Meta Quest to get AI features ahead of Vision Pro

Meta Quest VR headsets are to get AI features ahead of Vision Pro, with Meta updates rolling out next month.

The move will see the artificial intelligence features currently available in Ray-Ban smart glasses brought to the Quest too, initially as an experimental feature …

No AI for Vision Pro this year – or at all

Previous reports have suggested that Vision Pro won’t get any Apple Intelligence features this year – and possibly not at all.

Earlier this month, John Gruber suggested that AI wasn’t coming to Vision Pro at all, because the devices simply don’t have enough spare processor capacity to run it.

One other surprising revelation is that Apple Intelligence won’t be supported by Vision Pro, despite the M2 chip being powerful enough to do so. The reason here, says Gruber, is that the chip is already running at close to capacity, so doesn’t have enough spare capacity for Apple Intelligence.

“According to well-informed little birdies, Vision Pro is already making significant use of the M2’s Neural Engine to supplement the R1 chip for real-time processing purposes — occlusion and object detection, things like that.”

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman posted a conflicting report, saying that AI would be coming to Vision Pro next year.

Either way, it appears there will be no AI features in 2024.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses already include AI features, and the company says they will now be coming to Quest headsets too.

Engadget reports that the rollout will initially be limited to North America.

The assistant will still be in experimental mode, however, and it’s availability will be limited to users in the US and Canada […]

[This will include] the “Meta AI with Vision” feature, which will let them ask the assistant for information on what they’re seeing, while using Passthrough on the Quest. Passthrough lets users see their environment through a video feed while watching or doing something else on their headsets.

I’ve been using Ray-Ban Meta glasses for a couple of months now, and while I have mixed views on the current AI capabilities, I am very excited about the future.

Photo by Adrià García Sarceda on Unsplash