Meta Connect 2024: How to watch and what to expect

Meta is holding its annual Connect developer conference next week, which will reveal a slew of exciting and perhaps some surprising new VR and AR hardware, and there’s also likely to be a big Meta AI showcase, including this The company’s latest Llama large-scale language model and image generator is used in apps like WhatsApp.

With Meta removing customization tools for AR filters, we may end up seeing a whole new set of development tools designed to take advantage of generative AI experiences. Perhaps this will all come together in Meta’s next big push into its alternate reality concept (and namesake) metaverse, including a major Horizon world update.

However, the most anticipated products expected to appear during the conference are the successors to the Meta Quest 3 and perhaps updates to the Meta and Raybans, which are both very cool smart glasses. Hopefully we’ll see the rumored “Orion” AR glasses, but we’ll need to catch up with the Connect keynote to find out.

This year’s Meta Connect developer conference opens Wednesday, September 25, 2024and ends the next day, Thursday, September 26th. The conference will kick off with a Connect keynote hosted by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 1pm ET / 10am PTfollowed by a developer keynote at 2 pm ET/11 am PT. Meta has a full program schedule on the Connect website.

The Meta Connect keynote speech will be broadcast live on the Meta Connect official website. If you are a Quest headset owner, you can also watch it on Horizon Worlds. After the keynote, you can attend a live developer session to learn more about artificial intelligence and mixed reality on Facebook.

The most exciting thing about the Meta is that it holds the key to the closest thing to a mainstream VR headset, including the Quest 2 and Quest 3. ) and there is no very clear AR video passthrough. Now we’re expecting a cheaper version, the Quest “3S,” which according to leaks could cost as low as $299.99.

Meta is also brewing other new VR headsets, including a new Quest 4 in 2026 and a professional-grade product designed for spatial computing in 2027, known internally as “La Jolla.” Has been put on hold. We may not see these models on Connect, but other models in the pipeline may.

The futuristic Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will also be updated on Connect. The current glasses look clean and not too bulky, but even without AR functionality, they’re ripe for iteration. The glasses respond to your commands through Meta AI, so look forward to the new chatbot assistant experience.

Meta is also developing new mixed reality glasses internally called “Orion,” which we can at least get a glimpse of. Snap recently made us wear new AR glasses, but they’re limited to developers, and a former Snap engineer who worked on the project called them “clearly terrible.” Hopefully what we see of Orion will be more interesting.

Along with Meta’s VR strategy comes expectations for new software and experiences, including the future of Quest games. Currently, there are questions about what Meta is doing for games: it is shutting down Ready at Dawn game studio, which made immersive 3D games such as Echo VRMeanwhile, Meta recently launched an app that lets you play console games on headphones via HDMI.