Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his new Meta Quest 3 mixed reality headset, new Ray-Ban smart glasses and AI conversation bots at the company’s annual product conference in Menlo Park, California on Wednesday.
Metaquest 3
Meta revealed more details about the Quest 3, which was first announced in late spring, just before the unveiling of Apple’s Vision Pro headset, a high-end product that will retail for around $4,700.
According to the company, the Quest 3 is the first consumer headset designed for mixed reality. The device has twice the graphics performance of the Quest 2 model and is equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor.
Start of the widget. Skip widget?
End of widget. Return to the top of the widget?
When released on October 10, Quest 3 will feature more than 100 video games, including current titles and expanded versions, many of which include mixed reality experiences.
Meta said Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service will be available on the Quest platform in December, offering access to video games such as Halo Infinite and Minecraft Legends.
The Quest 3 will start at $650.
Conversation bots and stickers
At its annual conference, Meta also unveiled more than two dozen chatbots that will be integrated into its various social media applications.
In particular, the company announced Meta AI, a conversational assistant offered in its WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram applications that will provide real-time information and generate photorealistic images from its users’ text messages.
The giant works with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to provide information from the Internet.
According to a company blog post, Meta will add 28 additional AI chatbots, including celebrities such as Charli D’Amelio, Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady.
Launch of the Facebook video widget. Skip widget?End of Facebook Video Widget. Return to the top of the widget?
The company is also opening its new Meta AI Studio platform to developers, allowing them to create personalized AI conversation robots. These bots will have profiles on Instagram and Facebook. Internet users can also chat with them via WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. According to Mark Zuckerberg, they will eventually appear as avatars in the metaverse.
Chatbots and AI Studio will launch in beta in the US starting Wednesday.
Meta has also launched an AI sticker generation tool using its Llama 2 language model and the company’s image generation model called Emu. The feature will be available to a handful of English-speaking internet users on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook Stories over the next month.
Ray-Ban data glasses
Meta also introduced a new generation of its Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Start of the widget. Skip widget?
End of widget. Return to the top of the widget?
In particular, the device will integrate a new meta-AI assistant and will be able to broadcast live what the user sees on Facebook and Instagram, representing an advance over the previous generation, which only allowed taking images.
Meta AI is also being integrated into smart glasses as an assistant, starting with a beta rollout in the US. A software update planned for 2024 will give the assistant the ability to identify places and objects people see, as well as perform language translation.
They retail for $370 and will ship starting October 17th.