Meta Merges Its AI And Metaverse Visions

On June 25, Meta held its Meta Connect 2024 developer conference in Menlo Park, California. Some of our staff was at the event and saw in-person demos of the new Quest 3S, Llama 3.2 and the updated Meta-RayBan smart glasses that are capable of realtime translation and live broadcasting.

In October 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched his Metaverse Strategy. Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become an online ‘metaverse’ and renamed the company Meta.

At that time, Zuckerberg went all in on the concept of the Metaverse and built his company’s focus on a VR future. In an article I wrote in April 2023, I updated Meta’s Metaverse progress and pointed out that AI could derail some of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse’s momentum, but I still believed his vision had merit.

In 2023, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT and unleashed a pandora’s box of futuristic artificial intelligence products, Meta was forced to pivot and shift a big part of its R&D budget to creating AI products for the company.

Meta is now working hard to merge these two technologies, artificial intelligence and the Metaverse, into new products they can offer in the future.

The new lower-cost Quest 3S introduced at this conference, starts at $299, has powerful new lenses and includes Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor and integrates AR into XR. The folks at Toms Guide have a first-glance overview of the new Quest 3S that will launch on October 15.

This new version of Quest 3S is designed to lure more users into the overall Meta XR strategy and should be a solid seller in Q4. However, if you have the Quest 3, it still has more power and storage options and can support all of 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 on the progress of Llama version 3.2. This particular version is important because it introduces reasoning into its AI models.

According to Meta, “The two largest models of the Llama 3.2 collection, 11B and 90B, support image reasoning use cases, such as document-level understanding including charts and graphs, captioning of images, and visual grounding tasks such as directionally pinpointing objects in images based on natural language descriptions.

For example, a person could ask a question about which month in the previous year their small business had the best sales, and Llama 3.2 can then reason based on an available graph and quickly provide the answer. In another example, the model could reason with a map and help answer questions such as when a hike might become steeper or the distance of a particular trail marked on the map. The 11B and 90B models can also bridge the gap between vision and language by extracting details from an image, understanding the scene, and then crafting a sentence or two that could be used as an image caption to help tell the story.”

Meta is making Llama 3.2 models available for download on llama.com and Hugging Face and for immediate development on a broad ecosystem of partner platforms.

In addition to the Quest 3S introduction, 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 broadcasting, and live translation. The new AI features are exceptional and make these glasses even smarter. The writers at Digital Trends submitted a good overview of the new models and features and is a good resource for more information about these new smart glasses.

However, the more interesting smart glasses discussed in the keynote was a glimpse of Meta’s smart AR glasses code-named Orion. Here is how Meta describes its vision for Orion:

“Our mission was clear, yet challenging: to create practical, wide-display AR glasses that people genuinely want to wear. This is one of the most significant breakthroughs in this product — from the start, we leveraged human-centered design principles to craft the most advanced AR glasses in a remarkably slim form factor. By utilizing unique materials like a lightweight magnesium frame, innovative thermal management techniques, and miniaturization of sensors and cameras, we’ve built a device that seamlessly integrates into everyday life while pushing the AR wearables industry forward.”

Alex Heath at The Verge was allowed to test Project Orion glasses before Meta announced it officially. I highly recommend you watch his short video, which clearly outlines Meta’s AR glasses’ vision and potential.

Project Orion is a product that is still years off but gives us a glimpse of how AR glasses could work and enhance our lives in the future. Meta has given no date for its release but says it is a project they are deeply committed to bringing to market eventually.

Mark Zuckerberg’s initial vision for the Metaverse, combined with the power of artificial intelligence, positions Meta to extend its status as a leader in the industry. Watching this strategy will be intriguing, as it is likely to influence both Meta’s trajectory and the future of the technology sector.

Disclosure: Qualcomm subscribes to Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high tech companies around the world.