Apple Making Smart Glasses, Meta Ray-Ban Competitor: Report

The Ray-Ban Meta sensible glasses have been named one of Oprah’s favorite things and are gaining traction: At one level in July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned, “Demand is still outpacing our ability to build them.”

Whereas Meta basks in demand, with more than 700,000 pairs of Ray Ban Metas sold, an business competitor is eyeing the identical area.

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Based on a brand new Bloomberg report, Apple is internally exploring getting into the sensible glasses area with merchandise of its personal. The hassle, internally named Atlas, started final week when Apple’s Product Techniques High quality Workforce requested choose Apple staff to affix “an upcoming person research with present market sensible glasses.” The hassle is a part of “testing and growing merchandise,” Apple wrote within the e mail.

Apple is planning extra focus teams in “the close to future” to establish what its staff like about sensible glasses already available on the market, in accordance with Bloomberg. Apple supposed to maintain the mission secret.

This would not be the primary class the place Meta and Apple’s choices overlap. Apple launched its $3,500 Imaginative and prescient Professional in February; the product is in the identical digital and augmented actuality headset class as Meta’s less expensive $500 Quest 3. A comparison on CNET between the Quest 3 and Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional reveals that the Quest 3 is a stronger gaming and health system whereas the Imaginative and prescient Professional comes out on high for work duties.

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The $299 Ray-Ban Meta sensible glasses come geared up with a digicam to take footage and movies, an Ask Meta AI assistant to reply to queries beginning “Hey Meta,” and audio to make calls, take heed to music, and ship voice-to-text texts.

^{Ray-Ban Meta sensible glasses. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg through Getty Photos}

Meta desires to transcend the glasses someday as nicely. At Meta Join in September, Zuckerberg unveiled the first prototype of Orion, sensible glasses that carry holograms or 3D avatars to your field of regard. The Orion glasses, full with an accompanying neural interface wristband that detects ideas by sensing impulses in your pores and skin, left early testers “giddy” Zuckerberg mentioned.

“These are the primary glasses to be managed by a wristband that picks up on ideas,” Zuckerberg mentioned on the time.

It stays to be seen how Apple intends to compete with Meta on the sensible glasses entrance — however Monday’s Bloomberg report reveals that Apple is protecting its eye on the merchandise.

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