Meta has rolled out new artificial intelligence (AI) products for consumers, including a mixed reality headset, bots that create photo-realistic images, and smart glasses that can play music and answer calls at the ongoing 10th edition of Connect at the Meta headquarters in Menlo Park, California on 27 and 28 September.
Kicking off the event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how the rise of AI and metaverse technologies are reshaping how people experience physical and digital worlds. In an attempt to expand their investment in AI, Meta is focusing on mixed reality which will merge real-world interactions with the digital world, Zuckerberg said. For this, Meta is launching the much anticipated Meta Quest 3, a competitor to the Apple Vision Pro, which was introduced in June.
Meta Quest 3 is the world’s first mainstream headset built for mixed reality and the company’s most powerful headset yet, Meta said in a blog post. It’s graphic processing power is double that of its predecessor and it is the world’s first device to feature the new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, the post explains.
Further, unlike the Apple Vision Pro, the Quest 3 doesn’t require a battery pack. In the keynote address, Zuckerberg also said Quest 3 covers the physical space with 10 times more pixels compared to Quest 2 and 30% higher resolution, an HT Tech report said.
More than 100 new and upgraded titles are coming to Quest 3 this year, and many of them will have mixed reality. Xbox Cloud Gaming will also be available for Quest users in December. Its shipping starts on 10 October.
Meta has also introduced a generative AI assistant, Meta AI, built on the Llama 2 large language model, which can access real-time information through a partnership with Bing Search. Meta AI will also be incorporated in Meta's new Ray-Ban smart glasses, which are capable of livestreaming broadcasts of what a user is seeing directly to Facebook and Instagram, a Reuters report said.
The company also introduced Emu (Expressive Media Universe), which uses text prompts to generate high-quality, photorealistic images in seconds. The blog post also said that Meta is working on a platform that people can use to create custom AI bots, which will have profiles on Instagram and Facebook and would appear as avatars in the metaverse. To show off its capabilities, the company has created 28 chatbots with different personalities in the voices of celebrities like Charli D'Amelio, Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady.
“Sometimes we innovate by releasing something that's never been seen before," Zuckerberg said at the event. "But sometimes we innovate by taking something that is awesome, but super expensive, and making it so it can be affordable for everyone or even free."
