Meta's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has teased a new smart glasses project with EssilorLuxottica, posting a photo of the eyewear company's chairman sporting a prototype of a neural interface wristband - designed for directing other devices.
"Great to be back in Milan to discuss plans for new smart glasses with Leonardo Del Vecchio and the EssilorLuxottica team. Here Leonardo is using a prototype of our neural interface EMG [electromyography] wristband that will eventually let you control your glasses and other devices," Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook, referring to EssilorLuxottica's chairman, Leonardo Del Vecchio.
He closed his message with a smiley-face emoji wearing sunglasses.
Facebook - which changed its name to Meta Platforms in October - said in a blog post last year that it planned to develop a wristband that would control augmented reality glasses, allowing users to interact with a virtual world using finger movements.
Zuckerberg was in Milan to discuss plans for new smart glasses with the eyewear company, he said.
Tech companies Amazon, Apple and Alphabet Inc's Google have piled in to the wearable tech business, developing augmented reality glasses in a bet they could one day replace mobile phones. Google also embraced fitness tracking technology by acquiring Fitbit for US$2.1 billion.
In 2020, EssilorLuxottica and Meta Platforms announced a multiyear collaboration to develop smart glasses. They currently sell Ray-Ban Stories frames like the classic Ray-Ban Wayfarer model that are embedded with technology, allowing the wearer to take photos and listen to music and calls, starting at US$299.
Meanwhile, Meta has also given an early glimpse of its first physical store, which features a floor-to-ceiling screen for showing off games on its virtual reality headsets and rooms for testing video calling devices.
The store, set to open on May 9, is located at the main campus for Meta's Reality Labs unit, in the Silicon Valley town of Burlingame, California. The unit is developing the hardware products the company aims to sell there, including Ray-Ban smart glasses, Portal video-calling devices and Oculus VR headsets.
With blonde wood and minimalist decor, the store design echoes the aesthetic pioneered by Apple when it set up retail stores more than two decades ago.
The opening of the Meta store makes tangible what is largely a theoretical future business for the world's largest social media company, which has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality in a push to build the "metaverse", a term used to describe immersive, shared virtual spaces.
Zuckerberg says the metaverse could be the world's next big computing platform, but he has warned that it may take about a decade for the company's bets to pay off.
In the meantime, with growth slowing and the company still almost entirely reliant on digital ads for revenue, Meta is cutting back on some of its long-term investments. read more
In addition to promoting its hardware devices to consumers, Meta is increasingly pitching them to businesses. It gave a demonstration at the store of conference calls that can feature a mix of virtual reality avatars and traditional video calling.
The company is experimenting with augmented reality technology that would enable users to join conferences as avatars via Portal, without donning headsets, said Micah Collins, a director of product management working on the enterprise tools.
Collins acknowledged the enterprise metaverse business is nascent, and a spokesperson said most usage of Horizon Workrooms, the VR conferencing technology, comes from inside Meta.
Still, Collins said, the company senses opportunity.
Although many products are still very early stage and known in their consumer context, "there's enough there that's giving us a lot of confidence to attack the space," he said.
