Meta today revealed its next-gen smart glasses, Aria Gen 2, which the company intends to release to third-party researchers working on machine perception systems, AI and robotics.
The company revealed its first iteration of Project Aria back in 2020, showing off a sensor-rich pair of glasses which the company used internally to train its machine perception systems, ultimately tackling some of the most complex issues in creating practical, all-day augmented reality glasses of the future.
Since then, Meta’s first-gen Aria has found its way outside of company offices; early collaborations with BMW and a number of universities followed, including Carnegie Mellon, IIIT Hyderabad, University of Bristol, and University of Iowa, which used the smart glasses to tackle the a host of machine perception challenges.
Now, Meta has revealed Aria Gen 2. Like the first-gen device, Gen 2 doesn’t include displays of any type, though it now houses an upgraded sensor suite, including an RGB camera, position-tracking cameras, eye-tracking cameras, spatial microphones, IMUs, barometer, magnetometer, GNSS, and custom Meta silicon.
New to Aria Gen 2 are two new sensors embedded in the device’s nosepad: a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor for measuring heart rate and a contact microphone to distinguish the wearer’s voice from that of bystanders.
What’s more, Meta touts the 75g device’s all-day usability—making for 6-8 hours of active use—and its a foldable design.
The increasingly AI-rich device also features a slate of on-device machine perception systems, such as hand and eye-tracking, speech recognition, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) tracking for positional awareness.
Meta envisions the Aria’s SLAM tracking will allow users to internally map and navigate indoor areas that don’t have good or detailed GPS coverage—aka, a visual positioning system (VPS) that could equally help you get around a city street and a find specific item in a store.
The company isn’t ready to sell Aria Gen 2 just yet, although Meta says it will share more details over the coming months, which is slated to target both commercial and academic researchers.
One such early collaboration was with Envision, which announced in October it was working with Meta to provide Aria with a ‘Personal Accessibility Assistant’ to help blind and low-vision users navigate indoor spaces, locate items, and essentially act as a pair of ‘seeing eye’ glasses.
Envision and Meta showed off their latest work in a video (seen above), revealing how Aria Gen 2’s SLAM tracking and spatial audio can assist a blind user to navigate a supermarket by following a spatially correct homing ping that the user perceives as emanating from the correct area, which guides them to the desired item, such as a red onion, or Granny Smith apple.
This comes as Meta continues its push to release its first commercial AR device, which not only needs all of those systems highlighted in Aria, but also the ability to display stereo-correct information in a slim, all-day wearable package. It’s no small feat, considering displays have much higher compute and power requirements relative to Aria’s various machine perception systems.
One of Meta’s biggest ‘light house’ moments was the reveal of its AR prototype Orion in September, which does feature those compute and power-hungry display, yet still fitting into an impressively slim form-factor, owing to its separate wireless compute unit.
Orion, or rather an Orion-like AR device, isn’t going on sale anytime soon though. The internal prototype itself cost Meta nearly $10,000 per unit to build due to its difficult to scale silicon carbide lenses, which notably feature a class-leading 70 degree field-of-view (FOV).
Still, the race is heating up to get all of the right components and use cases up to snuff to release a commercial product, which is aiming to supplant smartphones as the dominant mobile computing platform. Meta hopes to launch such AR glasses before 2030, with other major companies hoping to do the same, including Apple, Samsung, and Google.
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