09/26/2024
Meta’s quest to put a computer that sees and hears everything onto everyone’s face spun a run of public losses into a win this week. The social networking, metaverse and AI giant demonstrated at its annual developer conference yesterday:
▪ Project Orion mixed-reality glasses
▪ Quest 3S entry-level virtual reality headset
▪ new functions for its Ray-Ban glasses’ AI agent
▪ added features for Meta AI
▪ the latest version of its Llama large language model
The Project Orion kit — very chunky wireless glasses, a computing “puck” about the size of a standard phone-charging external battery, and a gesture-sensing “neural” wristband, using hardware custom-built in a decade-long effort — was originally intended for release as a consumer product by now but was shelved in 2022 amid cutbacks and high production costs that remain, relegating it to internal prototype status.
Even so, the company — whose stock price stumbled along with its odd but opportunistic rebranding from Facebook to Meta three years ago, a poorly received $1,500 Pro headset two years ago and underwhelming original VR social experiences to date — managed to spark new excitement with the planned-product turned prototype Orion demonstration.
Meta showed a functioning vision of a future inching ever closer in which the digital world is not a mere display or overlay of data on the physical world, but an integrated one where people can interact with so-called “hologram” objects, avatars and each other almost naturally.
While a consumer version of Orion glasses optimistically remains at least two to three years away, Meta is bringing pieces of the larger vision into the world today:
▪ The new Quest 3S headset is priced to make virtual reality a little more accessible, with $300 and $400 versions, and a $150 price drop on last year’s Quest 3 to $500
▪ Ray-Ban Meta glasses hardware unchanged, but the fashion-first voice-controlled photo and video device gains an upgraded AI agent that offers instant language translation and improved search capabilities
▪ Meta AI search adds a voice to respond to queries, enhanced visual search and contextual image editing
▪ an expanded open-source Llama LLM powers the Ray-Ban and Meta AI features, along with improved text-based versions for mobile and edge devices, while vision and voice functions enable it to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI.
The gradual march to reaching that future world slowly seeping into ours offers all an extended opportunity to rethink and reinvent themselves for the convergent AI, immersive and spatial era I've been talking about for over a decade.
For journalists and news organizations, the new suite of products, tools, features and glimpse of the future signal areas to explore and experiment, with an eye to developing experiences and products that capitalize on the unique features and contexts they enable. Imagine novel and better ways to help people stay well-informed, apply that knowledge in meaningful ways, and establish new lines of business and revenue along the way..
If the past 25 years have taught us anything, it should be to invest in innovation, our audiences and ourselves instead of waiting for someone else to figure things out and reap the rewards while we play the costly game of catching up.
https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/everything-announced-at-meta-connect-2024-202733568.html
