At the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada yesterday, one company dazzled the crowds with a technology that will signals the rise of augmented reality to take place this year. Having launched an augmented reality device in 2014, Meta was on stage at TED with the latest version of their headset, the Meta 2 development kit.
Meta CEO Meron Gribetz whipped the second version of their development kit out from beneath a red sheet before giving the audience a glance of what the future might look like without desktop computers. Gribetz expalined, “Today’s computers are so amazing that we fail to notice how terrible they really are. The future of computers is not locked inside screens. It is right here, inside of us… You are the OS, you live between windows.”
Gribetz then showed off a few demos for the Meta 2 headset, including a “holographic” video call, which takes Google Hangouts and Facetime a step further by actually projecting the person your chatting with into the room, right in front of you. The CEO also demonstrated how virtual objects can be held and manipulated through gesture control, using the stunning example of a “glass brain“.
Since first covering Meta in 2014, the latest version of the headset has increased its field of view and performance, which may more than make up for the bulkiness of the device. Still, it can’t be much sillier looking than the HoloLens, if you plan on wearing a face computer. Though Microsoft was hoping to conquer the AR market with their own system, which is shipping to developers this quarter, it seems that they may have competition from the likes of Meta, whose TED performance has been circulating around the web since it occurred. Both companies, however, will have to keep their eyes set on Magic Leap, who, with substantial support from Google, plans to project AR directly into the retinas of its wearers. Until then, we can wait for more information about the Meta 2 DK to come out around March 2, a date that Meta’s website seems to be counting down to as we speak.
