Mark Zuckerberg thinks that the next frame-breaking moment in technology, comparable to the first Google search or Facebook friend request, will be Meta’s holographic glasses.
“We’re almost ready to start showing the prototype version of the full holographic glasses and that’s wild,” Zuckerberg said in a June interview with YouTuber Kallaway. “Every person I’ve shown it to, their reaction, it’s giddy.”
Holographic glasses transform the wearer’s full field of vision into a three-dimensional space. Zuckerberg painted a picture of him as a full hologram, or 3D digital avatar, sitting on Kallaway’s living room couch.
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“And it’s not just a video call, it’s not just like there’s a screen and you’re there as a hologram,” he said. “We’d be able to interact. So you want to play cards, it’s a hologram, we’re interacting.”
Artists could create art together and content creators could collaborate on new projects as holograms, Zuckerberg explained.
The technology will come at a price, though the exact cost is unspecified for now.
Zuckerberg stated that the fully holographic glasses would cost “significantly more” than the $300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses currently on the market and that Meta isn’t thinking about selling the glasses to everyone right away.
“We’re focused on building the full consumer version of it rather than selling the prototype,” he said.
Meta still intends to demo what the prototype can do to the general public — something Zuckerberg stated he was “really looking forward” to.
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Another example of a frame-breaking product, according to Zuckerberg, is Meta’s upcoming neural wristbands. The futuristic wrist straps pick up brain signals, without the need for wires or anything attached to the brain, with the aim of one day performing tasks like typing and controlling a computer mouse.
Zuckerberg said that the possibility of paradigm-changing products like holographic glasses and neural wristbands sets technology apart from other fields.
“In a lot of other fields, you can be doing the same thing for a long period of time, whereas in technology, every once in a while something comes along and just unleashes all of these new opportunities and you need to rethink what you’re doing,” he said.
Meta is currently an industry leader in virtual reality, drawing 37.2% of AR/VR market share in Q1 2024 compared to Apple’s 17%.
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