Everything announced at Meta Connect 2024 – The Verge

The kinds of devices Meta wants to make next

2024-10-11T09:37:58-04:00

When I recently met with Meta's top executives, I wanted to know about more than the company's first AR glasses, Orion.

In the weeks leading up to our meeting, reports had surfaced about new devices the company's hardware division, Reality Labs, was working on, from camera earbuds to mixed reality goggles. I had also been hearing rumors of tinkering on new variations of AI-enabled wearables. During my interview with Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth just before this year's Connect conference, we discussed not only some of these possible future products but also how Meta approaches hardware development in general, which I haven't seen the comp …

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Welcome to Meta’s future, where everyone wears cameras

2024-09-28T08:00:00-04:00

See that little circle? That’s a camera. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

All around Meta's Menlo Park campus, cameras stared at me. I'm not talking about security cameras or my fellow reporters' DSLRs. I'm not even talking about smartphones. I mean Ray-Ban and Meta's smart glasses, which Meta hopes we'll all - one day, in some form - wear.

I visited Meta for this year's Connect conference, where just about every hardware product involved cameras. They're on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that got a software update, the new Quest 3S virtual reality headset, and Meta's prototype Orion AR glasses. Orion is what Meta calls a "time machine": a functioning example of what full-fledged AR could look like, years before …

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Meta’s new smart glasses look like the future

2024-09-27T09:03:09-04:00

You can't buy Meta's most impressive new product, the smart glasses codenamed Orion. You might be able to buy something sort of like them a few years from now, but most of us will never get to so much as wear them. That doesn't necessarily make them less impressive, though, or less important. Orion is a statement of purpose from Meta: that AR glasses really are the future and that we're eventually going to get there.

On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge's Alex Heath joins the show to tell us all about his experience with Orion - two hours in the glasses of the future, playing Pong with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and making smoothies an …

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Kristen Bell told Instagram to ‘get rid of AI’ before she became its official voice

2024-09-26T08:40:00-04:00

Meta has cut deals for high-profile actors to lend their voices to its Meta AI chatbot, with Kristen Bell among the initial set of voices. Bell lending her voice is a bit of a surprise. Back in June, she openly expressed opposition to Meta's AI using her data.

She reposted a popular Instagram message declaring that she refused to consent to Meta using her content and likeness for training large language models and demanding that Instagram "get rid of the AI program."

The prompt claims that by reposting, users deny Meta permission to use their personal data for these purposes. Celebrities such as Jessica Chastain, Sarah Paulson, and Ashley …

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Meta is giving its metaverse avatars a glow-up

2024-09-25T15:45:14-04:00

Meta is overhauling its metaverse avatars, and you'll be able to use them soon: the new look will be available on October 1st, the company announced at its Connect conference on Wednesday. The new avatars will be available on Meta Horizon OS (its VR operating system), as well as Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.

Meta's avatars started out in a rough place, but the company has made steady improvements, and these changes look to build on that. With the upgraded avatars, Meta is going to give users new ways to fine-tune things like eye size, nose shape, and body shapes, Meta's Aigerim Shorman, a VP on the Horizon team, said onstage. That's t …

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Meta’s VR app store is about to fill up with phone-style 2D apps

2024-09-25T15:02:19-04:00

Meta's Quest headsets and app store have been around for a while, but with a software experience largely limited to 3D and AR apps and games. But now, the company says it's opening things up - Horizon OS and Quest VP Mark Rabkin said during Meta Connect that from today, the Meta app store "fully welcomes 2D and spatial apps."

Meta also says it supports web apps, and what do you know? The New York Times' Wordle app for Quest headsets, which we wrote about last week, is a Progressive Web App.

The company's app store, until now, has been heavily curated, with a single experimental section called App Lab. But today's announcement sounds like t …

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Mark Zuckerberg says there’s ‘no causal connection’ between social media and teen mental health

2024-09-25T14:40:00-04:00

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pushing back on the idea that social media directly harms teen mental health. During an interview with The Verge's Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said that "the majority of the high-quality research out there suggests that there's no causal connection at a broad scale between these things."

This echoes the statement Zuckerberg gave in front of Congress in January during a hearing about child safety, where he argued that existing research hasn't shown a causal link between social media and poor teen mental health. As my colleague Adi Robertson pointed out at the time, it's difficult to prove causal links, and research sho …

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Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ‘overestimate the value’ of their work for training AI

2024-09-25T14:15:00-04:00

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn't valuable enough for it to matter. In an interview with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, Zuckerberg said Meta will likely strike "certain partnerships" for useful content. But if others demand payment, then - as it's done with news outlets - the company would prefer to walk away.

"I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this," Zuckerberg said in the interview, which coincides with Meta's annua …

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Meta is working on recreating influencers with AI

2024-09-25T14:13:29-04:00

Meta has big ambitions for using AI to help creators, and it showed two impressive demos of what that could look like onstage at Connect today.

One version of this involves fully recreating real influencers as AI figures. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a live demo of a creator-based AI persona, which looked like the creator, talked like the creator, and tried to respond to questions like the creator would. It was pretty wild to watch.

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Another tool it's developing takes Reels and automatically dubs them into another language, maintaining the creator's vo …

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The biggest news from Meta Connect 2024

2024-09-25T14:09:32-04:00

Meta has a bunch of new hardware and AI news coming out of its Meta Connect event today, including a new Quest 3S VR headset, an expansion of Meta AI features, a new Llama model, and a first look at the new Orion augmented reality glasses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage on Wednesday with a new style and demonstrated new features including live translation between English and Spanish.

Here's everything announced at Meta Connect:

Orion AR glasses

Meta has revealed its Orion augmented reality glasses, and they look almost like a trendy pair of frames you could pick up without all the tech inside. Orion uses Micro LED projectors inside the …

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