Meta Unveils New Smart Glasses and Headsets in Pursuit of the Metaverse

At an event in Silicon Valley, the company exhibited a range of products meant to blend the real world and virtual reality, with a healthy dose of A.I.

Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars, hired thousands of employees and worked for roughly a quarter of his life in pursuit of a vision: a future in which the physical and digital worlds are interwoven to connect people around the globe.

The dream still seems far-fetched. But on Wednesday, his company, Meta, took one step closer.

Meta introduced a series of new products during an event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., including an updated, low-cost version of its Quest 3S virtual reality headset, a pair of prototype glasses with holographic technology built into the lenses and a series of enhancements to its artificial intelligence assistant, Meta AI.

Those updates will bring a host of celebrity voices to the A.I. assistant — including those of Awkwafina, John Cena and Dame Judi Dench — that will respond to users when asked questions. The assistant is incorporated across most of Meta’s largest apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook.

The new products are Mr. Zuckerberg’s attempt to meld his vision of what social networks can be with what is possible now. Though Meta has had some success selling its virtual reality headsets and a surprise hit in its Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses, Mr. Zuckerberg’s metaverse is still years from reality.

“We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look,” he said at the event on Wednesday. “It’s happening.”

In the last few years, Meta has spent nearly $50 billion on its Reality Labs division — the part of the company working on hardware. It does not stand to turn a profit any time soon. That is on top of the increasingly high costs of Meta’s expansion into artificial intelligence and data centers.

By building millions of smart glasses and VR headsets, Mr. Zuckerberg hopes to bring the many people who already use his apps into a different kind of social network. And by coupling those products with the Meta AI assistant, he hopes he can make them useful enough for people to want to come back to them regularly.

The company said more than 400 million people have already used Meta AI, and nearly 200 million people use the smart assistant on one of the company’s products each week.

Some of Meta’s new ideas are risky. The company will begin to insert A.I.-generated posts in users’ Facebook and Instagram feeds. The move could alienate people who do not want to see such content, which could include images based on users’ interests that the company has gleaned from browsing behavior, and even photos of a user’s own face.

Not all of Meta’s A.I. projects have panned out. The company shuttered a product that had allowed users to talk with celebrity chatbots, including ones based on Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady, after less than a year on the market.

For its smart glasses, Meta is banking heavily on its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the largest eyewear conglomerate in the world. Early sales are promising, and Meta is trying to introduce more features quickly. Meta has also been in talks to purchase a minority stake in the eyewear company.

The new features include a live translation option that Meta unveiled on Wednesday. The glasses can translate conversations between people in English, Spanish, Italian and French. Meta is also working with a company called Be My Eyes to help people with vision impairments receive audio descriptions of the world around them using artificial intelligence and the cameras inside of the glasses.

Meta’s biggest bet is still experimental. During the event, Mr. Zuckerberg showed off Project Orion, a pair of smart glasses that go beyond the company’s existing Ray-Bans by adding digital technology inside the lenses themselves.

That technology, Meta hopes, will allow users to do things like sit in a living room and have a conversation with a friend from across the world while looking at the person’s digital avatar, as if the friend was next to them on the couch.

Mr. Zuckerberg argues that these enhanced glasses could one day replace smartphones. In his telling, Orion will allow people to use apps and features they would otherwise be using on a smartphone, but without staring down at a different device. The glasses will be controlled via voice, touch or in an experimental “wrist-based neural interface” that relies on a hardware bracelet and a flick of a user’s wrist.

Much of Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision is still theoretical. And if relatively slow user adoption is an indicator, it’s still a long way in the future.

But he remains an optimist. He believes that the products introduced today will ultimately be embraced by millions of people once they are able to try them out.

“For now, I think the way to look at these glasses is as a time machine,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “They are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.”

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