Apple and Meta won’t just be competing with their VR headsets – they are also likely to be gearing up for a later battle between Apple Glasses and Meta Glasses.
While both devices are believed to be years from launch, a new report today says that we’ll get a sneak peek at Meta Glasses later this year …
After Vision Pro vs Quest, the glasses battle to come
In what has been beautifully described as looking like a hostage video, Mark Zuckerberg recently made the eyebrow-raising claim that the company’s own Quest 3 headset was better than Vision Pro.
But while such headsets will always have a role for some applications, the end-goal for both companies in terms of mass-market products is a device with the same sort of size, weight, and appearance as ordinary eyeglasses – with the ability to overlay AR content.
This would mean the ability to see notifications as they arrived, follow map directions overlayed onto the real world, see recipes and timers as we cook, and so on.
As we’ve noted before, this is an ambitious project, likely years away from delivery.
Making them do all the things expected of them, in a device that has all-day battery life, which has a form factor similar to prescription eye-glasses, and is affordable enough to be a consumer product (even an Apple one), is a massively ambitious project. One that was always going to take many years.
Meta Glasses reported to be revealed in the fall
Meta has so far launched what it calls smart glasses, but useful as these can be, they are no more than a combo headphone and camera unit. But the company is working on a full-on AR glasses product.
Business Insider reports that while Meta is nowhere near ready to launch these, it does plan to reveal them later this year.
Meta plans to show off years of work on new augmented-reality glasses during its developer conference this year.
The company’s first version of what’s considered “true” AR glasses, an internal project referred to as Orion, is poised to be revealed this fall, most likely during Meta’s annual Connect conference for third-party developers.
The AR team is also being pushed to have the high-tech glasses demoed during Connect, so there’s internal pressure to ensure a high level of performance, according to two people familiar with the plans, whose identities Business Insider has confirmed but who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely.
While the prototype is expected to be fully functional, Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth described them as based on a “prohibitively expensive technology path,” and thus likely years away from something offered for sale to consumers.
All the same, it will certainly be interesting to get a glimpse as to where Meta is headed – and to compare that with what we’re expecting to some day see from Apple.
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