A few months ago, Meta introduced the Orion, a pair of smart glasses with cutting-edge holographic display units. While those glasses are still a few years into the future, Meta has today introduced the Aria Gen 2 platform.
Shaped somewhat like the Ray-Ban Meta Stories smart glasses, but with bulkier arms, the next-gen Aria smart glasses come with a handful of notable upgrades. For example, they are fitted with a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor for heart rate measurement.
The PPG sensor is embedded within the nose pad of the smart glasses. These are the first pair of smart glasses out there to offer this biosensing facility, though not the only ones in the wearable segment. Apple’s new Beats PowerBeats Pro 2 earbuds also come kitted with a heart rate sensor.
Think of them as Ray-Ban Stories with too many onboard sensors.
Meta says it has also updated the sensor stack on the Aria Gen 2 smart glasses, equipping them with a regular RGB camera as well as eye-tracking cameras. Going a step further, the company also armed them with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) cameras with 6 degree of freedom (DoF) movement support.
The hardware stack even includes GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System), a barometer for pressure sensing, and a magnetometer, as well. There’s also a contact-based microphone array on the smart glasses to separate the speaker’s voice beam from other people in its vicinity.
Meta says it created a custom processing assembly so that the sophisticated sensing stack can draw power in the most efficient way. Talking about power draw, Meta says the Aria Gen 2 smart glasses can be worn for “six to eight hours of continuous use,” which is unprecedented.
Unfortunately, these smart glasses are not for sale to the masses. Instead, they will be extended to researchers, and will also be used by Meta’s own employees in the Reality Labs and FAIR AI divisons.
The glasses built atop the Aria platform have found utility in multiple domains, such as automobiles and creating med-tech tools like those aimed at helping people living with vision problems and assisting with navigation.
The data collected by Aria Gen 2 smart glasses will also be used for robotics training. Meta has been working on robotic advancements for years and it is said to be eyeing humanoid robots in the near future.
