Facebook’s booming enterprise is dominated by digital adverts, but it surely additionally has {hardware} ambitions past VR. During the corporate’s newest earnings name, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned its subsequent product launch can be a pair of sensible glasses from Ray-Ban.
“The glasses have their iconic form factor, and they let you do some pretty neat things,” the Facebook co-founder mentioned. “So I’m excited to get those into people’s hands and to continue to make progress on the journey toward full augmented reality glasses in the future.”
Facebook’s sun shades have been the topic of rumors since 2019. Back then, sources informed CNBC that Facebook was working with Ray-Ban proprietor EssilorLuxottica on AR eyewear nicknamed “Orion.” The glasses have been billed as a full-fledged cellphone alternative on which you could possibly take calls, see data and even broadcast livestreams. That inevitably drew comparisons to Google Glass (one other Luxottica collab) as an alternative of the phone-tethered Spectacles from Snap. Last 12 months, Hugo Barra, then VP VR at Facebook Reality Labs, confirmed that the glasses would land in 2021. But, we have not heard a lot since.
For Facebook, the glasses maintain the important thing to its future. Alongside digital actuality, augmented actuality (AR) is integral to constructing the “metaverse,” Zuckerberg mentioned. In the longer term, Facebook will morph right into a shared, habitable platform that allows you to “teleport” between completely different social experiences utilizing VR and AR, Zuckerberg defined.
The time period metaverse is the newest buzzword seized upon by Silicon Valley and futurists. While the idea has been round for nicely over a decade, it gained traction after the breakout success of multiplayer recreation creation platforms like Fortnite and Roblox. Earlier this week, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella talked about an “enterprise metaverse” on his firm’s earnings name.
For Facebook, the metaverse is greater than only a fad. The firm is spending billions in an effort to construct its shared universe, which might be populated with Facebook customers and digital adverts, in keeping with Zuckerberg. In order for it to turn out to be a actuality, the corporate wants extra folks to purchase its computing {hardware}. Therefore, the plan is to make these units extra inexpensive.
“Our business model isn’t going to primarily be around trying to sell devices at a large premium or anything like that because our mission is around serving as many people as possible,” Zuckerberg famous. “So we want to make everything that we do as affordable as possible, so as many people as possible can get into it and then compounds the size of the digital economy inside it. So that’s kind of at a high level how I’m thinking about this.”
Sunglasses aren’t the one {hardware} Facebook is reportedly engaged on. Multiple stories have claimed Facebook is growing a smartwatch with a built-in mobile connection and a removable show. Initially, it was believed that the watch can be first out the gate, but it surely appears Zuckerberg had different plans.
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