Connecting the Dots: Meta’s Ecosystem on Display at Meta Connect 2023
Meta’s new products and services from Meta Connect 2023 are largely seen as positive for the company to secure its near-term future.
- At the Meta Connect 2023, Meta introduced the Quest 3 headset, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Meta AI, Emu, and AI Studio at Meta Connect 2023.
- Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to deliver the Meta Connect 2023 keynote address to explain how the company is working towards enabling and feeding its Metaverse ambitions.
- Meta’s new products and services are largely seen as positive for the company to secure its near-term future.
Meta Connect 2023, the social networking giant’s annual developer conference, concluded yesterday. Meta has lots in store for its users, including introducing a new device in its Quest line of immersive products.
And by the looks of it, the Meta Quest 3 has impressed tech connoisseurs, gadget geeks, and the overall tech community alike. This was important since it was seen as Meta’s last straw at keeping up with Apple and its Vision Pro headset.
As odd as it sounds, Apple only recently announced its headset in its June WWDC 2023 event and was touted to be better than anything else. Hardcore Apple fans now have to wait a bit longer, given the company reportedly hit snags in the production of the Apple Vision Pro. As such, the timing couldn’t have been better for Meta.
Meta also announced a host of other new products and services, including, of course, those featuring artificial intelligence (AI). These include Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Meta AI, Emu, AI and Studio.
Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage to deliver the Meta Connect 2023 keynote address. He explained how the company is working towards enabling and feeding its Metaverse ambitions by highlighting an essential aspect of the hardware behind it: affordability.
“We have to make it so that it is affordable and accessible to everyone. And that’s why we focus a lot of our innovation not just on the groundbreaking innovations but on making sure that these things are going to be accessible to everyone because, to us, that is just as important as advancing the state of the art,” Zuckerberg said.
Let us look at what Meta announced at Meta Quest 2023.
Meta Quest 3
Running on the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip, Meta Quest 3 is the foundational consumer-side hardware the company hopes to build the metaverse on. As Zuckerberg said, the focus is on mixed reality with its ability to merge augmented reality into the user’s physical surroundings and display it on a full-color passthrough.
The improved LCD offers 10x higher pixels (in each of the two 4K resolution – 2,064 x 2,208 pixels – pancake-shaped lens) than the Meta Quest 2 and one-ups its predecessor by offering twice the performance and 40% slimmer body, though with the same refresh rate of 90 Hz.
Notably, Meta replaced the tracking ring of previous Quest VR devices with haptic feedback, a depth sensor, Touch Plus Controllers, and two cameras, effectively making it a mixed reality device. It also supports Xbox Cloud Gaming and Microsoft 365.
Further, it features a 110° horizontal and 97° vertical field of view, 8GB RAM, 128GB, or 512GB of storage priced at $499 and $649.99, respectively. Compared to Apple’s $3,500 headset, whose rollout may reportedly be delayed, the Quest 3 certainly looks like a better choice.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses
Meta’s other hardware introduction was possible with its existing partnership with Luxottica Group-owned sunglasses brand Ray-Ban. Where Ray-Ban Stories was widely panned by users and critics alike, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have impressed those who tested the wearable.
It comes with an onboard voice assistant, 12 MP, 1080p/60 FPS video cameras with an ultra-wide lens, built-in speaker, five mics for spatial audio, 32 GB of RAM, IPX4 rating, and weighs 48.6 grams, 50.8 grams, or 49.2 grams.
The 60-second video record limit indicates that Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses could be designed to cater to video streaming and content sharing on the company’s social media platforms. It also supports live streaming.
The wearable can be pre-ordered for $299 for the base variant, $329 for the polarized one, and $379 for transitions. It starts shipping on October 17, 2023.
See More: Windows 11 Gets a Copilot: Microsoft’s Latest Offerings From the Fall Surface Event
Emu
Days after OpenAI announced image and voice support for ChatGPT, Meta has officially graduated to offer a text-to-image model service it calls Emu or Expressive Media Universe. Emu is Meta’s text-to-image generation model that can generate images in five seconds.
Clearly, Meta hopes to keep up in the AI sphere against DALL-E and Midjourney by enabling itself to serve the demand for creating engaging visual content. Emu was previously in testing on Instagram. The AI image generation tool will be available for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger.
While OpenAI has attained roaring success with DALL-E, whose version 3 was released in September, Emu has the advantage of Meta’s social media networks to prompt it to glory. However, the release of Threads in July this year proves otherwise.
Meta AI
Conversational AI has become the bedrock of the current generative AI phase. As such, Meta wants to harness its long-standing AI presence and expertise with the launch of Meta AI, a chatbot that took the back seat before ChatGPT was launched.
And for good reason. The company’s Blender Bot 3 chatbot, released in August 2022, didn’t meet expectations.
Meta AI leverages the LlaMA 2 model to generate text-based responses in conversation with users. However, Meta aims to go beyond that by incorporating real-time information and is thus partnering with Microsoft to integrate the Bing search engine.
Meta AI will be available in Quest 3, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
AI Studio
While Meta’s primary focus is the average user, the company has something in store for third-party and independent developers. Meta’s AI Studio is designed to enable developers to train and create custom AI chatbots.
Still, AI Studio from Meta isn’t strictly a developer-centric offering, given it is designed simplistically for seamless use by developers and non-developers and is intended to primarily serve ecommerce, communications, customer engagement, and support needs.
Tailor-made AI chatbots using AI Studio can be integrated with WhatsApp and other Meta apps through APIs. AI Studio is available as an alpha offering.
“We’re also building a sandbox that will be released in the coming year, enabling anyone to experiment with creating their own AI,” Meta noted. “As our universe of AIs continues to grow and evolve, we’ll bring this sandbox to the metaverse, giving you a chance to build AIs that adopt an even greater level of realism, embodiment, and connectedness.”
Meta demonstrated AI Studio by introducing 28 AI characters based on well-known personalities. These characters embody the purpose for which they were designed and the personality that a user may be familiar with.
For instance, Tom Brady’s character is Bru, the “wisecracking sports debater who pulls no punches,” and Snoop Dogg is introduced as the Dungeon Master, overseeing events and proceeding in the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Other characters include a chef, a detective, a fitness enthusiast, a pro golfer, and more.
Closing Thoughts
After a rough 2022, where Meta’s stock tumbled by more than 64%, the company is back to winning ways in 2023, with share prices surging over 143% year-to-date. Additionally, Meta’s new products and services are largely seen as positive for the company to secure its near-term future.
The market sentiment has been positive as its stock rose by 1.6% in the two days of the event.
“Meta remains the top contender to dominate the VR market primarily due to Zuckerberg’s massive investment in the segment ahead of the competition in 2021 and 2022. Although the company has shifted focus since then, cutting costs and delivering what Zuckerberg dubbed efficient capital management, it will still be a while before others can catch up with those years,” said Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, speaking for the company’s report.
“However, there’s also a downside to being the perceived market leader, which is the very high expectations from its shareholders. In that sense, I view Meta’s leadership as a double-edged sword, and any mishaps along the way will be scrutinized, likely leading to stock volatility.”
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