Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will give a keynote speech at the Meta Connect Annual event held on September 25, 2024 at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta CNBC will use its annual Connect Conference next month to announce a deeper push to smart glasses, including the company’s first consumer-ready glasses launch.
According to people familiar with the issue, this is one of two new devices Meta plans to announce at the event. The company will also launch its first wristbands that will allow users to control their glasses with hand gestures, people said.
Connect is a two-day developer meeting focused on Virtual Reality, AR, and The Metaverse. Originally called Oculus Connect, it acquired the current Monica after Facebook changed its parent company name to Meta in 2021.
The glasses are codenamed HyperNova internally, and when the lens on the right of the device includes a small digital display, people who asked not to name them because the details were confidential, said.
The device costs around $800 and will be sold in partnership with essilorluxotticapeople said. CNBC reported in October that Meta was using displays with consumer glasses at Duftottica.
Meta declined to comment. Luxottica, based in France and Italy, did not respond to requests for comment.
Meta began selling smart glasses at Luxottica in 2021, when the two companies released their first-generation Ray-Ban Story. The partnership then expanded, including the addition of advanced AI features that made the second-generation product an unexpected hit for early adopters last year.
Luxottica owns numerous eyeglass brands, including Ray-Ban, and many other licenses, such as Prada. It is unknown which brand Luxottica will use for glasses using AR, but the metajob list posted this week says it is looking for a technical program manager for the “wearable organization” who will be responsible for Ray-Ban AR glasses and other wearable hardware.
In June, CNBC reported that Meta and Luxtika were planning to release Prada-branded smart glasses. Plastic decay glasses are known for having thick frames and arms, making them a suitable option for HyperNova devices.
Last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg used Connect to showcase the company’s experimental Orion AR glasses.
Orion has AR capabilities on both lenses, allowing 3D digital visuals to be blended into the physical world, but the device only serves as a prototype to show the public what is possible with AR glasses. Still, Orion has built some positive momentum for Meta. This has endured nearly $70 billion in losses from the Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for building hardware devices since late 2020.
With HyperNova, Meta will ultimately offer consumers glasses with displays, but the company says it has low expectations for sales, some sources said. People said that’s because the device requires more components than its voice-only predecessor, and is slightly heavier and thicker.
Luxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said Meta and Ray-Ban have sold 2 million pairs of second-generation glasses since 2023. In July, Luxottica said revenue from smart glasses sales has more than tripled each year.
According to Bloomberg, Meta has acquired about 3% stake in the eyeglass company as part of an extension agreement between Meta and Luxtica. Meta has also gained exclusive rights to Luxottica’s brand for smartglass technology over the years, someone familiar with the issue told CNBC in June.
HyperNova features a display, but these visual features are expected to be limited, said those familiar with the issue. They said that the color display provides a field of view of about 20 degrees (meaning that it is displayed in a small window in a fixed position, and is mainly used to relay simple information such as text messages.
Meta’s technology chief Andrew Bosworth said earlier this month that there is an advantage to having only one display, rather than two, including low prices.
“There’s a lot to do with the Monocla display,” Bosworth said in an Instagram video. “They are affordable, light and have no gap corrections, so structurally they’re pretty easy.”
“Conversing with an AI assistant”
Other details of Meta’s upcoming glasses were revealed in a July letter from the US Customs and Border Patrol to a lawyer representing Meta. While the letter edited the name of the company and product, those with knowledge of the matter confirmed that it was related to meta hypernova glasses.
“The model allows users to take and share photos and videos, make phone and video calls, send and receive messages, and interact with AI assistants in a variety of formats and ways, including voice, display and manual interaction,” according to the letter, July 23rd.
The letter from CBP was part of the routine communication between the company and the US government in determining the country of origin of consumer products. It calls the product “new smart glasses” and says the device “has a lens display function that allows users to interface with visual content arising from smart features, and has components that provide the search, processing and rendering of image data.
CBP did not provide a comment on the story.
HyperNova glasses are also combined with wristbands that use technology built by Meta’s Ctrl Labs, said those familiar with the issue. Ctrl Labs, acquired by Meta in 2019, specializes in building neural technologies that allow users to control computing devices using gestures in their arms.
People said that wristbands are expected to become a key input component for the future release of the company’s full AR glasses, allowing data to be retrieved with HyperNova could improve future versions of wristbands. Instead of using camera sensors to track body movements, Apple’s The Vision Pro headset, Meta’s wristbands use so-called SEMG sensor technology, which reads and interprets electrical signals from hand movements.
One of the challenges Meta faces with wristbands involves how people choose to wear it, said someone who is familiar with product development. He said that if the device is too loose, it will not be able to read the user’s electrical signals as intended, which could affect performance. I also ran into problems with tests related to which arms are worn, how they work in men and women, and how they work for people who wear long sleeves.
The Ctrl Labs team published a natural paper on the wristband in July, and Meta wrote about it in a blog post. In the paper, the meta team detailed the use of machine learning technology and worked with as many people as possible with wristbands. Additional data collected by future devices should improve the functionality of future metasmartglasses.
“We prototyped the SEMG wristbands with Orion, the first pair of True Augmented Reality (AR) glasses, and that was just the beginning,” Meta wrote in the post. “Our team has developed sophisticated machine learning models that can convert nerve signals that control the wrist muscles into commands that promote interaction with glasses, eliminating the need for traditional, more cumbersome inputs.”
Bloomberg reported wristband components in January.
Meta recently reached out to the developers to begin testing both HyperNova and the wristbands that come with it, said those familiar with the issue. The company hopes to build experimental apps that Meta can showcase to third-party developers, especially those who specialize in generative AI, to trigger the excitement of smart glasses, people said.
In addition to HyperNova and wristbands, Meta will also be unveiling a third generation of voice-only smart glasses using Connect’s Luxottica, one said.
The device was referred to by CBP in a July letter and is called “next-generation smart glasses.” The glasses include the letters “contains components that provide capacitive touch functionality, allowing users to interact with the smart glasses via touch gestures.”
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