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Ever since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta at its 2021 Connect developer conference, virtual and augmented reality have dominated the conference's focus. The announcements made from the Connect stage every year form a strong outline of what to expect from the company in the year ahead.
This year's Connect carried on with the focus on VR and AR, but of course, with the requisite infusion of AI.
Meta Quest Moves Into the Enterprise
The Connect conference typically spotlights efforts in the consumer market, but this year the enterprise got its due as speakers explored how these technologies might be used in the workplace.
The release of Meta Quest is a case in point. Meta introduced the Quest 3 headset from the stage at Connect. The VR headset will retail for around $500 with pre-orders already opened and devices expected to ship starting Oct. 10.
Mark Zuckerberg described it in his keynote speech as a mixed-reality headset that "allows you to blend physical and digital worlds together."
The updates to the new headset will please gamers, but what about the enterprise?
Obviously, there are a number of possible use cases for virtual reality in the workplace, but Zuckerberg took it a step farther with a nod to the metaverse in the form of Meta Quest for Business.
While he didn't go into too much detail, Meta Quest for Business is due to start rolling out this month to give organizations access to augmented reality (AR) applications in the same place.
The new platform will be compatible with a number of business tools and applications including Microsoft 365, which will be made available later this year.
How this will work remains unclear, but one of the new additions to Quest is likely to help with collaboration and communications. The Quest 3 color ‘pass-through’ feature comes with two external cameras that give a user a better sense of the external surroundings.
For Meta, the upgrade to a ‘pass-through‘ in color was just about obligatory after Apple unveiled its Vision Pro headset in June, which is due for release in early 2024 at the eye-watering price of $3500.
A statement about that release reads: "Apple Vision Pro enables users to be even more productive, with infinite screen real estate, access to their favorite apps, and all-new ways to multitask .… and with support for Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, users can set up the perfect workspace.”
Quest 3
Not everyone is convinced this is going to make an impact on the organization.
“Despite Meta’s claims that the Quest 3 is 'the first ‘mainstream’ mixed reality headset,' the masses simply aren’t yet interested in this category of devices,” wrote Mike Proulx, VP and research director at Forrester Research.
Citing Forrester’s Technology and Telecom Benchmark Recontact Survey, 2022, he notes only 8% of U.S. adults who are active online have a VR headset, and among those who do, the most popular use case is playing video games.
Meta AI Chatbots
Proulx is more optimistic about the uses of Meta AI, its first generative AI assistant based on Meta’s Llama 2 language model. It can access real-time information through a partnership with Microsoft Bing. It also embeds Emu (Meta’s “expressive media universe” image model) into its UI, which means users can generate custom photorealistic images.
During his keynote, Zuckerberg described the product as bringing the digital and real worlds together through 28 AI-powered chatbots. “Meta AI is your basic assistant that you can talk to like a person,” he said during his keynote.
Meta’s strategy, according to Zuckerberg, is to create separate AI products for different use cases as opposed to a single chatbot applied to numerous different cases.
The AI Studio platform will make this possible. With it, businesses can build AI chatbots for the company’s various messaging services, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
Zuckerberg also outlined a future where people will interact with friends and co-workers using AI bots to help them connect and communicate. Of course, the use Bing in this context raises security issues, notably the use of data that contains private details when training the model.
In an interview with Reuters news agency, however, Meta global affairs president Nick Clegg said the company had created data filters that would stop this from happening. He cited LinkedIn as an example — its content is not being used by Meta in Llama 2. It has also ruled out the development of realistic images of public figures. It is probably worth noting here that Llama 3 is due in 2024.
There is more on the way too as AI has become central to Meta’s future business strategy. In April, Zuckerberg mentioned AI 22 times during the Q1 earnings call opening presentation and five more times as he answered questions throughout the meeting.
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One of the striking things about Zuckerberg’s Connect keynote was that AI dominated from the start. In fact, according to TechCrunch, he didn't mention the metaverse until 33 minutes into his keynote.
Earlier this year, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth made comments in Nikkei Asia that some interpreted as a move away from the metaverse towards AI for Meta. Bosworth told Nikkei: "So previously, if I wanted to create a 3D world, I needed to learn a lot of computer graphics and programming. In the future, you might be able to just describe the world you want to create and have the large language model generate that world for you. And so it makes things like content creation much more accessible to more people."
Bosworth sees AI as a stepping stone to building the metaverse and not its end, even if there was little talk about it at Connect.
Meta's Future Projects
In a Meta statement summing up Connect and the different releases, the company outlined some of its upcoming projects. They include:
AI Studio: AI Studio will be made available to people outside of Meta — coders and non-coders alike — to build third party AIs for messaging. Businesses will also be able to create AIs that reflect their brand’s values and improve customer service experiences.
Virtual presence: Creators will be able to build AIs that extend their virtual presence across Meta’s apps. These AIs will have to be sanctioned by them and directly controlled by the creator.
Sandbox: Expected for release in the coming year, Sandbox will enable anyone to experiment with and build their own AI. While it is not clear exactly what this means, the statement added: "As our universe of AIs continues to grow and evolve, we’ll bring this sandbox to the metaverse, giving you the chance to build AIs that adopt an even greater level of realism, embodiment, and connectedness."
Clearly, Connect offered a lot of technology that can be applied to the workplace, Quest 3 and Microsoft 365 being the best examples. However, until all of this is available the practical applications across the enterprise and even in the metaverse remain speculative.
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