I just got home from the keynote of Meta Connect. It’s been a busy day; I am devastated; but before going to sleep, I still feel the urge to tell you what my impressions are from today.
I’m pretty sure you’ve already read all Meta’s announcements in some magazines like Road To VR. So I’m not going to repeat what you already know. But I’m going to tell you what I think about today’s keynote and also tell you what the general impressions have been from the audience here at Connect. Let’s start!
The keynote went as expected
Meta today mostly announced the following things:
- The integration of Muse AI with all glasses and headsets
- The third generation of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, with new styles like Aviator
- Meta glasses made with Lisa
- Meta VR Glasses
- Muse Charm
This is more or less what we were expecting from this event. There were no big surprises, with the last one being the exception.
The Muse Pendant was the surprise
Actually, there was a small surprise: Meta announced a small pendant that lets you always bring your Muse AI assistant with you. The pendant represents the smallest and simplest way to interact with Muse AI. It’s kind of a cute idea, and the fact that they are going to release it before Christmas makes it a nice Christmas gift for geeks. It’s not exactly my thing because I’m not a big fan of having AI everywhere, but I recognize it may be of some value to some people. There were no demos about it at Connect, so I can’t comment directly about this hardware.
Muse AI was the main topic, as expected
After an initial teaser of the “Phoenix” glasses, the first topic of Connect was Muse AI. It was expected: we are living the AI hype, and Meta invested a lot of money in Muse, so they needed to give it the spotlight.
Muse AI is a personal assistant, and its main characteristic is that it can be customized according to the user: the aspect, how it speaks, the name, etc. Everything about your Muse assistant can be customized. Meta also improved its conversation skills a lot, so speaking with it is very natural, as you can see in this video:
And if you give it access to all your apps, it can help you with everything, from buying clothes to answering your emails, not to mention helping you with pushing code updates. And it is represented by an avatar that is overly cute. Again, I’m not a big fan of having an AI assistant that reads all my data (Zuck is, I guess), so I don’t think I will use it, but I can understand the value it can have for some people. Plus I think the mascot of Muse is super super super cute.
As expected, Meta announced that Muse AI will be integrated both in smartglasses and VR glasses. Boz mentioned something about the operating system of the new headset being made so that to be AI native. I guess Meta is trying to do with its glasses what Google did with Gemini AI.
Smartglasses made just a step forward…
Meta announced Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, with new styles (including the iconic Aviator style). And it also announced new models for its affordable Meta smartglasses, which now start from just $249.
The announcement was made very quickly. I was pretty surprised by it; I was expecting Meta to spend more time to talk about these new models and their features. But they just talked about the new styles, about the Dolby Atmos sound captures on video, and that’s it. They didn’t even mention the price of the new Ray-Ban Meta or the availability. This makes me think they are just an incremental update, so Meta didn’t think it was worth spending too much time on it.
Even after the keynote, when there were the demo booths, there were AI glasses everywhere to try, but people went immediately in line to try the VR Glasses. I saw absolutely no hype for the new models of smartglasses, because they felt too similar to the ones already on the market.
We were expecting a new version of Meta Ray-Ban Display, but this didn’t happen. Meta instead announced that the Display is finally coming worldwide. This is great news for us Europeans who will finally be able to buy them.
… and their software did too…
A couple of features that Meta announced on stage were particularly appreciated by the community.
The first of them was a solution to help people with hearing impairments with smartglasses. Meta has created a solution that allows people with hearing impairments to use smartglasses to hear better what is happening around them. This is a very nice thing, and everyone at Connect was praising Meta for this accessibility feature.
The other one was the privacy. When I saw Zuck say the word “Privacy” I thought I was having a hallucination. Instead, he announced a nice feature: some of the processing that smartglasses will do will happen through a crypted communication with Meta servers, and the crypted conversation between you and the server can’t be read by anyone, not even Meta’s employees (and hopefully not even subcontractors in Nigeria). This is the same technology empowering Crypted conversation in Whatsapp. We all liked the idea.
… but Lisa was definitely the best feature
Meta partnered with Lisa, the K-pop idol, to create a new model of smartglasses. She announced the glasses with a video, where she also unveiled some cute pendants associated with the glasses.
I think this was the genius move of the day. Lisa has a HUUUUGE following. When I tweeted about the partnership, the tweet went on fire immediately. This partnership is going to give Meta smartglasses a lot of visibility, and also a new audience of young women buying them because their idol said so. When I was speaking with my friends at Connect, some said “Who is Lisa?” and this showed me the disconnect from the real world that we VR nerds have. We know all the specifications of the Decagear headset that did not even launch, but we have no clue who is one of the most famous K-pop stars of the world. In case you don’t know, let me give you a primer: Lisa is insanely popular, she’s one of the top idols in the whole world. I don’t know how much Meta paid her for this, but I think this partnership is worth every penny.
Kudos Meta, for this move. These glasses are going to sell like hotcakes for the target they have been made for.
Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses confirmed
A few days before Connect, there was a leak about Meta going to announce camera-less glasses. It actually happened: Zuck announced the Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses. I’m personally not that excited about them, because I think that removing the camera, you also prevent many useful use cases. But the more options, the better for everyone, so I guess it is a good thing they have been launched. The Even Realities glasses are performing well in the deaf people community, so I guess these Audio glasses plus the new software feature to help people with hearing impairments will make these glasses interesting for that community, too. I personally see them as niche devices for specific niches. And I didn’t perceive any excitement about them from anyone in the community. No conversation I had was about these audio glasses: mostly no one cared about them.
Meta VR glasses
The main topic of conversation for everyone was Meta VR glasses, instead. Meta finally unveiled what we all knew only as “Phoenix”: lightweight VR/MR glasses working by being connected to a computational puck.
These glasses are for media consumption and productivity, and that’s why Meta announced new video content (including something made by James Cameron) and sports content coming for it. It also announced more than 70 games supporting hand tracking coming, including Beat Saber Flow. These glasses are integrated with Muse AI, so you can command them with your voice, instead of interacting with the clunky interface of Horizon OS. They feature hand tracking and eye tracking, and you can also interact with them à la Vision Pro. These glasses will support realistic Codec Avatars, and Zuck and Boz showed a short demo of a remote meeting using realistic avatars at the beginning of the keynote. Meta VR glasses are coming this Spring for $1299.
Now I would like to give you my first impression about these glasses, but I wasn’t able to try them. There was a demo room, but I just waited in line to enter and watch a fucking marketing video about these glasses. And after this stupid video (that I could have watched at home on YouTube), we could see the glasses inside a plastic box and not even be able to try them. What a joke: I spent a lot of money for this trip just to see a fucking video. And not even a detailed video, just a fluff video. We were all so disappointed about it. A reliable source told me that this happened because the OS is still not ready for mass try-ons. That’s why only the big press people tried it, and only in very scripted demos.
Luckily, I have a few friends working in the press, and I asked them how the experience was. All of them were actually pretty stoked by the device. Scott Stein defined it as “Apple Vision Pro meets XREAL Aura”. The device is reportedly very lightweight, has a good screen definition, and a very good passthrough. Its real shortcoming is the field of view, which feels quite limited. I‘ve been told that for this reason, it doesn’t feel great for VR gaming, but it is definitely good for casual MR content, productivity, and media consumption. It seems to be a good headset. And the demo about the codec avatars was good too, even if I’ve been told the avatars are not real 3D holograms, but like 2.5D pixel-streamed billboards. If you stay still, the illusion is great, but if you move, the magic is a bit lost. Anyway, Meta is working to fix it. And calls with Codec Avatar are kinda available also on smartglasses. The capture process for making an avatar is relatively short, and the result is pretty realistic. This is the best hands-on impression I could get for you. I’ve also interviewed Scott Hayden about his thoughts on these glasses, and you can read his full review on Road To VR.
As for the name “Meta VR Glasses”, I personally think it is so lame. Someone suggested they may have chosen it because it is straightforward and it is also good for SEO on Google (everyone looking for VR glasses will find them). But still, I found it totally non-original…
I met Boz!
A final highlight of my day has been meeting with Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta. I would like to tell you that I had a private meeting with him, but instead I just saw him when he was eating a taco and asked him for a photo. And then an embarrassing interview happened… but this is a fun story for tomorrow’s article! So subscribe to my newsletter not to miss it. For today, I can only say that he told me that one of the reasons why they went for this device is that they realized that the sales of Quest 3S were not many more than the ones of Quest 3, so they realized people are ok paying for a premium to have a more comfortable device with better visuals. And Meta VR Glasses go exactly in that direction.
And that’s it for today! If you have ANY questions about Meta Connect, the hardware, the vibes, the free food, or Mark Zuckerberg, feel free to ask them in the comments or message me on social media, and I will try to answer them for you!