ACCORDING TO THE HOUSE OF IT ON April 15, according to MacRumors, according to former employees involved in the project, Mark Zuckerberg hopes to make Meta's upcoming AR glasses his "iPhone moment" and give him and the company a new look.
The review is a report for The Verge that outlines Meta's roadmap for AR glasses, which includes at least four different versions over the next six years.
According to the report, Meta's first generation of AR glasses, dubbed Nazare, will be designed to work independently of smartphones, using wireless, phone-shaped devices to offload some of the computations needed for the glasses to run.
One of the device's features is the ability for users to communicate and interact with other people's holograms, similar to the fictional scene depicted in the video announcing facebook's change of business to Meta last October.
Meta intends to launch its first generation of AR glasses by 2024, aimed at early adopters and developers, the report said. That same year, the company also plans to release a cheaper pair of smart glasses, code-named Hypernova, which will be paired with smartphones to display incoming messages and other notifications in a heads-up display.
Looking ahead, Meta's AR roadmap includes a lighter, more advanced version of Nazare glasses that will be launched in 2026, followed by a third version in 2028.
If AR glasses are successful, Zuckerberg hopes they will bring new perspectives to Meta and himself and let the company he founded innovate again, which is why "Zach's ego is intertwined with [glasses]," the former employee told The Verge.
But Meta will have to contend with Apple, which has its own AR ambitions. Apple is working on at least two AR projects, including an augmented reality headset that will be released in late 2022 or 2023, followed by a more stylish pair of augmented reality glasses.
It was revealed that Apple's AR/VR headset will come out in 2022, perhaps the WWDC Global Developer Conference in June, but Apple needs to overcome some development issues. Reliable sources such as analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman say the headset could be released in 2023, while smart glasses will be available in 2024 or 2025.