SAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars, hired thousands of employees and worked for roughly a quarter of his life in pursuit of a vision: a future in which the physical and digital worlds are interwoven to connect people around the globe.
The dream still seems far-fetched. But on Wednesday, his company Meta took one step closer.
Meta introduced a series of new products during an event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, including an updated, low-cost version of its Quest 3S virtual reality headset; a pair of prototype glasses with holographic technology built into the lenses; and a series of enhancements to its artificial intelligence assistant, Meta AI.
Those updates will bring a host of celebrity voices to the AI assistant — including those of Awkwafina, John Cena and Dame Judi Dench — that will respond to users when asked questions. The assistant is incorporated across most of Meta’s largest apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook.
The new products are Zuckerberg’s attempt to meld his vision of what social networks can be with what is possible now. Though Meta has had some success selling its virtual reality headsets and a surprise hit in its Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses, Zuckerberg’s metaverse is still years from reality.
“We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look,” he said at the event Wednesday. “It’s happening.”
In the last few years, Meta has spent nearly $50 billion on its Reality Labs division — the part of the company working on hardware. It does not stand to turn a profit anytime soon. That is on top of the increasingly high costs of Meta’s expansion into AI and data centers.
By building millions of smart glasses and VR headsets, Zuckerberg hopes to bring the many people who already use his apps into a different kind of social network. And by coupling those products with the Meta AI assistant, he hopes he can make them useful enough for people to want to come back to them regularly.
The company said more than 400 million people have already used Meta AI, and nearly 200 million people use the smart assistant on one of the company’s products each week.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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