Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face. At …
Read More »Meta Teaches Its Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Some New AI Tricks
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are the first real artificial-intelligence wearable success story. In fact, they are actually quite good. They’ve got that chic Ray-Ban styling, meaning they don’t look as goofy as some of the bulkier, heavier attempts at mixed-reality face computers. The onboard AI agent can answer questions and …
Read More »Meta Connect Starts Today. Here’s What to Expect
Meta Connect, the big developer event and hardware showcase from the company that runs Facebook and Instagram, is kicking off today. Meta is likely to show off its new VR and mixed-reality technology, put a shiny polish on its meandering metaverse ambitions, and delve into all the fresh ways it …
Read More »Palmer Luckey Is Bringing Anduril Smarts to Microsoft’s Military Headset
When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses. That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from …
Read More »The Metaverse Was Supposed to Be Your New Office. You’re Still on Zoom
When Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he estimated the metaverse could reach a billion people over a decade. Not long after, Bill Gates predicted that within two or three years “most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids—which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although …
Read More »I Wore Meta Ray-Bans in Montreal to Test Their AI Translation Skills. It Did Not Go Well
Imagine you’ve just arrived in another country, you don’t speak the language, and you stumble upon a construction zone. The air is thick with dust. You’re tired. You still stink like airplane. You try to ignore the jackhammers to decipher what the signs say: Do you need to cross the …
Read More »The Spacetop G1 Arrives This Fall. We Try the AR Laptop With No Screen
As I was flying to cover Google I/O early in May, I vowed to do some work on the plane. I pulled out my MacBook while in my economy window-seat. As a 6'4" guy, things were already cramped for my legs; I couldn’t put the 16-inch machine on the tray …
Read More »I Spent an Hour in Marvel’s Apple Vision Pro Experience. I’m Still Not Sure Why
On its surface, Marvel’s new “immersive story” What If…?, available to Apple Vision Pro users starting Thursday, seems like a win-win. Marvel gets to mess around with how to combine storytelling and spatial computing, and Apple gets a big-name experience to appease everyone who ponied up $3,500 for their new …
Read More »I Rode This ‘Holographic’ Bike and Things Got a Little Weird
Until this past week, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been on a bike. In the past decade, I had kids and moved from flat, mostly bike-friendly Chicago to the hilly east side of Los Angeles, but I don’t really have an excuse. I’ve just been lazy. I miss …
Read More »My Life Outside of the Apple Vision Pro
The day preordered Apple Vision Pros were being delivered, I texted my boyfriend about an hour after his messages abruptly stopped. We were both in our respective homes, working remotely, so I knew he had access to his phone. But I also knew he was waiting impatiently for the headset …
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