- Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at SIGGRAPH, predicted the widespread adoption of AI-powered smart glasses.
- The Meta CEO foresees a future with “a whole series of different potential glasses products.”
- At the roughly $300 price point, he said, he thinks hundreds of millions of people will use the tech.
Mark Zuckerberg sees a future where we’re all wearing AI-powered technology.
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Speaking with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the SIGGRAPH conference on Monday, the Meta CEO said he foresees the rise of smart glasses in particular.
“I think what you’re going to end up with is just a whole series of different potential glasses products, different price points with different levels of technology in them,” Zuckerberg told Huang.
He added: “So I kind of think, based on what we’re seeing now with the Ray-Ban Metas, I would guess that display-less AI glasses at like the $300 point are going to be a really big product that, like tens of millions of people, or hundreds of millions of people eventually are going to have, and you’re going to have super interactive AI that you’re talking to.”
AI-powered smart glasses Ray Bans launched in 2021
Meta launched its smart glasses, a collaboration with the eyewear brand Ray-Bans, in 2021. Earlier this year, the company announced an update to Meta AI that enabled the tech to work for wearers. At SIGGRAPH, Zuckerberg said the company is working on the next generation of smart glasses, which he said have been designed with a fashionable wearer in mind.
“The goal there has been, OK, let’s constrain the form factor to just something that looks great,” Zuckerberg said. “And within that, let’s put in as much technology as we can — understanding that we’re not going to get to the kind of ideal of what we want to fit into it technically, but at the end, it’ll be like great looking glasses.”
The progression in the wearable tech has come as Meta has simultaneously developed custom silicon chips and made its display stack sensor layer thinner to shrink the technology needed to make fully holographic smart glasses, as well as partnering with eyewear specialists like Ray-Ban and Oakley to focus on the product’s form.
At this point, Zuckerberg said, Meta’s glasses have camera sensors so wearers can take photos and videos, livestream on Instagram, take video calls on WhatsApp, and the accessories come with a microphone and speaker to interact with Meta AI like a virtual assistant.
Meta isn’t the only company working on the latest iteration of smart glasses. Snap Inc. created AR-enabled Spectacles, and Google has been working on various publicly-available models of its product, Glass, since 2013. While the original Google Glass was a commercial flop, the recent advancements in AI technology have resulted in renewed interest in bringing the next generation of smart glasses to market.
Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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