The keynote of Meta Connect 2023 finished a few instants ago, and if you follow me on social media, you know that I’ve not been enthusiastic about it, to say the least. But let’s anyway analyze together what have been the most important pieces of news we got from it!
Meta AI was the real product launched
We all were waiting for the launch of Quest 3, and indeed Meta launched Quest 3, but it did it quite fast, as if it was something it had to do quickly to leave the stage for more important announcements. And those more important announcements all revolved around Meta AI, the new AI companion by Meta. Meta AI was the central feature announced at the event: IT was the main product that was launched during the Connect, not Quest 3.
Meta is creating an AI platform that encompasses all its existing products. These AI efforts will materialize in different systems, because Meta doesn’t believe in only one AI (a la ChatGPT) but thinks there is a need for different AIs for different needs. Some of the systems announced are:
- Meta AI, which basically is Meta’s answer to ChatGPT. Meta AI is your assistant, and you can chat with it anytime and from any device, and ask it what you want. Meta AI will be able to also generate images for you and will be powered by Bing search to look for information on the web
- Emu: a very fast generative AI solution for images, that can generate an image as fast as 5 seconds
- AI Characters. These are various AI personalities, that have the face of a real famous person: for instance, you can open a chat with an AI dungeon master that has the face of Snoop Dogg. AI Characters are interesting because every one of them has its specialization (cooking, finance, golf, etc…) and also its own personality traits. They are an attempt to make chatting with an AI feel more personal
- AI Studio: a new solution to let people train their own AI models. Soon there will be tools to let people who don’t know how to code train their AI models.
The interesting (and scary) thing about the Meta AI chatbot is that it will be integrated all over Meta systems. So you will have Meta AI on Facebook. You can have a group chat with your friends and tag Meta AI so it will answer to all the group. You have the Rayban Stories 2 that can connect with Meta AI upon request, so you can ask the AI something, and the AI will answer using the context of what you are seeing or hearing. I find all of this technically very cool, but humanly creepy: basically Meta will have the power of seeing what I’m seeing and hear what I’m hearing… which… you know… sounds WRONG considering all its past about privacy mismanagement.
Zuck said briefly that AI will be useful also in the metaverse to power NPCs, but it was clear that the main focus of the whole event was artificial intelligence, and not VR, and not the metaverse. This in part is understandable given the great interest that there is towards AI, but on the other side, it has been pretty sad to me, since I was watching this event to discover the latest about XR. Zuck didn’t even mention the work the company is doing in AR, or give any update about Project Aria or Project Nazare. All he cared about was AI and how its AI companion will be always with us on all software products stealing our data.
Quest 3 launched for $499
With absolutely no surprise, the Quest 3 was launched for $499 (for the 128GB option). Preorders are already open, and shipping will start on October, 10th. The launch has been very quick, and they didn’t even mention what is the price of the higher-storage tier (the price for the 512GB SKU will be $649)
These are the specifications of the device:
- Resolution (per-eye): 2064 x 2208
- Display Type: LCD
- Refresh Rate: 120Hz
- Lens type: Pancake
- Processor: Snapdragon XR2 Gen2
- RAM: 8GB
- Battery Life: 2–3 hours
- Field of View: 110° horizontal, 96° vertical
- IPD Adjust: hardware-based. Eye relief is also supported
- Audio: integrated
- Weight: 509g
- Storage: 128GB or 512GB
- Connectivity: USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi
- Tracking: inside-out
- Depth sensor: available
- Mixed Reality: full-RGB cameras for color 18 PPD passthrough
Meta stressed a lot the fact that the new XR2 Gen2 processor has double the graphical power of the one in Quest 2, so games can have better quality on Quest 3. This is great because we developers need a device that can render more polygons than we are allowed to use now.
Passthrough has very high quality, and the depth sensor lets the Quest scan your room, so the Guardian will be set automatically. Many features that Meta presented for the Quest 3 reminded me of what the HoloLens was already able to do.
Whoever buys the Quest 3 until January gets Asgard’s Wrath 2 for free, and whoever buys the 512GB edition also gets six months of Quest+ subscription service.
Augments
With Quest 3 Meta will also launch “Augments”, which are basically 3D widgets that you can put in your room and see in augmented reality. Widgets stay where you left them also after you turn off the device. They are basically the 3D elements that you could put around your room with HoloLens: if you were used to playing around with Microsoft AR glasses, you know what I’m talking about.
Meta is trying to give Augments a purpose, so it previewed an Augment that is a widget to see Instagram Stories, and another one that lets you enter SuperNatural. One interesting use case of Augments is to put the trophies you win in XR games in your room as if they were real trophies.
No Mixed Reality Use Cases
Meta went on to show some applications for mixed reality on Quest, like tabletop gaming, fitness, or watching a movie on a giant virtual screen, but no one looked to me compelling enough to sell the Mixed Reality feature. Before the event, I said that use cases would have been important to tell people why they should want a mixed reality headset and I think that Meta failed this mission, because no must-have feature was proposed, so no people will be interested in buying a Quest 3 just to have mixed reality. They will be interested in the better controllers, more powerful processor, and so on, but I expected to see something more from what has been defined as “the first consumer mixed reality headset”.
Meta also announced that 100 new experiences are coming to the store, and at least half of them will have mixed reality features. Let’s see if at least one of them can be the “Beat Saber of mixed reality”.
No big launch of content
No new big AAA game for Quest has been announced. This is for me a bad sign, meaning that Meta is disinvesting in AAA content. The only relevant news about games was the announcement of the launch date of Asgard’s Wrath 2, which is December, 15th.
The most relevant news about content has been the official release of Roblox on the Meta Quest Store, which is already happening today. Roblox has broken every record on App Lab, and it is going to get even more attention now that is on the Quest Store. I’m sure Zuck hopes that it will help drive up the sales of the Quest 3 this holiday season. But honestly, given the small attention that Meta gave to the launch of Quest 3, the higher price than Quest 2, and the lack of use cases for mixed reality, I’m almost sure this holiday season Quest 3 will sell quite well but won’t skyrocket.
Talking about content, Zuck has announced that finally, XBOX Game Pass is coming to Meta Quest in December. So there won’t be new big VR games, but you can play a lot of flat games on your Quest 3 with a gamepad. So exciting.
Some other minor news about content have been:
- A new MR experience made with Lego (Bricktales) has been teased
- Supernatural will now just cost $9.99/month
- FitXR is going to launch a Zumba course
- XTADIUM will let people watch sports like basketball or MMA on Quest
- Headspace wellness experience is coming to Quest
- Redrocks and Iliveradio are going to offer live concerts in VR
Productivity and business
Meta is going to announce next month Quest For Business, with the business licensing of Meta Quest 3. Meta Quest 3 for business will be integrated with the most famous enterprise software like Microsoft Intune and VMWare.
Talking about productivity, PowerPoint, Excel, and World are going to come soon on Quest. Microsoft 365 compatibility is coming at the end of the year.
Ray-Ban Stories 2
On October 17th people will be able to buy the new Ray-Ban Stories 2 smartglasses starting from $299. Ray-Ban Stories 2 keep being smartglasses without a screen that are useful for shooting pictures, photos, and taking phone calls. But this new model features better cameras, better audio, better battery, better comfort… better… everything. Ray-Ban Stories 2 has also important improvements in voice quality, so you can have phone calls with people even in noisy environments.
The first big innovation of Ray-Ban Stories 2 is that now they let you live stream on Instagram and Facebook. You can so perform a live for your friends or your followers directly from the point of view of your head, which in some contexts can be pretty cool. The glasses can also automatically share your pictures and videos on social media channels.
The second big innovation is that “for the first time” (not true, but ok) an AI system will be connected to smartglasses. When wearing Ray-Ban Stories 2, you will be able to ask Meta AI whatever you want, like writing a caption for your Instagram reel that you just shot. Or you can look at a dish and ask Meta AI what it is. As I said above, the glasses will see what you see and hear what you hear, so they can help you in giving suggestions that are contextual to the situation you are in. This feature is coming next year and will roll out starting from the US. I guess one of the reasons for the US-first launch is that the EU has stricter rules about privacy, and a system that sees what you see has inherent privacy problems. But on the strictly technical side, this is what we always dreamt of for the future: an AI assistant that can help us wherever we are, using our contextual information to support us better. So this new feature is both cool and creepy.
AI Stickers
One of my favorite announcements was the one about AI stickers: soon, in all Meta apps, it will be possible to ask the AI to build custom stickers to share in the chats with our friends. It’s a simple thing but can be very funny… I use stickers a lot when chatting with my friends and I’m sure I will love to experiment with the infinite stickers that AI can create for me!
Some other pieces of news
Some other snackable pieces of news that are worth mentioning:
- People until now spent more than $2B on the Quest store
- Meta talked about being able to create AIs that can interact with our communities at our place. But what if the people in our communities create AIs to interact with us, too? In the end, we’ll just create AIs speaking between them… it’s so dystopian
- Quest is coming with some colored facemask accessories, so people can have a more colorful headset on their face. This is a cool idea, in my opinion.
- The event should have started at 7 pm CEST, and at that time the stream was doing the countdown, then it arrived close to zero, then something weird happened, and the stream suddenly showed again “the event is starting in 30 minutes” and started a new countdown that made the event being 30 minutes late. It has been pretty strange that it was delayed this way… and the fun thing is that at 7 p.m., when the embargo lifted, many creators already published their reviews of Quest 3… before it was even launched. It was all so weird…
And that’s it! It has been a pretty disappointing event for me since it featured mostly AI, data harvesting, and AI with data harvesting.
But maybe it’s only me that saw it this way… I’m curious to hear your opinion, so let me know what you think here in the comment section or on my social media channels!
(Header image taken during a Meta event)