Facebook envisions a future in which smartglasses become as common in everyday life as smartphones are today. This is what we read on thelatest corporate blog post of the colossus of Menlo Park.
For this vision to be realized, however, such devices will require powerful AI software capable of monitoring, reading and reacting to the context surrounding the users of the headset. And the only way to train AI to see and hear the world the way humans do is to have it experience the world the way we do: from a first-person perspective. Twenty-four hours a day. Developing abilities like those of humans with “episodic memory”. In other words, as in an episode of the now prophetic Black Mirror, a viewer would be able to recover even the smallest details of our lives, helping us to recover keys forgotten somewhere. Or who knows, helping the police to see what we did on such a day, at such an hour.
The "electronic voyeur" of users takes shape
“Next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the users' point of view, from the exact center of the action,” the blog post reads. A goal that is currently impossible, but which can be achieved with the development of significantly advanced artificial intelligence.
Facebook's solution to this problem is a new project, called Ego4D. Ego4d will collect data from “13 universities and labs in 9 countries, which have collected more than 2.200 hours of first-person video. Over 700 users made their daily lives available."
The data will be open to the research community, the blog post says, but the goal of the project is clear: create the “ideal” artificial intelligence to power all current and future Facebook devices. Especially the future ones, if you consider that there is a division of Big F called Reality Labs, with the aim of doing research and development on the future of virtual reality and augmented reality in devices intended for users.
The next steps of Reality Labs
Reality Labs is led by a longtime Facebook executive, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, which shared images of several prototypes last week. What are the next steps? You already know about the last one collaboration with Ray Ban for the development of “Ray Ban Stories”, the smart glasses equipped with Facebook.
Activity in the field is also continuing apace with the popular Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset. The plan is now to move from virtual reality to augmented reality (AR) in the next few years.
Everything else is metaverse (and there too Zuckerberg has to say). We'll see.
