Meta Connect is Meta's annual hardware showcase, and this year the star of the show is the Meta Quest 3. But the standalone VR headset wasn't alone.
Meta announced a bunch of new products, of course including the Meta Quest 3, but Emu AI was also there, furthering Meta's goal of furthering human connection – whatever that means. We went ahead and gathered everything announced at the show right here, so you can find out what matters to you.
Meta Quest 3 - Mixed Reality for All?
The Meta Quest 2 was a virtual reality headset, and while the Meta Quest 3 can do that, it differs by having cameras that allow your content to exist in the same world you do. It does this with 2 dedicated color sensors and a depth sensor, that will allow you to do things like previewing furniture in your room.
Meta Quest 3 will also support Xbox Cloud Streaming. That doesn't mean that everything on Xbox Game Pass will be VR, but instead it's taking the Apple Vision Pro approach, projecting a giant virtual screen into your environment that you can sit and play games on with a regular controller.
Under the hood, the Meta Quest 3 is powered by the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, which has a massively more powerful GPU, which will allow more VR games to run natively on the Quest, when previously you'd have to play games tethered to one of the best gaming PCs.
Meta claims the Meta Quest 3 is the most powerful VR and MR headset ever, which we'll have to wait and see how it pans out in our review. But with the price tag going up to $499, it might be a little harder to afford for "everyone". But either way, you can buy it October 10, 2023.
Emu - AI comes to Instagram
AI has been everywhere over the last year, but Meta is looking to democratize the tech further. Emu, then, isn't really a product, but more an initiative to bring AI models to Facebook and Instagram. The idea here is to use AI image generation and manipulation to create fun photos to send to friends and will even allow you to create custom stickers at the drop of a dime, whether you're in chat or commenting on a friend's post.
Beyond Meta's own AI models, the company is using this to create a platform for developers to create AI models that Meta's massive userbase. So, get ready for a deluge of "smart" video filters. An even bigger deluge than we already have.
Of course, Meta is also using this as an opportunity to create Meta AI, an AI chatbot where you can ask questions and get AI-generated answers. But instead of it being one single chatbot, it's a wide collection of different chatbots that each specialize in their own special categories, and of course they're "played" by celebrities.
