Zuckerberg shows off Orion AR glasses, Quest 3s, limited edition Ray-Ban at Meta Connect 2024
Contributor since / Followers
COM & O
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced five key things at the much anticipated Meta Connect 2024 live event on Wednesday.
The highlight of the event was the Orion prototype mixed reality glasses, which the tech giant CEO claims to be the company’s “first true holographic augmented reality glasses.” For now, only company employees and select external audiences have access to the prototype, who will contribute to the research and development of a consumer-grade version of the AR product.
Zuckerberg introduced the Meta Quest 3s virtual reality headset, a cheaper version of the Quest 3 from earlier this year, starting from $299.99 for the base model and will ship from October 15 onwards. He also slashed prices for the 512GB variant of the Meta Quest 3 device by $150 to $499.99.
On news around artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg demonstrated features of the voice options for the AI assistant. Users will be able to talk to Meta AI on Messenger, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram DM and choose from different voice options for their assistant, including celebrities like Awkwafina, John Cena, and Kristen Bell, among others.
He said the company is even testing a Meta AI translation tool that will automatically translate the audio of reels on Instagram with automatic dubbing and lip syncing.
Zuckerberg said new AI features are also coming to Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the company has advanced on partnerships with Spotify and Amazon Music and signed new ones with Audible and iHeart Radio to improve audio content experience on the glasses. Notably, he unveiled a pair of transparent special edition Ray-Ban Meta glasses, of which only 7,500 pairs would be available.
For the latest open source AI offering, Zuckerberg announced Llama 3.2, which includes small and medium-sized vision LLMs (11B and 90B) and lightweight, text-only models (1B and 3B) that fit onto edge and mobile devices, including pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions.