STORY: :: Meta

MARK ZUCKERBERG: “This is Orion…”

Meta Platforms Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg unveiled ‘Orion,’ the company's first working prototype of augmented-reality glasses during its annual Connect conference on Wednesday.

“It is a completely new kind of display architecture with these tiny projectors and the arms, the glasses that shoot light into waveguides, that have nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses so they can defract light and put holograms at different depths and sizes into the world in front of you.”

Users will be able to interact with the glasses through hand-tracking, voice and wrist-based neural interface.

Zuckerberg said Meta plans to make Orion smaller, sleeker and more low-cost before releasing it to consumers.

Zuckerberg positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum opus when he first pivoted toward building immersive “metaverse” systems in 2021.

Delivering products, however, has been hampered by high development costs and technological hurdles.

The company's metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the first half of this year, according to the most recent disclosures. It lost $16 billion last year.

Meta also announced a slew of new AI chatbot capabilities.

Meta AI will now respond to voice commands and users will have the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities like Judi Dench, John Cena and Awkwafina.

ZUCKERBERG: “Are live demos risky?"

META AI USING VOICE OF AWKWAFINA: "Live demos can be risky. Yes.”

ZUCKERBERG: "Thanks Awkwafina."

Later this year, the company plans to add video-generation capabilities and the ability to perform some real-time language translations.