Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a range of AI and MR products, including ‘holographic’ mixed reality glasses that operate with a neural interface.
Unveiled at Meta’s annual Connect developer conference, the Orion ‘holographic’ smart glasses allow users to see digital objects overlayed over the real world, which Zuckerberg claims can be controlled by the human brain via a neural interface.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta, explains: “It is a completely new kind of display architecture, with these tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses that shoot light into waveguides, that have nano-scale 3D structures etched into the lenses so they can diffract light and put holograms at different depths and sizes into the world in front of you.
“Bright enough to see in different light conditions, large enough to display a cinema screen or multiple monitors for working wherever you go.
The neural interface works via Meta’s wrist based neural interface, enabling control of the device through brain signals.
Zuckerberg continues: “There’s a few ways that this is going to work; They’re going to do voice and AI, they’re going to do hand tracking and eye tracking so you can select UI elements by looking at them.
Voice is great, but sometimes you’re in public and you don’t want to say what you are doing with your computer out loud. I think that you need a device that allows you to send a signal from your brain to the device; this isn’t just the full wide field-of-view holographic AR glasses, this is the first device that is powered by our wrist based neural interface.
While only a prototype at its current stage, Meta will continue to improve the display system, enhancing its sharpness while also improving the design to shrink the glasses down, and working on the manufacturing process to lower its cost.
Zuckerberg closes: “We are going to use Orion as a dev kit, mostly internally to build out the software that we need to, and we’re also going to work with a handful of partners externally to get a diversity of content and so that we can really dial in the software and experience.
“It is ready to be our first consumer, first holographic AR glasses.”