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META CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a major speech at the Meta Connect annual event at the company headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on September 25, 2024.
Orbegozo Manuel | Reuters
Meta He plans to use his annual Connect conference next month to announce a deeper impetus in smart glasses, including the start of the first glasses ready for users of the company with a display, CNBC has learned.
This is one of the two new devices that Meta plans to reveal to the event, according to people familiar with the question. The company will also release its first wrist strap that will allow users to control the glasses with hand gestures, people said.
Connect is a two -day developer conference focused on virtual reality, AR and Metaverse. It was originally called Oculus Connect and received its current manager after Facebook replaced his parent Company name Until Meta in 2021
The glasses are an internally coded name Hypernova and will include a small digital display in the correct lens of the device, said people who wanted not to be baptized because the details were confidential.
The device is expected to cost about $ 800 and will be sold in partnership with EssilorluxotticaPeople said. CNBC reports in October This meta worked with Luxottica on consumer glasses with a display.
Met refused comment. Luxottica, based in France and Italy, did not respond to a request for comment.
Meta started selling smart glasses with Luxottica in 2021 when the two companies released the first generation Ray-Bas StoriesWhich allowed users to take photos or videos using simple voice commands. Since then, the partnership has expanded and last year has included the addition of advanced AI features that made the second generation of the product an unexpected hit with early adoptive parents.
Luxottica has a number of Glasses brands, including Ray-Ban, and licensed many others like Prada. It is not clear what brand Luxottica will use for glasses with AR but Meta work list Posted this week said the company is looking for a technical program manager for its “support organization”, which “is responsible for AR Glasses Ray-Ban and other load-bearing hardware.”
In June CNBC reported This meta and luxury plan to release Prada smart glasses. Prada’s glasses are known for having thick frames and hands, which could make them a suitable option for the Hypernova device, one of the people said.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg A connection used to show the company’s experimental AR goggles of the company.
Orion has AR capabilities of both lenses capable of mixing 3D digital visualizations in the physical world, but the device serves only as a prototype to show the public what can be possible with AR glasses. Yet Orion has built some positive inertia for meta, which since the end of 2020 withstood almost $ 70 billion lost From its unit for real laboratories, this is responsible for building hardware devices.
Hypernova Meta will finally offer consumer display glasses, but the company sets low sales expectations, some sources said. This is because the device requires more components than its predecessors only for voice and will be a little more difficult and thicker, people say.
Meta and Ray-Ban have sold 2 million pairs of their second-generation glasses of 2023, said Luxottica CEO Francesco Milri in February. In July, Luxottica stated that revenue from sales of intelligent glasses have more than triple A year over a year.
As part of the Meta and Luxottica extension agreement announced in September, META received a share of about 3% in Glasses as per the company BloombergS Meta has also received exclusive rights from Luxottica brands for his Smart Glasses technology for several years, said a man familiar with the June issue in June.
Although Hypernova will have a display, these visual functions are expected to be limited, say people familiar with the question. They said that the color display will offer about 20 degree visual field – which means it will appear in a small window in a fixed position – and will be used mainly for transmission of simple bits of information such as incoming text messages.
Andrew Bosworth, Head of Meta Technology, said earlier this month that there are advantages to there is only one display rather than two, including a lower price.
“Monocular displays have a lot for them,” Bosworth He said in a video on Instagram. “They are accessible, they are easier and you have no correction of the mismatch, so they are structurally much easier.”
“Interact with AI assistant”
Other details of the upcoming Meta glasses were revealed in a July letter from the American myth and a border patrol to a lawyer representing Meta. While the letter redirects the name of the company and the product, a person knowing the question confirmed that it refers to Meta hyper glasses.
“This model will allow the user to make and share photos and videos, make phone calls and video calls, send and receive messages, listen to audio playback and interact with AI assistant in various forms and methods, including voice, display and manual interactions,” according to the letter of July 23.
The CBP letter was part of routine communication between companies and the US government in determining a country of origin for a consumer product. It refers to the product as “new smart glasses” and says that the device will have a “lens display function that allows the user to interact with visual content arising from the intelligent functions, and components providing data extracting capabilities, processing and depicting images.”
CBP did not comment on this story.
Hypernova goggles will also be paired with a wrist tape that will use Meta Ctrl Labs technology, people familiar with the question said. The Ctrl Labs, which Meta has acquired in 2019, specialize in the construction of neural technology that can allow users to control computing devices using gestures in their hands.
The wrist strap is expected to be a key input component for the future launch of the company of full AR glasses, so receiving data now with Hypernova can improve future versions of the wrist strap, people said. Instead of using a camera Sensors to track the body movements as with Apple’s Vision Pro Headset, the Meta wrist bar uses the so -called SEMG sensor Technology that reads and interprets the electrical signals from hand movements.
One of the challenges Meta faces the wrist strap includes how people choose to wear it, said a person familiar with the development of the product. If the device is too loose, it will not be able to read the user’s electrical signals for its intended purpose, which can affect its performance, the man said. Also, the wrist strap is confronted with testing problems related to which hand we wear, how it works for men against women, and how it works for people who wear long sleeves.
The Ctrl Labs team has published a document in Nature In July about his wrist lane and Meta wrote about her in a blog post. In the article, the Meta team details the use of machine learning technology to make the wrist strap work with as many people as possible. Additional data collected from the forthcoming device should improve these capabilities for future meta -intelligent glasses.
“We have successfully prototyped the SEMG wrist bar with OrionOur first pair of glasses with a true expanded reality (AR), but that was just the beginning, “Meta wrote in PostS “Our teams have developed modern machine learning models that are able to transform neural signals that control the muscles in the wrist into commands that lead the interactions of people with glasses, eliminating the need for traditional – and thicker – forms of input.”
Bloomberg reported The wrist component in January.
Meta has recently started to reach the developers to start testing both Hypernova and the accompanying wrist tape, say people familiar with the question. The company wants to court third -country developers, especially those specializing in generative AI, to build experimental applications that Meta can show to increase the excitement for intelligent glasses, people said.
In addition to Hypernova and the wrist strap, Meta will also announce a third generation of its only Luxottica voice glasses in Connect, one man said.
This device was also indicated by CBP in her letter to July, calling it “the next generation smart glasses.” The glasses will include “components that provide the capacitive functionality of the touch, which allows users to interact with intelligent glasses by touch gestures,” the letter said.
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