Meta Unveils Orion AR Glasses, Upgrades AI Chatbot With Celebrity Voices

Meta unveiled its first augmented reality (AR) glasses at Connect, the annual development conference of the company, on Wednesday and upgraded its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with voice options of celebrities such as Dame Judi Dench and John Cena.

The social media giant, which announced it is building AR glasses five years back, claims that Orion is the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made.

AR glasses enable digital experiences that overcome the limits of a smartphone screen. It has large holographic displays for viewing 2D and 3D content anywhere.

The glasses, which seamlessly integrate contextual AI, are lightweight and let people see each other's face, eyes and expressions. It can also sense and understand the world around the user to anticipate and proactively address user's needs.

"That's the north star our industry has been building towards: a product combining the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a large display, high-bandwidth input and contextualized AI in a form that people feel comfortable wearing in their daily lives," Meta said in a statement.

Reuters reported that the tech titan packaged the product to have the ability to perform tasks similar to those handled by desktops and smartphones.

"This is the physical world with holograms overlaid on it," said Mark Zuckerberg who eagerly pulled out the black glasses from a metal case as his firm kicked off conference at its California headquarters.

"For now, I think the right way to look at Orion is as a time machine," the proud CEO said.

"These glasses exist, they are awesome and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting," Zuckerberg added.

The Orion glasses come with tough components as it is powered by Meta-designed silicon and made of tough magnesium alloy. Using the glasses, users may find themselves replicating actions only previously seen in movies such as interacting with the glasses through hand-tracking and a wrist-based neural interface.

However, one should not get too excited at the moment because the prototype is not yet for release. Zuckerberg mentioned that they are still working on making it smaller and more cost-effective before it can be made available at the consumer level.

"A lot of people have said this is the craziest technology they've ever seen," Zuckerberg said during his speech, The Guardian reported.

The capabilities of the glasses were showcased in a pre-recorded demonstration where two people talked on a video chat through AR, and also play a virtual Pong game.

In the same event, the company also released a new Quest mixed-reality headset Meta Quest 3S. The headset has the same mixed reality capabilities and fast performance as Meta Quest 3, but at a lower price point of $299.99.

Meta also announced a raft of new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like chatbot and plans to start automatically injecting personalized images created by the bot into people's Facebook and Instagram feeds.

The audio upgrade to Meta AI allows it to respond to voice commands. There is also a list of celebrity voices that users can choose from, with regards to how they would like their digital assistant to sound like. Among the available celebrity voices include that of Judi Dench, John Cena, Kristen Bell, Keegan-Michael Key, and Awkwafina.

"I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text," Zuckerberg noted about the upgrade.