Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled today the next wave of innovations at its annual technology showcase. From the next generation of Meta Ray Ban and Oakley glasses to neural interfaces and immersive content tools, Zuckerberg’s latest announcements shed light onto the future of AI and the hardware that will plug into the metaverse and beyond.

From Meta glasses to Quest upgrade: Key announcements

Next-generation of Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses

Zuckerberg announced the new generations of Ray-Ban Meta Glasses and recently released Oakley glasses.

“Our goal is to build great looking glasses that deliver personal superintelligence, and a feeling of presence using realistic holograms, and these ideas combined,” said Zuckerberg.

The second generation of Ray Ban glasses, in its third-year, have double battery life from the previous generations with all-day use, 3K video recording capabilities, something called ‘Conversation Focus’ that amplifies voices you are talking to in noisy settings and will also be available in a limited-edition transparent matte frames. These glasses will be starting at a price of $379.

Meanwhile, Oakley Meta Vanguard, the performance AI glasses for athletes come with not a day-long but only two marathon-long battery around 10-12 hours, with centred 3K camera with 122° field of view. These also now have louder Oakley speakers for noisy roads or biking, new capture modes including slow-motion, hyperlapse, and have IP67 water resistance. Meta has partnered with Garmin for live captioning and come with LED that can help working in dim setting. Priced at $499, the glasses will be shipped in the U.S. from October 21.

Metaverse updates

In the realm of immersive VR/AR content, Zuckerberg made a series of announcements. Meta Horizon Studio works like a Canva assistant plugged with AI that can stitch together tools (for code, audio, skyboxes, etc.) enabling faster creation.

Horizon Worlds is basically a social platform for metaverse accessed through Meta’s VR headsets Quest and even through mobile phones. This platform is now going to be powered by Horizon Engine that will replace Unity, bringing faster loading (like a webpage), better graphics, realistic physics, higher concurrency (allowing 5 times of more users to be together in shared worlds). Something called ‘Hyperscape’ has also been announced that can scan a real room and convert it into a VR world within minutes.

“This is Meta horizon studio and Meta horizon engine, foundational infrastructure for the metaverse, they will enable interactive and immersive worlds across all of our products, starting with virtual reality, and then one day, coming to your glasses and coming to social media as well,” said Zuckerberg.

Within these VR headsets, Horizon TV is the new entertainment hub where Meta has partnered with Disney+ (with Hulu & ESPN), Universal, Blumhouse horror films, that can now support Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision for cinematic-quality VR.

Additionally, Quest VR Gaming is going to get a slate of new titles in the upcoming fall season including Marvel Deadpool VR, Dungeons & Dragons, Battle Mark.

Phone in your glasses

In a first in the industry, Meta introduced Ray-Ban Meta Display Glasses, where the glasses will come with in-built AR Display. This is a high-resolution, ultra-bright display with 42 pixels/degree, up to 5000 nits (an average iPhone has only 3000 nits of brightness). The display appears in one eye, off-centre, and automatically disappears when not needed.

This comes with Meta Neural Band, which is like a wristwatch, much lighter, but one that detects your hand and wrist movements, including the tiniest of muscle movements. With this, users can control glasses silently. Zuckerberg showed typing 30 words per minutes using the neural band.

These also come with previous features of real-time translation, live subtitles, and task follow-ups. These are priced at $799 and will be available from September 30.

The dates for India release have not been announced yet.