The Future Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying To Build

Very hard to make each one of these. That makes me feel incredibly optimistic. In a world where AI gets smarter and smarter, this is probably going to be the next major platform after phones.

Yeah, looking forward to it.

Go for it.

Yeah. Cool. All right. Awesome. So, I'd love to start with these.

We're getting there. But I'd love to just hear in your voice. What are these? Well, these are the first full holographic augmented reality glasses I think that exist in the world. Um, we've made I think it's a few thousand or something, right? um very hard to make each one of these. But this is the culmination of 10 years of research and development that we've done to basically miniaturize all the computing that you need to have glasses, not a headset, but glasses that can put full holograms into the world with a wide field of view. So you can imagine sort of in the future we'd be having a version of this conversation where you know maybe I or you are not even here. It's like one of us is physically here and the other one is here as a kind of a full body hologram and it's not just a video call. You can actually interact. You can do things. I mean in the demo we had the ping pong and games and things like that. But I mean you can interact. You can work together. You can play poker, play chess, whatever. Like the holographic cards, holographic board game. I just think it's going to be wild. That's going to remake I think so many different fields that we think about today from how we work and productivity to a lot of things around science, a lot of things around education, entertainment, fun, gaming. So but this is just the beginning, you know. This is the first version. It's like a prototype version that we've made in order to develop the next version, which is hopefully going to be the consumer one that we sell to a lot of people.

Well, I think it's going to be the next major computing platform. So, if you look at the grand arc of computing over time, you've gone from mainframes to computers that basically live on your desk or on a tower to phones that you have in your hand that you can take with you everywhere that you want. But it's pretty unnatural, right? It takes you away from the world around you. And I think that the trend in computing is it gets more ubiquitous, it gets more natural and it just gets more social, right? So you want to be able to interact with people in the world around you. And I think that this is probably going to be the next major platform after phones. I'll give these to you. These are the clear ones that show all.

And this is like a really special edition. There's not a single millimeter of space. It's, you know, everything in here from the micro projectors that basically shoot light into the waveguides, right? It's a special type of display system. I mean, these aren't normal displays like you have in a phone or a TV or computer, like the type of displays that people have been building for decades. It's a waveguide system. The projector that's shooting light basically goes into these nano etchings across the waveguide that are what catches and creates the holograms. In order to synchronize that with where you're looking, there's eye tracking and little cameras. They illuminate your eyes. And then of course there's all the basic stuff that you need. All the computing, the batteries to power the whole thing, microphones, the speakers because it needs to be able to play audio and speak with you. And the cameras and sensors to see things around you in the world. So that way when it's placing holograms in the world, it can do that in the right place and understand where you are. So that probably is still not covering everything because there's a lot of things that need to go into syncing up the holographic images between the two displays because you don't just have a single display like you have in a phone or TV. You have two and it moves around and physical things are hard and need to be synced up. There's also the radio that has to communicate with your other computing devices to do heavier computing. And the wrist-based neural interface that you probably got to try out. We kind of miniaturized all of this and fit it into a normal looking pair of glasses which is, you know, when I told the team that we were going to do this 10 years ago, people weren't sure if we were going to be able to but I think not only we're going to be able to do this but I think we're going to be able to get it cheaper and higher quality and even smaller and more stylish over time. So I think this is going to be a pretty wild future.

Yeah. So, when we were getting started on this about 10 years ago, I thought that something like this was going to be the ultimate product for everyone, right? You get a normal looking pair of glasses and we'll continue improving that that can have full holographic images. I think it's super powerful and it is sort of the science fiction future that I think we all hope to get to. On the journey we took a few other approaches as well to help us develop towards that including building glasses that don't have displays to try to learn. Just take a stylish pair of glasses today and put as much technology into it as you can but really focus on the form factor. And that's the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and it's doing really well. And initially we thought that that was sort of an intro product for us to learn how to build this. But one of the things that's clear now is you're going to be able to make that product a lot more affordable than this probably permanently. So I actually think that there are going to be a bunch of different of these paths that we've taken are going to be kind of permanent product lines that people will choose. I think you'll see displayless glasses like the Ray-Ban Metas continue to get better and better. Great for AI. No display, but you can talk to it. It can talk back. I know there's going to be something in between these that's basically a heads up display. So, it's not a 70 degree field of view. Maybe it's a 20 or 30 degree field of view. So, that's not going to be what you want for putting a full hologram of a person or interacting with the world around you, but it's going to be great for, you know, when you're talking to AI, not just having voice, but also being able to see what it's saying or being able to text someone with your wrist-based neural interface and then have their text show up rather than having it read to you, which is we read faster than we can listen or getting directions, right? Or just being able to search for information, get all that. There's a lot of value for a heads-up display that will be somewhat more expensive than the displayless glasses, but somewhat cheaper than this. Then I think you're going to get this. It's going to be probably the most premium and expensive of the glasses products, but hopefully still something that, like a computer is generally accessible to most people in the world. But I think that there are going to be all of those, and I think people will like them. I also think that the headsets that people are using around mixed reality will continue to be a thing too because no matter how good we get at miniaturizing the tech for this, you're just going to be able to fit more compute into a full headset. You know, fundamentally our mission is not build something that is advanced and only a few people can use. We want to take it the last mile and do all the innovation to get it to everyone. We just shipped or announced Quest 3S, the new mixed reality headset where we basically are delivering high quality mixed reality for $299. I was really proud last year when we delivered Quest 3, the first kind of really high quality, high resolution, color, mixed reality device for $500, right? It was like a fraction of the cost of what the competitors are doing. And I think it's actually higher quality in a lot of ways. And now we've just doubled down on that. So, I think that they're all actually going to end up being important long-term product lines. Displayless, heads up display, full holographic AR, full headsets, I think they're all going to be important.

I mean I think that there are two primary values that we're trying to bring on the AR and kind of mixed reality side. The main value we're trying to bring is this feeling of presence, right? So, there's something that I think is just really deep about being physically present with another person that you don't get from any other technology today. And I think that's the thing when people have a very visceral reaction to experiencing virtual or mixed reality. What they're really reacting to is that they actually for the first time with technology feel a sense of presence like they're in a place with a person and that's super powerful. Like I've focused on designing social apps and experiences for 20 years. That's sort of the holy grail of that is being able to build a technology platform that delivers this deep sense of social presence. The other big track is around personalized AI and for that and that's sort of where Llama and Meta AI and all those things are going. There's all this development that's going into making the models smarter and smarter over time. But I think where this is going to get really compelling is when it's personalized for you. And in order for it to be personalized for you, it has to have context and understand what's going on in your life, both at a global level and like what's physically happening around you right now. And in order to do that, I think that glasses are going to be the ideal form factor because they're positioned on your face in a way where they can see what you see and hear what you hear, which are the two most important senses that we use for taking in information and context about the world. I thought this is all going to be kind of really deep and profound stuff, but it's basically those two things. It's this feeling of presence and this capability of really personalized intelligence that can help you.

Well, eye contact I think we're going to get to a lot before the touch part. For haptics, I do think we'll make progress on that, but it's obviously there's a spectrum there, too, from kind of hands, which is if you draw out the kind of homunculus version of a person in terms of what are our sensory, what's the majority of what we're sensing, it's like... So, I think being able to do that for your hands is probably the most important place to start. And you have a rough version of that with controllers today. I think that that'll get even more over time. We have this demo playing ping pong where you have a controller where as the digital ball hits the ping-pong paddle, you feel it hit the paddle as if it's hitting the ping-pong paddle wherever it is. So, you actually have a sense of like where it's hitting the paddle. So, I think that was just a wild demo. So I think we'll get some of that. The most extreme version of this is wanting force feedback, right? So I mean for doing a lot of sports, right? It's like okay, we can kind of do a good approximation of boxing today where you get good feedback on your hands, but it would be hard to do a virtual reality version of jiu-jitsu where you're grappling with someone and you need real kind of force feedback on that. So that's probably the hardest thing to go do. But I think we'll get there. You know, I think like most science fiction, it's not this binary thing that you just wake up one day and we're like, 'Oh, we've realized all the dreams.' But I do think that these platforms are going to be the first time that I think that there's a realistic sense of presence and all the ways that that's special to people for most things that people want to do, which are not the most physical ones and even some of the basic physical ones I think we'll get. But then there's a long tail of other stuff. I mean, smell is also really important for people, right? It's disproportionately important for memories, and that's not really a thing that I think in the next few years we're going to have in any of these devices. I mean, that's a very difficult and challenging thing on its own.