Meta seeks to evolve its Metaverse vision with AI capabilities.
On June 25, Meta held its Meta Connect 2024 developer conference in Menlo Park, California. Some of our staff were at the event and saw demonstrations of the new one in person Quest 3S, Llama 3.2 and the updated Meta-RayBan smart glasses that are capable of real-time translation and live streaming.
In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his Metaverse strategy. Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to be online “metaverse” and renamed the company Meta.
At the time, Zuckerberg was fully engaged with the idea of Metaverse and built his company’s focus on a VR future. In an article I wrote in April 2023, I updated the Metaverse’s progress and pointed out that AI could derail some of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse momentum, but I still believed his vision had value.
In 2023, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT and unleashed a pandora’s box of futuristic AI products, Meta was forced to pivot and shift much of its R&D budget to building AI products for the company.
Meta is now working hard to merge these two technologies, artificial intelligence and Metaverse, into new products they can deliver in the future.
The new lower cost Quest 3S introduced at this conference, starts at $299, features powerful new lenses and includes Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 by Qualcomm processor and integrates AR into the XR. The peoples in Toms Guide get a first look at the new Quest 3S coming out on October 15th.
This new version of the Quest 3S is designed to attract more users to the overall Meta XR strategy and should be a solid seller in the fourth quarter. However, if you have the Quest 3, it still has more power and storage options, and can support all the new AI features and apps that will come to the Quest store in the future.
In Zuckerberg’s keynote, he also made important remarks about the Llama 3.2 version progress. This particular version is important because it introduces reasoning into AI models.
According to Meta, “The two largest models in the Llama 3.2 collection, 11B and 90B, support image reasoning use cases such as document-level understanding, including charts and graphs, image captions, and visual grounding tasks such as directional object detection in images based on natural language descriptions.
For example, a person could ask a question about which month last year their small business had the best sales, and Llama 3.2 can then reason based on an available chart and quickly provide the answer. In another example, the model could reason with a map and answer questions like when a hike might get steeper or the distance of a particular trail marked on the map. Models 11B and 90B can also bridge the gap between vision and language by extracting details from an image, understanding the scene, and then generating a sentence or two that could be used as an image caption to tell the story.”
Meta makes Llama 3.2 models available for download at llama.com and Embraced face and for immediate deployment across a broad ecosystem of partner platforms.
In addition to the introduction of the Quest 3S, two smart glass announcements were quite significant at Meta Connect 2024.
The first was version 2 of the Meta-RayBan smart glasses. They have added better audio, live streaming and live translation. The new AI features are great and make these glasses even smarter. The authors at Digital Trends provided a good overview of the new models and features and is a good source for more information on these new smart glasses.
However, the most interesting smart glasses discussed at the keynote were a glimpse of Meta’s AR smart glasses codenamed Orion. Here’s how Meta describes her vision for Orion:
“Our mission was clear but challenging: to create practical, widescreen AR glasses that people actually want to wear. This is one of the most important breakthroughs in this product — from the beginning, we leveraged human-centered design principles to create the most advanced AR glasses in an ultra-slim form factor By using unique materials such as a lightweight magnesium frame, innovative thermal management techniques, and By miniaturizing sensors and cameras, we’ve built a device that integrates seamlessly into everyday life while pushing the wearable AR industry forward.”
Alex Heath at The Verge he was allowed to try out the Project Orion glasses before Meta officially announced it. I highly recommend you watch his short video, which clearly outlines the vision and capabilities of Meta’s AR glasses.
Project Orion is a product that is still years away, but it gives us a glimpse of how AR glasses could work and improve our lives in the future. Meta hasn’t given a release date, but says it’s a project they’re deeply committed to bringing to market eventually.
Mark Zuckerberg’s original vision for Metaverse, combined with the power of artificial intelligence, positions Meta to expand its position as an industry leader. This strategy will be interesting to watch as it is likely to affect both the trajectory of the Meta and the future of the tech sector.
Disclosure: Qualcomm is listed in Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high-tech companies around the world.
