Meta (Facebook): Augmented reality glasses for 2024, Mark Zuckerberg’s complicated challenge

news hardware Meta (Facebook): Augmented reality glasses for 2024, Mark Zuckerberg’s complicated challenge

Meta masters virtual reality mainly thanks to the know-how of the Oculus teams. The latter have also been fully absorbed by Meta, so the Oculus Quest headset is now responsive to the cute Meta Quest name. It’s one of the first gateways into the company’s metaverse, with applications related to entertainment but also to business productivity.

Augmented reality glasses should convince

However, For Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse cannot be reduced to virtual reality : for the boss of Facebook/Meta, It is the augmented reality that allows the concept to really develop. Internally, the entrepreneur therefore refers to virtual reality glasses as “The Holy Grail that will redefine our relationship with technology”like smartphones could a dozen years ago.

According to sources close to Meta interviewed by The Verge, The company’s roadmap envisages the market launch of a first generation of augmented reality glasses in 2024. After that, a new generation will follow every two years. The project is ambitious, but internally the challenge is far from over.

Virtual reality? Not good enough!

When the “Nazare Project” skates

The first generation of these augmented reality glasses, which are called “Project Nazare” internally, should work without a smartphone. This would be possible thanks to the presence of a small remote box that would retain part of the current necessary for the operation of the device. A system that Mark Zuckerberg said would encourage user immersion.

An ambitious proposal, but it promises to be extremely expensive to develop and produce. Billions of dollars would have already been spent on research and development and given the components integrated into the first version of the goggles, A pair would cost a lot more than a Meta Quest helmet, 349 dollars sold by us. Meta therefore expects to spend a lot of money a niche product that is sold very little in its first version.

And without counting design difficulties which have already led to several shifts in the start window. Observers quoted by The Verge have doubts about the realism of a 2024 release: The company has already abandoned the project to develop an augmented reality operating systembecause this deadline could not be met.

Mark Zuckerberg fights for his project

From the Nazare Project to the Lazare Project?

If Mark Zuckerberg invests so much money in the development of augmented reality glasses, it’s not just because he firmly believes in the future of the metaverse. It’s also because of that Meta must become an innovative, future-oriented company again : after the setbacks Facebook has suffered in recent years, notably with the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 and the privacy issues and manipulation of news feeds in 2021, it takes more than a name change to restore its image.

By offering new high-tech products Mark Zuckerberg hopes to make Meta a company not only known for its sulphurous business of the last few years. Now it is time to move from theory to practice.