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Meta’s spatial computing efforts have simultaneously led the industry and endured slow market traction. That paradox traces back to the technology’s broader cultural resistance. Though XR could be the next paradigm shift in computing, consumers have been largely underwhelmed.
But this process of industry evolution – and Meta’s place within it – requires more nuance than typically applied. Meta’s endeavors cut across a few tracks. One is Quest – mostly a VR gaming device but increasingly utility-driven with passthrough AR, also known as mixed reality.
Then there’s Orion – a moonshot glimpse of spatial computing’s reality in 10+ years. It’s an appealing proposition for all-day AR in a pair of normal-looking glasses that people might actually wear. Why is it 10 years away? Because it’s a prototype… and it costs $10,000 per unit to build.
The third track is Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses (RBMS). It has struck a cultural cord more than anything above as it tones down the tech. It’s all about subtle audio cues and multimodal AI. And this week came a glimpse at RBMS’ near-term road map (more on that in a bit).
From Pets to Products
Sticking with RBMS, its appeal lies in style and utility. It can contextualize and identify things from pets to products. Users can refine visual inputs with spoken ones (e.g., “What am I looking at?”) to get audible answers. That mix of audio/visual inputs and outputs is why it’s called multimodal AI.
This approach also meets the moment. Inflections in large language models unlock capabilities that exceeed the previous generation of underwhelming or outright-dysfunctional AI assistants (looking at you Siri). Applied to smart glasses, they’re now more about information than optics.
This takes the burden off visuals as smart glasses’ main selling point. That in turn sidesteps a design dilemma that plagues AR: You can have style/wearability, or robust and dimensional (SLAM) visuals. You can’t have both… outside of $10K prototypes and other recent standouts.
The success of RBMS’ approach is meanwhile a key lesson for the AR industry, erstwhile mired Orion-like visions without technical viability nor cultural readiness. It turns out most people just want simpler, stylish, and ambient smart glasses. Visuals of dragons and whales be damned.
Best of Both Worlds
But could visuals be valuable if aligned with the toned-down spirit of RBMS? For example, is there a happy middleground somewhere between RBMS and Orion? Could this present a best-of-both-worlds opportunity in which the simplicity of the former meets the visuals of the latter?
We’re talking basic visuals rather than Orion-style dimensional fare. That includes text or flat images that join the audio output that RBMS already offers. The thought is that some things are better seen than heard, such as restaurant menus or a viewfinder for RBMS’ image capture.
This would have to be graphically simple to maintain RBMS ethos, and its slim profile. The more graphically robust AR becomes, the bulkier it gets. For scene understanding and dimensional interactions, you start to enter HoloLens territory… which consumers won’t wear.
But one big red flag likely flies up as you read this: it sounds like Google Glass. To address that, RBMS’ differentiating quality is its stylistic and market-validated vessel. And cultural sensitivities to camera glasses have since acclimated to the sheer saturation of mobile image capture.
Cultural Conditioning
Coming full circle to this week’s news, Bloomberg’s prolific sleuth Mark Gurman revealed a few Meta plans and internal projects. They include a more specialized version of RBMS for athletes, built around Oakley Sphaera (another brand in Ray-Ban owner Essilor Luxottica’s portfolio).
But more relevant to everything above, Meta’s Project Hypernova involves a more advanced form of RBMS with a simple display system. That gets back to the “best of both worlds” scenario, where RBMS-like style, simplicity, and superpowers, are joined by basic visuals.
Altogether, it’s a gradual and roundabout way to acclimate consumers to AR glasses. But this may be what it takes. For something so radical – especially proposed to occupy the vanity-inflicted domain of consumers’ faces – AR needs a frog-boiling-paced sequence of cultural conditioning.
That point was missed in previous “build it and they will come” attempts at AR glasses – from Magic Leap to Microsoft. Will Meta’s long con on the consumer culture be more effective? Its first steps with RBMS signal it could be. The next methodical steps will follow in the foreseeable future.
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