In an earnings convention name on Wednesday, Fb CEO Mark Zuckerberg instructed buyers that the corporate’s subsequent {hardware} launch will likely be “sensible glasses” made in partnership with basic sun shades vendor Ray-Ban.
Zuckerberg segued into the Ray-Ban announcement following a prolonged dialogue of Fb’s plans for Oculus Quest, its all-in-one digital actuality (VR) platform. Zuckerberg says that social media is the actual “killer app” for VR, backing that up with knowledge from Oculus Quest: “The most well-liked apps on Quest are social, which inserts our unique thesis [that] digital actuality will likely be a social platform.”
Zuckerberg intends the as but unnamed sensible glasses to be a stepping stone, not an finish objective. He remained cagey about their precise goal, saying solely that the glasses “have their iconic kind issue, and [let] you do some fairly neat issues,” with no concrete particulars about what these “neat issues” is likely to be.
We do know that the glasses aren’t anticipated to have built-in show, because of reporting from The Verge on their preliminary announcement in September 2020. With out show capabilities, the Ray-Ban/Fb glasses appear more likely to fall in the identical class as Amazon’s Echo Frames or Lucyd Lyte—a largely normal-looking pair of sun shades with built-in Bluetooth pairing and directional audio system that we reviewed in March.
Zuckerberg describes the sensible glasses as a stepping stone towards not solely digital or augmented actuality as we all know it, however one thing he calls the metaverse. “So what’s the metaverse? It is a digital setting [like] an embodied Web that you simply’re within slightly than simply . And we imagine that that is going to be the successor to the cellular Web.”
After warning that constructing his imaginative and prescient would require important funding not solely from Fb itself however from its whole ecosystem of companions, he doubled down on its eventual significance, saying, “Along with being the following chapter of the Web, the metaverse can also be going to be the following chapter for us as an organization.”
