According to a former employee who worked on the project, Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta's upcoming AR glasses to be a "iPhone moment" that would put him and the firm in a new light. The statement was made to The Verge in response to an article describing Meta's AR glasses roadmap, which includes at least four different versions to be released over the next six years.
According to the article, Meta's first-generation AR glasses, called Nazare, would be intended to run independently of a smartphone via the use of a wireless, phone-shaped device that offloads some of the computation necessary for the glasses to function.
The ability for users to communicate with and interact with holograms of other people will be a key feature of the device, similar to the fictional scenes depicted in a video released last October announcing Facebook's corporate rebranding to Meta.
According to the source, Meta plans to deploy the first-generation edition of their AR glasses to early users and developers by 2024. The company also plans to release a pair of less expensive smart glasses, codenamed Hypernova, in the same year that will pair with a smartphone to show incoming messages and other notifications in a heads-up display.
According to facts given by The Verge by persons familiar with the topic, Meta's AR roadmap includes a lighter, more sophisticated version of the Nazare glasses arriving in 2026, followed by a third iteration in 2028.
If the AR glasses are a success, Zuckerberg apparently expects they would put Meta and himself in a new light and re-invent the business he created, which is why "Zuck's ego is connected with [the glasses]," the former employee told The Verge.
However, Meta will have to compete with Apple, which has its own AR aspirations. Apple is working on at least two AR projects, the first of which is an augmented reality headset that will be released in late 2022 or 2023, followed by a sleeker pair of augmented reality glasses that will be released later.
Rumors initially predicted that Apple's AR/VR headset will be released in 2022, maybe at WWDC in June, but there are development concerns that Apple must address. According to reliable sources such as Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the headgear will most likely be released in 2023, with the glasses following in 2024 or 2025.
