Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, counts more than 3 billion monthly users across its family of apps. Now, it’s trying to build the next generation of services in virtual reality and the metaverse through Meta Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds — all while dealing with antitrust pressures, privacy concerns, and younger users shifting to other platforms.
Musk famously challenged the Meta CEO to a cage match last year that Zuckerberg agreed to but never happened.
Now, more than a year later, a reporter from Fox News got Musk to say today that he’s again open to fighting — this time on Zuckerberg’s terms.
Spotted by Radu Oncescu, it lets you view custom feeds from your homepage in the mobile app (as you already can on the redesigned desktop app), so you can easily access posts you’ve saved, liked, and filtered only to show posts by people you’re following.
That means mapping developers can access the 2.3 billion unique buildings, 54 million places of interest, 200 million addresses, and other global data collected by the Overture Maps Foundation. The open-source initiative launched in 2022 with the goal of offering a free alternative to mapping data provided by Google and Apple.
[Overture Maps Foundation]
Demos on this Meta blog show how the company will implement its promise to bring AI to its VR headsets. Like the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, you can ask it questions about things you see (in passthrough), and it will answer.
The experimental feature rolls out in English next month, in the US and Canadia (excluding the Quest 2).
An eagle-eyed Threads user spotted the glasses in a photo posted by Mark Zuckerberg in April, with the Meta CEO replying that more details will be shared “later this year.”
That checks out with Zuckerberg recently teasing that Meta was “almost ready” to reveal a prototype. Rumor has it Meta is planning to demo its “Orion” augmented reality smart glasses at Meta Connect in September.
The watchdog says that Meta violated upon local consumer protection and data privacy laws, reports Reuters. The company has 60 days to pay the fine, according to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s order.
You can read documents associated with the case on the watchdog’s website.
Google is trying to steal the Ray-Ban partnership from Meta
The smart glasses market is heating up. Also: layoffs and a strategy shift hit Magic Leap.
What happened to the metaverse?
‘The Metaverse’ author Matthew Ball discusses the new update to his 2022 book and how the Apple Vision Pro and AI fit into the spatial internet.
That’s according to the Financial Times, reporting that Meta is looking to further its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban and so many other eyewear brands.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses released last year now support multimodal AI to identify what wearers are seeing. They also sold more in a few months than the previous pair did in two years, according to EssilorLuxottica’s CEO.
[Financial Times]
Earlier this month, the country’s data protection authority (ANPD) issued a temporary measure banning Meta from training its AI models on Brazilian personal data over privacy and transparency concerns.
Like it did following similar constraints with the EU, Meta has now decided to suspend its generative AI tools in the region while it works to find a resolution with ANPD, according to Reuters.
The two tech CEOS (and jacket-swapping friends) will have a live-streamed “fireside chat” at the SIGGRAPH conference to discuss AI. Their conversation will take place on July 29th at 6PM ET.
The CEOs of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have all posted comments over the past hour wishing for Trump’s recovery and criticizing the use of violence.
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He’s set to appear on the Acquired Podcast on September 10th at San Francisco’s Chase Center. Tickets haven’t gone on sale yet, but you can sign up for more information here.
As summarized by Ball:
In the interview, we discuss the three “epochs” in Meta’s Metaverse strategy, what it will take for total VR / MR headset sales to cross 100 million annually, his the specs of his dream headset, Meta’s spending on Reality Labs, whether and when developers might get access to the Quest’s raw camera feed, the many inventions required to ship optical AR glasses, the role of AI, and more.
A new WhatsApp beta version for Android lets you send a photo to Meta AI, then ask it questions about it or edit the image using prompts, according to WABetaInfo.
Meta has worked more image-generation features into the app lately, including a beta feature letting Meta AI create an avatar for users based on photos of them.
With one year completed for Instagram’s Twitter-like app, Meta illustrator Jez Burrows is showing off some of the other options that were on the table to represent Threads.