Meta’s annual Connect conference has begun in Menlo Park, California, so we’ve tried on its new Orion AR glasses with Mark Zuckerberg and listened through a whole lot of AI news.
Over the past year, Meta has made a big push to integrate AI features into the platforms it owns, and it’s not slowing down, with more image generator prompts in your feed, celebrity chatbot voices, and a new AI model: Llama 3.2.
There are also Meta’s smart glasses with Ray-Ban, which can remember things for you wholesale, and the Meta Quest line of headsets, which is saying goodbye to the Quest 2 and Quest Pro while adding the new Quest 3S.
Read on below for all of the details from Meta Connect 2024.
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The biggest news from Meta Connect 2024
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Meta has a bunch of new hardware and AI news coming out of its Meta Connect event today, including a new Quest 3S VR headset, an expansion of Meta AI features, a new Llama model, and a first look at the new Orion augmented reality glasses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage on Wednesday with a new style and demonstrated new features including live translation between English and Spanish.
Here’s everything announced at Meta Connect:
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Welcome to Meta’s future, where everyone wears cameras See that little circle? That’s a camera.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
All around Meta’s Menlo Park campus, cameras stared at me. I’m not talking about security cameras or my fellow reporters’ DSLRs. I’m not even talking about smartphones. I mean Ray-Ban and Meta’s smart glasses, which Meta hopes we’ll all — one day, in some form — wear.
I visited Meta for this year’s Connect conference, where just about every hardware product involved cameras. They’re on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that got a software update, the new Quest 3S virtual reality headset, and Meta’s prototype Orion AR glasses. Orion is what Meta calls a “time machine”: a functioning example of what full-fledged AR could look like, years before it will be consumer-ready.
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Meta’s new smart glasses look like the future
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge
You can’t buy Meta’s most impressive new product, the smart glasses codenamed Orion. You might be able to buy something sort of like them a few years from now, but most of us will never get to so much as wear them. That doesn’t necessarily make them less impressive, though, or less important. Orion is a statement of purpose from Meta: that AR glasses really are the future and that we’re eventually going to get there.
On this episode of The Vergecast , The Verge’s Alex Heath joins the show to tell us all about his experience with Orion — two hours in the glasses of the future, playing Pong with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and making smoothies and doing all sorts of other things. He also tells us about his conversation with Zuckerberg (subscribe to Decoder !) about AR, AI, and the future of just about everything.
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Kristen Bell told Instagram to ‘get rid of AI’ before she became its official voice
Photo by Tommaso Boddi / Variety via Getty Images
Meta has cut deals for high-profile actors to lend their voices to its Meta AI chatbot, with Kristen Bell among the initial set of voices. Bell lending her voice is a bit of a surprise. Back in June, she openly expressed opposition to Meta’s AI using her data.
She reposted a popular Instagram message declaring that she refused to consent to Meta using her content and likeness for training large language models and demanding that Instagram “get rid of the AI program.”
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Turns out, there are only 7,500 of those clear Meta Ray-Bans…
They’re on sale now for $429 — an extra $100 more than the other translucent models — and are only available in the “standard” size. The limited-edition frames do come with transition lenses and “an exclusive custom-designed black case.” Meta normally charges a $50 premium for Transitions.
Here’s our story about them and their new features.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Meta is giving its metaverse avatars a glow-up
Photo by Jay Peters / The Verge
Meta is overhauling its metaverse avatars, and you’ll be able to use them soon: the new look will be available on October 1st, the company announced at its Connect conference on Wednesday. The new avatars will be available on Meta Horizon OS (its VR operating system), as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
Meta’s avatars started out in a rough place, but the company has made steady improvements, and these changes look to build on that. With the upgraded avatars, Meta is going to give users new ways to fine-tune things like eye size, nose shape, and body shapes, Meta’s Aigerim Shorman, a VP on the Horizon team, said onstage. That’s thanks in part to a new underlying tech stack, which includes an updated avatar skeleton.
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Meta’s Connect keynote is done.
The developer portion is over, and now the room is clearing out. Staffers are taking photos onstage and celebrating.
Thanks for following along with us! Now go read our awesome posts!
Photo by Jay Peters / The Verge
Meta’s VR app store is about to fill up with phone-style 2D apps
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Meta’s Quest headsets and app store have been around for a while, but with a software experience largely limited to 3D and AR apps and games. But now, the company says it’s opening things up — Horizon OS and Quest VP Mark Rabkin said during Meta Connect that from today, the Meta app store “fully welcomes 2D and spatial apps.”
Meta also says it supports web apps, and what do you know? The New York Times’ Wordle app for Quest headsets, which we wrote about last week, is a Progressive Web App.
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Mark Zuckerberg thinks AI is going to make phones “a lot more exciting.”
In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said phone makers like Apple and Google can do a lot with AI in phones that app developers can’t:
If I were at any of the other companies trying to design what the next few versions of iPhone or Google’s phones should be, I think that there’s a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can do with AI that, as an app developer, we can’t.
Meta is launching new avatars on October 1st.
And later in 2025, users will be able to generate a new avatar with an AI prompt.
Meta is touting increased Horizon Worlds usage.
5X usage growth in 2024, and the app is a top five Quest 3 app in terms of weekly users, the company says.
Correction: Horizon Worlds is not a Quest 5 app.
Meta is releasing a camera passthrough API for Quest developers early next year.
Could be a really big deal for developers — the announcement got huge cheers in the Connect keynote room.
Meta might have more wearable plans down the line.
In a chat with Decoder , CEO Mark Zuckerberg says:
Over time, I think the glasses are also going to be able to be powered by wrist-based wearables or other wearables
So maybe not a smartwatch — which was reportedly nixed — but… something worn on the wrist that ties into smart glasses. Reminds me a bit of how the now-defunct Focals by North had a little smart ring for controls. Interesting, interesting.
“Our third era is a stable era.”
That’s from Meta’s Mark Rabkin, who wants to assure developers that the Meta Quest 3 and 3S are great platforms to develop VR experiences for.
Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter. In an interview with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said Meta will likely strike “certain partnerships” for useful content. But if others demand payment, then — as it’s done with news outlets — the company would prefer to walk away.
“I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” Zuckerberg said in the interview, which coincides with Meta’s annual Connect event. “My guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable.” But if creators are concerned or object, “when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content. It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much.”
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Meta is working on recreating influencers with AI
Photo by Jay Peters / The Verge
Meta has big ambitions for using AI to help creators, and it showed two impressive demos of what that could look like onstage at Connect today.
One version of this involves fully recreating real influencers as AI figures. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a live demo of a creator-based AI persona, which looked like the creator, talked like the creator, and tried to respond to questions like the creator would. It was pretty wild to watch.
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Meta’s CTO gives developers an apology.
We’re in the developer-focused section of Meta’s Connect keynote. CTO Andrew Bosworth is onstage and starts with an apology: “We have not made it easy to develop for our platforms. I want you to know that we know that, and we’re sorry.”
He goes on to say that the “ground has constantly been shifting under your feet for years now.” Meta just recently killed Spark, its AR effects platform, without warning and has made more changes than I can count to the Quest’s software.
Mark’s done.
Zuckerberg has wrapped up announcements. We just watched a video made by director Matthew Vaughn filmed on Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Now Andrew Bosworth is here for the developer keynote.
Meta’s translucent Meta Ray-Bans now come in a crystal-clear colorway.
Meta already let you see some of its smart glasses circuitry through its orange and blue frames, but now there’s an even clearer version. We already got a few photos of our own in our story about them today.
Is it… time for me to buy these things?
Here is Orion, Meta’s first AR glasses prototype.
Zuckerberg just pulled a pair out of a suitcase brought out to him onstage at Meta Connect. He calls them “our first fully functional prototype” and the “most advanced AR glasses the world has ever seen.”
I’ve got a deep dive on Orion you can read and watch below, which includes a demo I did with Zuckerberg last week. And here’s my full interview with Zuckerberg that just dropped on Decoder.
Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks AR glasses will replace your phone
We have a very special episode of Decoder today. It’s become a tradition every fall to have Verge deputy editor Alex Heath interview Mark Zuckerberg on the show for Meta Connect.
There’s a lot to talk about this year: on Wednesday, the company announced new developments in VR, AI, and the fast-growing world of consumer smart glasses, including a new pair of AR glasses the company is calling Orion. Before we start, Alex and I talked a little about the Orion demo he experienced at Meta’s headquarters, some of the context around the company’s big AR efforts of late, and how Mark is approaching his reputation as a leader and the public perception of Meta as a whole.
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Hands-on with Orion, Meta’s first pair of AR glasses
They look almost like a normal pair of glasses.
That’s the first thing I notice as I walk into a conference room at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The black Clark Kent-esque frames sitting on the table in front of me look unassuming, but they represent CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the computers that come after smartphones.
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We’re seeing a demo of live language translation coming to the Meta Ray-Bans.
Zuckerberg is doing a demo with mixed martial artist Brandon Moreno, where they are using the Ray-Ban Metas to do live translation in English and Spanish.
Zuckerberg is speaking in English, Moreno is speaking in Spanish, and it seems like they are able to have a short discussion. This feature is still in the works, but the company says it’s coming soon.
“The demo gods are looking somewhat favorably on us,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg takes a shot at OpenAI.
He mentions how “closed” AI labs have been cutting costs since Meta released its Llama model for free and says he thinks open-source AI will win. (Of note: OpenAI rolled out its advanced voice mode to all of its paid subscribers last night, just before Meta rolled out its voice mode today.)
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