Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company is working with Ray-ban on creating new augmented reality glasses.
This product is coming sometime in the future, and it’s in addition to the existing partnership that Meta and Ray-ban have on Ray-ban Stories glasses. Zuckerberg said that AR glasses will get more sophisticated over time. Rocco Basilico of Luxotica showed off a demo of the new tech. And Ray-ban Stories will get a Spotify update.
The announcement was part of the company’s Meta Connect event where Zuckerberg talked about things coming the future. And Meta is working on a lot of things.
Meta also showed off new technologies for people with accessibility challenges. One showed a controller tied to someone’s wrist that could control a game with minimal body movement.
It is creating Project Aria research glasses to map a public place so that people who can’t see can get around better. Research techniques can make virtual objects a part of your real world, said Meta’s chief scientist Mike Abrash. He showed a demo of using virtual hands to interact with a real clothing in another location. He wants to make you feel, at a gut level, that you’re sharing a social space with other people.
Meta is also working on updates to its Codec avatars, which create ultra-realistic 3D avatars by scanning people in a room full of sensors. Zuckerberg did a scan himself and it looks pretty real. And creepy, of course.
“This is some of the most inspiring stuff that we get to work on,” Zuckerberg said.
All of this stuff is research, but it is a glimpse of where technology is headed, Abrash said. Zuckerberg said the company will put people at the center of everything it is building. He said the company’s role is to build the open ecosystem and to make sure it wins out against closed ecosystems in the future. (Ahem, Apple.)
“This is an exciting time to be working on the metaverse,” Zuckerberg said. “We are investing in this because we believe in the future.”