also offers text-only 3B and 1B versions for mobile devices. These smaller text-only versions are already optimized for Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware and optimized for Arm processors. Meta says that the 11B and 90B models are drop-in replacements for their text-only predecessors, improving capability without needing more resources or a larger memory footprint.The star of Meta Connect was the Orion AR glasses. These glasses come as a three-part platform that combines a pair of advanced AR glasses with a compute puck and an EMG wristband. Mark Zuckerberg showed off Orion on stage and talked about the company's aspirations in the AR space, while demonstrating the many things Orion can already do. While the Orion AR glasses are a demonstration device—not a consumer product or even a developer device—Orion has helped Meta realize where it should invest for the next generation of AR. I believe that Meta wanted this product to be at least a developer device, but the $10,000 cost made that untenable. A lot of that cost comes from the custom-made silicon carbide waveguides, which were created specifically for this headset. I had the opportunity to try Orion for myself, and the biggest thing that impressed me was how encompassing the 60-degree horizontal field of view was. While the form factor wasn’t perfect, it was extremely sleek, and could be considered acceptable compared to most AR glasses in the market today. The EMG wristband also created a new way for users to interact with AR experiences without needing a controller. My favorite game to try out on Orion was a 3-D-like game that took advantage of hand-tracking, eye-tracking, the EMG wristband and spatial audio to create some of the best AR gaming I’ve ever encountered. While the demos were done indoors, I don’t believe these glasses are ready for prime time for outdoor use. Additionally, when I tried them, they had only 13 pixels-per-degree resolution, which was noticeable when watching videos. That said, the company has already upgraded the display tech to 26 pixels per degree since the event and is targeting 30 for its final spec. Powering that much resolution requires a lot of compute, but too much compute will destroy battery life, weight and thermals, which is why Meta opted for a compute puck. I believe compute will become more commoditized and distributed. Split rendering is the future, it’s just that we don’t yet have enough GPUs in the cloud; that said, Nvidia might change that with its new AI-RAN offering that it recently announced with T-Mobile. a paid business relationship with Amazon, Arm, MediaTek, Meta, Nvidia, Qualcomm and T-Mobile.Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. We want our readers to share their views and exchange ideas and facts in a safe space.Insults, profanity, incoherent, obscene or inflammatory language or threats of any kindContinuous attempts to re-post comments that have been previously moderated/rejectedAttempts or tactics that put the site security at riskProtect your community.
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