5 ms·

Meta Project Aria - Smart Glasses Research Kit

129 points by walterbell 2y ago

Etheryte 2y ago
The specs [0] are quite interesting, in that they're nothing fancy which enables the small form factor. I'm guessing the main intent here is to do as much as possible off-device? 4GB of RAM is not nothing, but it's not much if you want to use any advanced models, never mind what that'll do to battery life. [0] https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/tech_spec/hardware_spec https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/te...
- fatnoah 2y ago
  It's been a few years since I worked on wearables at Meta, so things may have changed, but the goal from the beginning was to move as much compute off the device as possible to deal with the related problems of power consumption and heat generation. For the particular wearable my time was very focused on at the time, heat was actually the larger issue.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - cco 2y ago
    Then why can't my Meta Ray Bans use a non-Meta AI assistant??? Haha I understand why but my only real complaint about the glasses is that I'm stuck with Meta AI. Would be so nice if I could plug Gemini or Open AI into it. Great product overall but suffers from not having an SDK and lock in on the model.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      Unfortunately pretty much every modern product suffers from the same fate, we can't even have widely used open standards for messaging interoperability. We're lucky the open internet, email, irc and etc were invented before all of this enshittification, all of those would be very different if they were invented today.
bratwurst3000 2y ago
how are the other smart glasses of meta doing? The ray ben one seems to be the new instagram.
- ConfusedDog 2y ago
  I got one transition lens RayBan Meta glasses. It's pretty useful to free up my hands when shooting a video of my kid playing. I also like it can replace ear plugs if you don't care about premium sound quality. The only downside is a tad bit too heavy...
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
kaivi 2y ago
For those who won't read the article: it's only a wearable camera with an SDK for capturing data, there's no AR projection.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  Reminds me of the original Oculus Rift, it was a def device.
_fat_santa 2y ago
I'm glad Mark managed to dig Meta out of the hole it was in a few years ago. I remember they were dumping so much money into the metaverse telling everyone it was the future. Seems now they have less of a focus on that and more of a focus on VR hardware and their AI models, which IMO is a better place for them than where they were.
- robbbbbbbbbbbb 2y ago
  I don't know if you're conflating 'Metaverse' with 'NFTs' or something, but in Meta land it's very much a VR/AR term. If you're interested in where they're currently focusing their spending and the timelines for return on investment, the recently leaked memo isn't a bad place to start https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-cto-to-staff-leaked-memo-2025-year-of-greatness/ https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-cto-to-staff-leaked-memo-2025-...
- skizm 2y ago
  I feel like the original messaging was terrible. Everyone thinks "metaverse" == Horizon Worlds, since that was the demo they showed at the time. It was actually supposed to be a blanket term for all post-phone tech that will be integrated into daily life. Including but not limited to AR/VR, all sorts of wearable tech, robotics, AI integration into everything, etc. People walked away from their original presentation assuming they were trying to clone second life in VR (they were, but that was just one random project they demoed).
- jayd16 2y ago
  I do appreciate the big swing and the R& D is quite cool. The Quest is a marvel and they seem to be making real gains towards a mythical hands-free AR glasses experience. I was also very excited to see a big tech company moved towards premium hardware and premium software. Sadly I fear a return to freemium, now AI generated, and soon to be advertisement filled slop. Meta is still Meta but hopefully their goals keep them on a better path.
- loeg 2y ago
  They're still dumping roughly the same amount of money into the Metaverse hole as they were in 2022 ($4-5B/quarter), investors have just warmed up to it (and spending growth slowed down).
robbbbbbbbbbbb 2y ago
The original paper abstract [1] cuts through a lot of the jargon on the website, but yeah it's just a research platform for capturing (and doing limited processing on) video and telemetry for the purposes of AR-focused ML research. It's not a new headset or a protoype for one. "Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data." [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13561 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13561
31337Logic 2y ago
Am I the only one who wants to see these things banned in most public places?
- phyrex 2y ago
  I assume you're consistent and therefore also want to ban any other photo or video device in most public places?
  - darkwater 2y ago
    Are you recording non-stop all the time? If so, yes, you should not be able to do it.
    - paxys 2y ago
      The glasses aren't recording non stop
    - phyrex 2y ago
      I wish we had batteries so small and powerful but there's no way to record constantly with a tiny device like that
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - Timpy 2y ago
    Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at the thing they're photographing or recording, it's a very clear visual signal to others and there are cultural norms for this behavior. If a person is doing this in a common tourist destination that's more acceptable than pointing your camera at somebody else's children without asking them first. Imagine how uncomfortable it would be for somebody to hold their phone at eye level and point it at you the entire time they're having a conversation with you, even if they say they're not recording or anything like that. Having a distaste for smart glasses is pretty consistent with the status quo.
jimiasty 2y ago
Founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13) here — we do beacons. In Project Aria video, they claim to have installed beacons at an airport to enable indoor location, only to dismiss it as something that "doesn't scale." Instead, they say they "trained" an AI model using vision from glasses, allowing for vision-based localization. So, here’s an honest question: which approach is actually easier, more cost-effective, and energy-efficient? 1) Deploying 100 or even 1,000 wireless, battery-operated beacons that last 5–7 years—something a non-tech person can set up in a day or two. 2) Training an AI model for each airport, then constantly burning compute power from camera-equipped glasses or phones that barely last a few hours. Thoughts?
- idopmstuff 2y ago
  > So, here’s an honest question: which approach is actually easier, more cost-effective, and energy-efficient? Really it's more like three questions. 1. Easier? I guess that depends how you define ease, but it largely depends on what resources you have available to you. If I'm Meta and I already have a ton of compute and AI training expertise but don't have relationships with all of the airports, stadiums, etc., their approach is probably easier. You'd have to spin up new teams of people all over the world to get beacons everywhere you want them. 2. Cost-effective? I don't know enough about the costs of your solution to give an accurate answer here, but again it just seems like they're probably already spending resources training models on a huge number of images of the world, so maybe not a lot of incremental cost here. 3. Cost efficient? I would assume your approach wins here.
- bantz_thoughts 2y ago
  1) Is a $1-$20M business requiring "humans in the loop" deploying, monitoring, and maintaining beacons with a single purpose, getting past lots of "humans with opinions" on "aesthetics" and "not in my back yard". 2) Is a $1-??? business requiring a few dedicated nerds working on CV with inf more applications and doesn't require "invading" physical buildings you dont own.
- simne 2y ago
  It depends on scale need to achieve. 1000 beacons easier for one town scale, but train model for each airfield is Earth scale(in 1990 in US was ~6000 airfields, whole Europe have less number of airfields). Also exist some nuances, as some cities are flat but others have large hills, so need to place few beacons on sides of hill (rough surface need much more beacons). Practically, I have experience in project to deploy LoraWan network in large city Kiev, and one concurrent bought research from cellular network planners and for first look they drawn ~300 access points to have more than 99% coverage.
singularity2001 2y ago
Why glasses? Why not a headband / bandeau / frontlet / taenia?
- verdverm 2y ago
  People want smart glasses so they can see virtual overlaid on the real world.
  - singularity2001 2y ago
    That's not what these do though.
    - verdverm 2y ago
      Obviously, they are an early development device for what will be smart glasses. Why use a different form factor for this?
k__ 2y ago
Don't know how hyped people are about this after Meta let Spark users standing in the rain...
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
smileson2 2y ago
[flagged]
qwertox 2y ago
One question: as a person who is far and nearsighted at the same time, I basically see only sharp at a distance of around 20 cm, could I even use such glasses?
- corysama 2y ago
  It would probably involve a small physical adjustment to the device. Whether or nor Meta provides that option is a good question. VR and AR devices so far always use a fixed focal plane for everything. Usually around 1 meter. So, if you are looking at a distant object in VR or through AR video passthrough, your eyes need to focus at around 1 meter. I know some VR headsets that offer customizable lens. But, I don't know about this device in particular.
- ipsum2 2y ago
  The glasses don't have a display, they're just normal glasses with audio/video recording functionality.
clueless 2y ago
Seems like they've been pushed to release this as open source alternatives are catching up, if not passing them by [1] ... [1] https://augmentos.org/ https://augmentos.org/
hx8 2y ago
Was anyone else disappointed not to see any sort of display built into the lens? When Google Glass came out 12 years ago I thought he would have DBZ Scouter level tech by now.
qwertox 2y ago
Link to hardware specifications provided by the manual, has good images: https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/tech_spec/hardware_spec https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/te...
ge96 2y ago
Oh this one isn't Orion, Orion looks amazing

129 points by walterbell 2y ago

The specs [0] are quite interesting, in that they're nothing fancy which enables the small form factor. I'm guessing the main intent here is to do as much as possible off-device? 4GB of RAM is not nothing, but it's not much if you want to use any advanced models, never mind what that'll do to battery life. [0] https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/tech_spec/hardware_spec https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/te...

fatnoah 2y ago
It's been a few years since I worked on wearables at Meta, so things may have changed, but the goal from the beginning was to move as much compute off the device as possible to deal with the related problems of power consumption and heat generation. For the particular wearable my time was very focused on at the time, heat was actually the larger issue.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cco 2y ago
  Then why can't my Meta Ray Bans use a non-Meta AI assistant??? Haha I understand why but my only real complaint about the glasses is that I'm stuck with Meta AI. Would be so nice if I could plug Gemini or Open AI into it. Great product overall but suffers from not having an SDK and lock in on the model.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    Unfortunately pretty much every modern product suffers from the same fate, we can't even have widely used open standards for messaging interoperability. We're lucky the open internet, email, irc and etc were invented before all of this enshittification, all of those would be very different if they were invented today.

bratwurst3000 2y ago

how are the other smart glasses of meta doing? The ray ben one seems to be the new instagram.

ConfusedDog 2y ago
I got one transition lens RayBan Meta glasses. It's pretty useful to free up my hands when shooting a video of my kid playing. I also like it can replace ear plugs if you don't care about premium sound quality. The only downside is a tad bit too heavy...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

kaivi 2y ago

For those who won't read the article: it's only a wearable camera with an SDK for capturing data, there's no AR projection.

giancarlostoro 2y ago
Reminds me of the original Oculus Rift, it was a def device.

_fat_santa 2y ago

I'm glad Mark managed to dig Meta out of the hole it was in a few years ago. I remember they were dumping so much money into the metaverse telling everyone it was the future. Seems now they have less of a focus on that and more of a focus on VR hardware and their AI models, which IMO is a better place for them than where they were.

robbbbbbbbbbbb 2y ago
I don't know if you're conflating 'Metaverse' with 'NFTs' or something, but in Meta land it's very much a VR/AR term. If you're interested in where they're currently focusing their spending and the timelines for return on investment, the recently leaked memo isn't a bad place to start https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-cto-to-staff-leaked-memo-2025-year-of-greatness/ https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-cto-to-staff-leaked-memo-2025-...
skizm 2y ago
I feel like the original messaging was terrible. Everyone thinks "metaverse" == Horizon Worlds, since that was the demo they showed at the time. It was actually supposed to be a blanket term for all post-phone tech that will be integrated into daily life. Including but not limited to AR/VR, all sorts of wearable tech, robotics, AI integration into everything, etc. People walked away from their original presentation assuming they were trying to clone second life in VR (they were, but that was just one random project they demoed).
jayd16 2y ago
I do appreciate the big swing and the R& D is quite cool. The Quest is a marvel and they seem to be making real gains towards a mythical hands-free AR glasses experience. I was also very excited to see a big tech company moved towards premium hardware and premium software. Sadly I fear a return to freemium, now AI generated, and soon to be advertisement filled slop. Meta is still Meta but hopefully their goals keep them on a better path.
loeg 2y ago
They're still dumping roughly the same amount of money into the Metaverse hole as they were in 2022 ($4-5B/quarter), investors have just warmed up to it (and spending growth slowed down).

robbbbbbbbbbbb 2y ago

The original paper abstract [1] cuts through a lot of the jargon on the website, but yeah it's just a research platform for capturing (and doing limited processing on) video and telemetry for the purposes of AR-focused ML research. It's not a new headset or a protoype for one. "Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications. Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable recording and processing of such data." [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13561 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13561

31337Logic 2y ago

Am I the only one who wants to see these things banned in most public places?

phyrex 2y ago
I assume you're consistent and therefore also want to ban any other photo or video device in most public places?
- darkwater 2y ago
  Are you recording non-stop all the time? If so, yes, you should not be able to do it.
  - paxys 2y ago
    The glasses aren't recording non stop
  - phyrex 2y ago
    I wish we had batteries so small and powerful but there's no way to record constantly with a tiny device like that
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Timpy 2y ago
  Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at the thing they're photographing or recording, it's a very clear visual signal to others and there are cultural norms for this behavior. If a person is doing this in a common tourist destination that's more acceptable than pointing your camera at somebody else's children without asking them first. Imagine how uncomfortable it would be for somebody to hold their phone at eye level and point it at you the entire time they're having a conversation with you, even if they say they're not recording or anything like that. Having a distaste for smart glasses is pretty consistent with the status quo.

jimiasty 2y ago

Founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13) here — we do beacons. In Project Aria video, they claim to have installed beacons at an airport to enable indoor location, only to dismiss it as something that "doesn't scale." Instead, they say they "trained" an AI model using vision from glasses, allowing for vision-based localization. So, here’s an honest question: which approach is actually easier, more cost-effective, and energy-efficient? 1) Deploying 100 or even 1,000 wireless, battery-operated beacons that last 5–7 years—something a non-tech person can set up in a day or two. 2) Training an AI model for each airport, then constantly burning compute power from camera-equipped glasses or phones that barely last a few hours. Thoughts?

idopmstuff 2y ago
> So, here’s an honest question: which approach is actually easier, more cost-effective, and energy-efficient? Really it's more like three questions. 1. Easier? I guess that depends how you define ease, but it largely depends on what resources you have available to you. If I'm Meta and I already have a ton of compute and AI training expertise but don't have relationships with all of the airports, stadiums, etc., their approach is probably easier. You'd have to spin up new teams of people all over the world to get beacons everywhere you want them. 2. Cost-effective? I don't know enough about the costs of your solution to give an accurate answer here, but again it just seems like they're probably already spending resources training models on a huge number of images of the world, so maybe not a lot of incremental cost here. 3. Cost efficient? I would assume your approach wins here.
bantz_thoughts 2y ago
1) Is a $1-$20M business requiring "humans in the loop" deploying, monitoring, and maintaining beacons with a single purpose, getting past lots of "humans with opinions" on "aesthetics" and "not in my back yard". 2) Is a $1-??? business requiring a few dedicated nerds working on CV with inf more applications and doesn't require "invading" physical buildings you dont own.
simne 2y ago
It depends on scale need to achieve. 1000 beacons easier for one town scale, but train model for each airfield is Earth scale(in 1990 in US was ~6000 airfields, whole Europe have less number of airfields). Also exist some nuances, as some cities are flat but others have large hills, so need to place few beacons on sides of hill (rough surface need much more beacons). Practically, I have experience in project to deploy LoraWan network in large city Kiev, and one concurrent bought research from cellular network planners and for first look they drawn ~300 access points to have more than 99% coverage.

singularity2001 2y ago

Why glasses? Why not a headband / bandeau / frontlet / taenia?

verdverm 2y ago
People want smart glasses so they can see virtual overlaid on the real world.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  That's not what these do though.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Obviously, they are an early development device for what will be smart glasses. Why use a different form factor for this?

k__ 2y ago

Don't know how hyped people are about this after Meta let Spark users standing in the rain...

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

smileson2 2y ago

[flagged]

qwertox 2y ago

One question: as a person who is far and nearsighted at the same time, I basically see only sharp at a distance of around 20 cm, could I even use such glasses?

corysama 2y ago
It would probably involve a small physical adjustment to the device. Whether or nor Meta provides that option is a good question. VR and AR devices so far always use a fixed focal plane for everything. Usually around 1 meter. So, if you are looking at a distant object in VR or through AR video passthrough, your eyes need to focus at around 1 meter. I know some VR headsets that offer customizable lens. But, I don't know about this device in particular.
ipsum2 2y ago
The glasses don't have a display, they're just normal glasses with audio/video recording functionality.

clueless 2y ago

Seems like they've been pushed to release this as open source alternatives are catching up, if not passing them by [1] ... [1] https://augmentos.org/ https://augmentos.org/

hx8 2y ago

Was anyone else disappointed not to see any sort of display built into the lens? When Google Glass came out 12 years ago I thought he would have DBZ Scouter level tech by now.

qwertox 2y ago

Link to hardware specifications provided by the manual, has good images: https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/tech_spec/hardware_spec https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/te...

ge96 2y ago

Oh this one isn't Orion, Orion looks amazing