News hardware Meta (Facebook): augmented reality glasses for 2024, Mark Zuckerberg’s complicated challenge
Published on 04/16/2022 at 19:10
By betting everything on the metaverse, Meta, formerly Facebook, is taking risks. The first is that of failing to offer a convincing pair of glasses to promote augmented reality.
Virtual reality, Meta masters, mainly thanks to the know-how of the Oculus teams. The latter have also been completely absorbed by Meta, to the point that the Oculus Quest helmet now responds to the sweet name of Meta Quest. It is one of the first gateways into the firm’s metaverse, with applications related to entertainment, but also to business productivity.
Augmented reality glasses to convince
However, for Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse cannot be reduced to virtual reality : for the boss of Facebook/Meta, it is augmented reality that will allow the concept to really develop. Internally, the entrepreneur therefore describes virtual reality glasses as “The Holy Grail that will redefine our relationship with technology”as smartphones were able to do a dozen years ago.
According to sources close to Meta interviewed by The Verge, the company’s roadmap would involve the arrival on the market of a first generation of augmented reality glasses in 2024. Should then follow a new generation every two years. The project is ambitious, but, internally, the challenge is still far from being met.
Virtual reality? Not good enough!
When the “Nazare Project” skates
The first generation of these augmented reality glasses, which is called “Project Nazare” internally, should be able to work without a smartphone. This would be possible thanks to the presence of a small remote box, which would retain part of the electricity necessary for the operation of the device. A system which, according to Mark Zuckerberg, would promote user immersion.
An ambitious proposal, but which promises to be extremely expensive to develop and produce. Billions of dollars would have already been spent on R&D and given the components integrated into the first version of the glasses, a pair would cost a lot more than a Meta Quest helmet, sold 349 euros with us. Meta therefore expects to spend a lot of money on a niche product that will be sold very little in its first version.
And that’s without counting on design difficulties which have already resulted in several postponements of the launch window. Observers quoted by The Verge have doubts regarding the realism of a 2024 release: the project to create an augmented reality operating system has already been abandoned by the firmbecause it did not allow this deadline to be met.
Mark Zuckerberg fighting for his project
From Nazare project to Lazare project?
If Mark Zuckerberg is investing so much money in the development of a pair of augmented reality glasses, it is not only because he firmly believes in the future of the metaverse. It is also because Meta needs to become an innovative, forward-looking company once more : following the setbacks encountered by Facebook in recent years, in particular with the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 and the issues surrounding privacy and the 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 known for more than its sulphurous business of its last years. It now remains to move from theory to practice.
Par akazanWriting jeuxvideo.com
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