Meta Platforms announced a new entry-level version of its Quest line of mixed reality headsets and a host of software improvements to the AI assistant that has fueled interest in Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses as it kicked off its annual Connect conference at . California headquarters on Wednesday.
Set to hit shelves on October 15, the Quest 3S will be offered in two storage capacity sizes, the smaller one priced at $299.99 and the other priced at $399.99.
With the launch, the company is discontinuing its older Quest 2 and high-end Quest Pro devices, while also dropping the price of the more powerful Quest 3 it introduced last year from $649.99 to $499.99.
The Facebook owner is also expected to preview its first augmented reality glasses and announce updates to existing virtual reality and artificial intelligence products.
Among the AI updates announced was 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, including Judi Dench and John Cena.
“I think that voice will be a more natural way to interact with AI than text,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Discovering augmented reality has been a long time in the making for Zuckerberg, who positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum opus when he first steered the world’s largest social media company toward building immersive “metaverse” systems. ” in 2021.
However, Meta has struggled to overcome technical challenges with its AR project since then, leading the head of the company’s metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division to admit last year that a product it could bring to market was “yet a few years away—a little, to put it mildly.”
The company has poured tens of billions of dollars into its investments in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies, raising its 2024 capital spending forecast to a record $37 billion to $40 billion.
Its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the first half of this year, according to the latest disclosures. It lost $16 billion last year.
The social media giant is planning to roll out the first generation of AR glasses this year only in-house and to a select group of developers, with each device costing tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture, according to a source familiar with the project.
Meta aims to ship its first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, by which time technical advances should lower the cost of production, the source said.
The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the company’s plans.
Zuckerberg seemed to confirm that approach, describing the AR work and telling an audience at a live taping of the Acquired podcast in San Francisco that Meta was “very close to being able to show the first prototype that we have for this.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the plans.
Meanwhile, Meta is headed for a temporary runaway success on the road to AR with the Ray-Ban Meta camera-equipped smart glasses.
Riding a wave of excitement around emerging AI-generating technology, the company announced at last year’s Connect conference that it was adding an AI-powered digital assistant to glasses, turning a once-forgotten device into a household name of AI in the market.
Although Meta has not disclosed sales figures for the smart glasses, the CEO of Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica said this summer that more of the new generation were sold in a few months than the old ones in two years. Market research firm IDC estimates that more than 700,000 pairs of glasses have shipped since last year’s update.
Meta recently expanded its partnership with EssilorLuxottica and mulled a possible investment in the eyewear company, prompting speculation that the AR glasses could also carry the Ray-Ban name. Immediately, Meta’s roadmap for smart glasses includes plans for a next generation that will feature a viewer capable of displaying basic text and images through the lens.
They’ve shipped software updates this year enhancing the AI assistant’s capabilities on existing glasses, including an update in April that enabled the agent to identify and chat about objects seen by the wearer.
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