Either Zuck or nothing

Mark Zuckerberg just wrapped up the keynote address at Meta Connect, the company’s annual developer conference.

Clad in an oversized black T-shirt emblazoned with Latin text reading “aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Either Zuck or nothing”), the Meta CEO ran through several tech demos, suffered some minor glitches, and talked about Dame Judy Dench, avocado smoothies, cattle ranching tips, and showed off some THICK prototype holographic glasses.

Zuckerberg noted that the company’s multi-year effort working on glasses, AI, and mixed reality are starting to bear fruit.

“We can start to see how the future of computing and the future of human connection are going to look, and it's pretty awesome,” said Zuckerberg.

It’s also going to look a little weird! The big reveal at the end of the keynote was a pair of holographic augmented reality glasses called “Orion” that the company has been working on for a decade, according to Zuckerberg.

Unlike Apple face-hugging Vision Pro, Orion glasses look like — glasses — albeit so thick they look like they were pulled off the face of a Pixar character.

In a video of people’s reactions, the prototype glasses elicited a chorus of "that’s crazy" from various tech buddies such as digital marketer Gary Vaynerchuk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

It sounded like Orion wasn’t going to be ready to ship for a long time, probably due to the expense of the novel technology, which uses “tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses that shoot light into waveguides that have nanoscale 3D structures etched into the lenses,” Zuckerberg said. According to reporting from The Verge, the first generation of these expensive glasses will likely never in fact be sold to the public, who will have to wait for Orion’s second generation.

Other demos featured live language translation through Ray-Ban Meta glasses, AI-powered video translations of Instagram Reels, and virtual AI avatars that could answer questions on your behalf for... all your many fans?