Zuckerberg shows off new ‘Orion’ smart glasses at Meta Connect

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has shown off the first “fully functioning” prototype of his company’s augmented-reality smart glasses dubbed Orion, which he claims are the “most advanced smart glasses the world has ever seen.”

At the Sept. 25 Meta Connect event in California, Zuckerberg revealed Orion for the first time, which uses tiny projectors built into the glasses’ arms to create a heads-up display that appears as though it’s on objects in the real world.

“For now, I think the right way to look at Orion is as a time machine,” Zuckerberg said, holding up the new AR glasses.

“These glasses exist, they are awesome and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting,” he added.

Orion is controlled by voice prompts but also through what Zuckerberg called a “neural interface” which takes the form of a wrist-worn wearable. Orion users will be able to make specific gestures while wearing the wristband to navigate and control apps on the smart glasses. 

A pre-recorded demo video showed off Orion’s capabilities, including Zuckerberg and tech commentator Roberto Nickson playing a virtual game of Pong and talking on a video chat through augmented reality.

Zuckerberg framed the glasses as a step away from computers and smartphones, allowing users to interact with computer systems in a way that’s more integrated with the real world. 

Meta also said its Ray-Ban smart glasses are getting upgrades, including real-time artificial intelligence video interaction and processing, along with live language translation between English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

New — and cheaper — Quest 3S headset 

Zuckerberg also unveiled Meta’s latest mixed-reality headset, the Quest 3S, which comes at a starting price of $299 for its 128 GB version — much cheaper than the $500 Quest 3 128 GB headset, which price has been dropped as it will be discontinued.

Meta also killed off its other headsets, the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro, but its 512GB Quest 3 will remain at the reduced price of $500.

Meta shows off new Llama, and John Cena

Just two months after releasing its last major AI model, Zuckerberg announced the next major update: A new model called Llama 3.2, which allows developers to create more advanced AI apps and has a deeper understanding of images and text.

Alongside the launch of Llama 3.2, a new lineup of “natural” voices will integrate with Meta AI beginning Sept. 25.

Meta AI will now include a suite of famous voices, including former WWE star John Cena and iconic English actress Dame Judi Dench.

The addition of Cena and Dench as voices for Meta’s AI chatbot comes just one day after OpenAI unveiled its own “Advanced Voice” feature, which introduced five new voices with upgradable features to premium users of ChatGPT. 

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