Meta: Here's Aria Gen 2, the Smart Glasses That Go Beyond the Smartphone

Meta has shared details of its new Aria Gen 2 glasses, which were announced earlier this year . These are experimental glasses that Meta is developing to study egocentric artificial intelligence, the branch of AI that teaches machines to interact with the world in a first-person way, just like humans.

Through cameras, sensors and microphones, these devices collect data on what the person wearing them says, feels and does, in order to design digital assistants that interact with humans in reality.

These glasses represent the tool that, on several occasions, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has indicated as destined to replace the smartphone.

Project Aria is an initiative launched by Meta in 2020 to develop the interaction between artificial intelligence and human perception. These are glasses equipped with video cameras, microphones, motion sensors and GPS, created to collect data in the field in urban and domestic environments. The aim is to provide a continuous flow of environmental data to be used in training artificial vision systems.

The previous model, the Aria Gen 1 glasses, contributed to the creation of the Ego4D dataset, developed by Meta AI in collaboration with international academic institutions. It is one of the largest egocentric video datasets in the world, with over 3,000 hours of first-person recordings collected from 74 different locations and annotated for activities, objects, gestures and conversations.