Meta’s annual keynote is all set to happen on September 25 and September 26 at Menlo Park in California. Though Meta Connect 2024 is a two-day event, we’ll likely hear all the product announcements at the opening keynote on the first day at 1 PM E.T. You can watch the event live on the Meta for Developers page on Facebook. There’s also an option to fully immerse yourself in the event using the Meta Quest headset in Meta Horizon. The company says this virtual experience is inspired by their Menlo Park campus and will also let you “meet people, join with friends, and unlock exclusive rewards.”
What to expect at Meta Connect 2024?
Meta Connect will mainly be about the company’s, you guessed it, new AI enhancements, but we’ll also see how they interact with its new hardware. The star of the show will probably be the “Orion” smart glasses, which Mark Zuckerberg briefly revealed in a Threads post earlier this year. According to The Information, these glasses will feature a projector on their right-hand lens and be significantly heavier than your average pair of glasses.
An entry-level headset, Meta Quest 3S, is apparently joining the already budget-priced Meta headset lineup. This “lite” version could be a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the $500 Quest 3, making the Meta lineup a much more viable option than the ridiculously-priced Apple Vision Pro. According to a leak on Reddit, it might cost $300 and sport a pair of external sensors. The catch is that Meta may offer limited passthrough capabilities on its Quest 3S.
The Menlo Park company is expected to continue collaborating with its old partner and Ray-Bans owner, EssilorLuxottica; we hope to see new frame styles of its Meta Ray-Bans. However, chances are we are more likely to see it advance some of its recent AI offerings into the smart glasses or the Orion.
We’ll likely get updates on Meta’s ongoing AI projects. We look forward to seeing which direction Meta’s Llama LLM (large language model) is headed. Or maybe an update to the company’s AI Studio lets you create AI chatbots without coding experience and have them respond to messages for you. This was particularly targeted at influencers so they could deploy AI to talk to fans on their behalf.