Connecting Physical and Digital Worlds

Meta is a global technology giant that is building innovative ways to help people feel closer to each other. Obinna Chima who attended the company’s ‘Connect’ conference held at its Menlo Park head office in California, United States, last week, writes on the innovative technologies that were unveiled at the forum

One of the consequences of the pandemic which hit the world about two years ago is the blurring of the lines between the physical and digital worlds.  The past few months have seen companies aggressively push innovative technologies in the race to drive digital reality as well as ensure greater connection between the physical and digital worlds.

One of such companies is Meta, which last week unveiled new Artificial Intelligence (AI) products for consumers as well as bots, and an updated virtual-reality headset.

Speaking during the tech giant’s ‘Connect Developers’ conference at his company’s Menlo Park headquarters in California, the United States, the Chief Executive Officer of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, noted that over the last few decades, the global technology industry has been building an incredible digital world.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and Thread, has long had a big research team of computer scientists devoted to advancing AI technology.  The tech giant is in the midst of a corporate transformation that it said would take years to complete. It wants to evolve from a provider of social platforms to a dominant power in a nascent virtual-reality world, called the metaverse – sort of the internet brought to life, or at least rendered in 3D.

Artificial intelligence is central to that vision. In July, Meta released the next generation of its AI large language model and made the technology, known as Llama 2, free for research and commercial use.

“A lot of this effort around chatbots and stories and other ways just to keep engagement going [like] AI-driven personalisation and stuff like that, that’s the overarching challenge for the company,” he said.

Zuckerberg stressed that Meta remains focused on building the future of human connection and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them.

 Standing on the podium, Zuckerberg told his audience made up of developers, employees and journalists that, “One of lives greatest joy is getting to go out, be active and enjoy. But at same time, over the last few decades, our industry has been building this incredible digital world. It is funny when people say the digital world is not the real world. Increasingly, the real world is the combination of the physical world that we have and the digital world that we are building.

“I think one of the most interesting question for our industry over the coming decades is going to be how do we unify these experiences – the physical that we have with this vibrant digital world to have something better than what we have today?  Not too far from now, you are going to walk into a room and there would be many holograms of digital things as well as physical objects.

“So, this is a quick glimpse of the future of how this idea of the physical and the digital coming together to create the idea that is called the metaverse.

“Mixed reality allows you bring digital objects into the physical world; advances in artificial intelligence (AI) allows us to create different AIs that help us to accomplish different things and smart glasses eventually allow us to bring all of these together. Now, the big part of these innovations is about making sure that these technologies are accessible to everyone.

“Sometimes, we innovate and release some of the things that have never been seen, but sometimes, we innovate by taking something that is awesome and super-expensive and make it affordable for everyone or even free. Innovations that bring the future to millions and billions of people is a big part of what we do.”

At the conference, Zuckerberg announced the launch of the tech giant’s new AI products for consumers, including smart glasses that can answer questions and stream directly on Facebook, as well as bots that create photo-realistic images and an updated virtual-reality headset, the Quest 3. The Quest 3 cost $499 and shipping of the product begins from October 10. The AI personal assistant can interact with people using any of Meta’s messaging apps – along with a smattering of AI characters he called “a bit more fun”, such as “Max the sous chef”, who can help come up with ideas for dinner, or Lily, a “personal editor and writing partner.”

The Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses allow people record videos or take photos, livestream, listen to music and interact with the Meta AI assistant.

It also unveiled an AI image generator named Emu, which creates images based on prompts from users.

He pointed out that the Quest 3, offers improved performance, immersive new mixed-reality features and a sleeker, more comfortable design.

Meta by contrast, has wholeheartedly embraced gaming as the most popular activity on its Quest VR headsets. The company even built its own game publishing arm, which has helped finance hundreds of VR games. Meta’s bet is that gaming could be a kind of gateway for other spatial computing use cases, including fitness, creativity, and even work—much like consumers embraced their mobile phones as cameras and music players first, only to use them additionally for work tasks as well.

“We are incredibly proud to introduce Quest 3, the first mainstream mixed reality headset. Quest 3 is the most powerful headset that we have ever shipped and it allows you to blend the digital and the physical worlds together. You can navigate it with your hands or with brand new precision control designed for work or games. It completely stands alone with battery pack and nothing that can break your head. When you put on Quest 3, you will see the physical room around you and then you can bring your digital object into the world. Quest 3 understands your space and so you can play with the world around you or even when they are far away.

“These experiences are possible because Quest 3 shows your digital space with ten times more pixels than what we had on Quest 2. We are just scratching the surface on what is to be possible in trying to bring virtual objects into your physical space,” he explained.

On the Smart glasses, he said: “Smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let an AI assistant see what you are seeing and hear what you are hearing. The glasses will launch on October 17 and cost $299.”

The founder of Meta described the products as bringing together virtual and real worlds and underscored that part of what Meta offers was low-cost or free AI that could be integrated into daily routines.

“These are just a few we have trained. There are a lot more coming,” he said.

Speaking further, he told participants at the conference: “We have a whole lot of new experience. We have been on it for a while and I am really very excited to show you what we have been building. At Meta, we are focused on building the future of human connections.

“What that means is that we build products to help people connect with friends, colleagues, families and people we care about, anywhere in the world we actually are. We do this because we believe that strengthens our relationship, helps us bond together, improves our learning, gives us more opportunity.

In his contribution, Meta’s Chief Technical Officer,  Andrew Bosworth, said he was excited to see the future taking shape.

“We are going to bring these technologies to the mass market in a way that nobody has done. Now for the Quest 3, we can’t talk about Quest 3 without recognising what made it happen – Quest 2. In 2020, Quest 2 was announced and it was a game-changer for the industry. It set the standard for what a modern headset should be.

“It introduced virtual reality to the mainstream and help thousands of people to have their first experience of the future. Now, three years later, Quest 3 is the beginning of the next wave. It built on all the things that people love about Quest 2, but also brings things new to the mass market – mixed reality,” Bosworth added.

According to him, “A bit of a cliche in our industry is that you only get the technology right in the third generation”.

 Smart glasses like those just released by the company help Meta understand and solve problems around comfort and durability even before AR glasses technology is mass-market-ready, he argued: “There’s no substitute for getting those [first-generation devices] out and building from there.”