Mark Zuckerberg’s Vision for AR: How Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Could Change the Game

I also didn’t want to miss this from last week.

At the Meta’a Connect event last week, the company announced a new pair of smart glasses.   The new Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses offer improved video and audio quality, weight, and the ability to interact with Meta AI for contextual queries. They are available for pre-order at $299 and will be released on October 17. Mark Zuckerberg expressed enthusiasm for the glasses’ potential for holograms and the AI’s ability to blend the virtual and real. Retention will be a crucial metric, with Meta aiming to increase smart feature usage among Ray-Ban users.

The company also unveiled its first generative AI products for consumers, including a chatbot that can generate text responses and photo-realistic images. The company aims to make these technologies accessible and affordable for everyone. The chatbot, Meta AI, is powered by the Llama 2 large language model and has real-time information access through a partnership with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Meta is also developing a platform for creating custom AI bots that will have profiles on Instagram and Facebook and eventually appear as avatars in the metaverse.

So, I’ve been pretty down on the metaverse for a while… but more specifically, the legless, weird version where you spend your interaction time online with others with googles.

But I’m starting to see the augmented reality version become more interesting, and you have to hand it to AI as the injection.    A device with vision whispering discretely in your ear has a lot of utility.   

I still believe it’s pretty early for this space, and these are all still prototypes or experimental visions of the future.  But they are coming into focus more, and my voice as interface prediction may finally come true.     As we get further clarity, the use cases will start to come into focus, and for some, it may soon be time to get moving.