Project Aria is a pair of sensor-packed glasses which Meta has been using internally to train its augmented reality perception systems. Now, Meta revealed it’s released Project Aria to a number of third-party research teams aiming to tackle some of the most complex challenges in creating practical, all-day AR glasses of the future.
Announced in 2020, Aria doesn’t include AR displays of any type. Instead, the company designed the glasses to help develop the “safeguards, policies and even social norms necessary to govern the use of AR glasses and other future wearable devices.”
One early collaboration was with BMW, exploring how Aria might inform how AR glasses will one day serve up stable virtual content in moving vehicles—undoubtedly a big piece of the puzzle considering Americans spend around one hour in a car per-day on average, according to AAA.
Now, Meta announced it’s also partnered with a number of universities to develop research projects centered around the sort of things that will be important for all-day AR.
Meta says partners using Aria are currently researching advanced topics such as goal-driven human interaction (University of Bristol), sound localization for hearing aid innovation (University of Iowa), driver intent prediction for accident prevention (IIIT Hyderabad), and audio-based indoor navigation for the visually impaired (Carnegie Mellon University).
Notably, Meta is still accepting applications, which gives approved teams access to Meta’s Aria Research Kit (ARK), which includes the Project Aria hardware and SDK. The company says it also hopes to spark a variety of research topics such as embodied AI, contextualized AI, human-computer interaction (HCI), and robotics.
Meta envisions a future where AR is an integral tool for communication, entertainment, and utility, although getting there requires slim, all-day wearable AR glasses, which hasn’t been easy.
At Meta Connect in September, the company revealed one such prototype, called Orion, which features an impressively slim glasses form-factor, a separate wireless compute unit, and EMG wristband that can detect subtle movements of the user’s hand and fingers.
While Project Aria focuses on foundational research, Orion showcases Meta’s future ambitions for wearable AR, which is expensive. According to a report from The Verge, it cost Meta nearly $10,000 per unit to build due to its difficult to produce silicon carbide lenses, which feature a class-leading 70 degree field-of-view.
While Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says the company hopes to launch such a pair before 2030 based on its work with Orion, at its unveiling, Meta made a point to note that Orion is “not a research prototype,” making it doubtful we’ll ever see this particular iteration in the hands of university teams.
