Mark Zuckerberg and Meta continue to pound away at augmented reality with the Orion glasses, which won't be sold to consumers

Meta, as in the parent company of Facebook and associated platforms, is in want of a better word, really weird. Born out of humanity taking its social needs online, which is a polite way to describe the Hot or Not clone Facemash that the main founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, put together, the global company is trying to reinvent itself as... something else. Something meta-Meta.

This week, Meta held its Connect conference with product launches and developer news. You can find all that on Facebook, at Meta for Developers. But it's not the first thing that pops up in your time line on the social network. Instead, it's this scam ad that RNZ and Rachel Hunter should take umbrage at:

The official announcements around Meta Connect are best read and watched on the web rather than Facebook. As a related aside, New Zealand doesn't seem to be on Meta's map, just like it isn't for Google. It's a different approach to other tech companies like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, which engage with journalists here regularly.

This year, Meta and Zuckerberg have launched the Orion augmented reality (AR) glasses. That is a prototype of the Orion glasses, which really do seem like a technological tour de force:

As you can tell from the design, it might be something of a hard sell for Meta to achieve mass market uptake of Orion without some pretty drastic changes to the look of the glasses.

Still though, integrated artificial intelligence, silicon carbide lenses, wave guides, uLED projectors, a wireless dual-processor compute puck in your pocket for Orion and I think you're meant to wear a wristband too to fully accessorise. That's some serious tech and innovations, and I'd love to try out Orion to get a better understanding of the question the glasses are answering, and the problem they're solving. 

One of them seems to be that today's VR masks, like Apple's Vision Pro or the new Meta Quest 3S (no NZ pricing yet) released at Connect along with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses work all that well as concepts. As Meta puts it:

"For years, we’ve faced a false choice—either virtual and mixed reality headsets that enable deep, immersive experiences in a bulky form factor or glasses that are ideal for all-day use but don’t offer rich visual apps and experiences given the lack of a large display and corresponding compute power."

And smartphones: their screens limit digital experiences that only holographic displays can bring. Maybe it was a good thing then that the Facebook Phone flopped over a decade ago, stopping the social network from heading into that cul-de-sac?

We'll see what the wearable tech Metaverse will bring, but it won't have Orion in it even though it could apparently ship to consumers as-is. It's a polished product prototype and not a research one, Meta says, but it won't go on sale. Instead, Meta said it will continue to develop it to make an even more consumer ready product.

What has shipped, or been made available to download, are Meta's new artificial intelligence large language models (LLMs), Llama 3.2. The smaller ones with one and three billion parameters can take advantage of Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware, and are optimised for Arm processors. What that means is they can be used to develop on-device AI for smartphones and computers that neural processing units, or specialised chips that can do things like matrix multiplication and parallelised tasks really fast while not using much energy.

The other two Llama 3.2 LLMs with 11 and 90 billion parameters are multi-modal which means they understand images as well as text. OK, understand should probably be "interpret". Visual or image reasoning, that's what it's called.

Plus, there are AI developer enhancements as well. Meta's taking a different approach with its AI work, which is open source and not closed models like OpenAI and Anthropic, so anyone can grab a copy of for instance Ollama and get cracking with them.