Meta Platforms announces its new entry-level version Quest line of mixed-reality headsets And a number of software enhancements to the AI assistant have fueled interest in Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters on Wednesday.
Set to hit the market on October 15, the Quest 3S will be available in two storage capacity sizes, with the smaller one priced at $299.99 and the larger at $399.99.
With the launch, the company is discontinuing its older Quest 2 and high-end Quest Pro devices, as well as reducing their prices. more powerful quest 3 Last year, its price was increased from $649.99 to $499.99.
The Facebook owner is also expected to preview its first augmented-reality glasses and announce updates to its existing virtual-reality and virtual-reality glasses. Artificial-intelligence products,
The announced AI updates included an audio upgrade for the digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities such as Judi Dench and John Cena.
“I think voice will be a more natural way to interact with AI than text,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The augmented-reality reveal was a long time coming for Zuckerberg, who positioned AR technology as a kind of magnum opus when he first led the world’s largest social media company toward building immersive “metaverse” systems in 2021.
However, Meta has since struggled to overcome technical challenges with its AR project, prompting the head of the company’s metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division to admit last year that a product it could viably bring to market was “still a few years away — a few, to put it mildly.”
The company is investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies, raising its capital expenditure forecast for 2024 to a record high of between $37 billion and $40 billion.
According to the most recent disclosures, its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the first half of this year. It had lost $16 billion last year.
According to a source familiar with the project, the social media giant plans to distribute the first generation of AR glasses this year only internally and to a select group of developers, and each device will cost thousands of dollars to produce.
Meta aims to deliver its first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, by which time production costs will have dropped due to technological breakthroughs, the source said.
The source spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the company's plans.
Zuckerberg confirmed that approach, describing the AR work and telling the audience at a live taping of the Acquired podcast in San Francisco that Meta was “very close to being able to show the first prototypes that we have.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the plans.
Meanwhile, Meta has scored an unexpected interim breakthrough on the AR road with its camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses.
Riding a wave of excitement around emerging generative AI technology, the company announced at last year’s Connect conference that it was adding an AI-powered digital assistant to glasses, making the once-forgotten device one of the most popular AI wearables on the market.
Although Meta has not disclosed sales numbers for the smart glasses, the CEO of Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica said this summer that the new generation of glasses sold out in a few months, compared to two years when the old ones had not been sold. Market research firm IDC estimates that more than 700,000 pairs of glasses have been shipped since an update last year.
Meta recently extended its partnership with EssilorLuxottica and has considered a potential investment in the eyewear company, leading to speculation that AR glasses could also carry the Ray-Ban name. Meta's road map for smartglasses includes plans for a next generation that would feature a viewfinder capable of displaying basic text and images through the lens.
This year, the company has released software updates to enhance the capabilities of the AI assistant on existing glasses, including an update in April that enabled the agent to identify and talk about objects the wearer sees.
