This is Meta’s AR/VR hardware roadmap for the next four years

Aside from the Quest lineup, the Meta also has thousands of employees building futuristic AR glasses and wrist devices to control them. The main difference from virtual reality is that the company intends to eventually wear AR glasses throughout the day as an alternative to smartphones. Zuckerberg called it the “Holy Grail” that will redefine our relationship with technology by the end of this decade.

During Tuesday’s roadmap presentation, Alex Himmel, the company’s vice president of augmented reality, laid out a plan for a range of devices through 2027. The first launch will come this fall with the second generation of Meta smart glasses with a camera released in 2021 with Luxottica, the parent company. for Ray-Ban.

In 2025, Himmel said, the third generation of smart glasses will ship with a display he dubbed a “viewfinder” to display incoming text messages, scan QR codes, and translate text from another language in real time. The glasses come with a “neural interface” bar that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as sliding fingers over an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said, the band will allow the wearer to use a virtual keyboard and type the same words in the exact minute that cellphones allow.

Hemel confirmed that while Meta has prepared its plans for a smartwatch with a detachable display and cameras, it is still working on another smartwatch to accompany the 2025 glasses.

“We don’t want people to have to choose between an input device on their wrist and the smartwatch functionality they like,” he said. “So we’re building a watch of neural interfaces. Number one, this device will do the input: input to control your glasses, inputs to control the functions of your wrist, inputs to control the world around you.”

Himmel showed staff a demonstration of the glasses, during a video call, the cameras on the glasses would show the wearer’s front view at the same time as a selfie from the camera on the watch. The smartwatch will be an optional upgrade from the dual nerve band that came with the glasses, he said, and will also integrate with Meta social media apps like WhatsApp and offer health and fitness features.

The Meta’s first true pair of augmented reality glasses, which the company developed in-house for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, and designed to project high-quality 3D images of avatars onto the real world. There will be an “internal launch” of employees to test the glasses in 2024, according to Himmel. A version won’t be released to the public until 2027, when Meta will launch what Himel called its “Innovation” line of augmented reality glasses for early adopters along with the “Scale” line of less advanced smart glasses and the second generation of its Neural smartwatch.

Himmel modeled the market opportunity around the nearly two billion pairs of eyeglasses and hundreds of millions of smartwatches sold each year. “If we can put a great product on the shelves at a great price at the right value, we think we can get into these upgrade cycles and generate significant growth in our devices,” he told Chamber. “We have to submit.”

Meta plans to build on its current advertising business model to help it make money from these future devices. Himmel said the company believes it can generate higher average income per user than it currently makes on social media, thanks to a combination of selling virtual goods and optional extras like cloud backups and augmented reality ads.

“We should be able to run a pretty good advertising business,” he said. “I think it’s easy to imagine how ads will look in the space when you have the augmented reality glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, where there’s been a lot of focus as a company, also has to get close to 100 percent.”

“If we get anything close to the expectations,” he said, “it will be a colossal feat.” “A work unlike anything we’ve seen on mobile phones before.”