Following its recent Q1 earnings report, news emerged highlighting how Meta is again doubling down investments in immersive technology highlighting its ongoing $100 billion spending plan for its XR product portfolio, which includes augmented reality smart glasses, virtual reality headsets, mixed reality Quest, and metaverse services.
The news comes as Samsung drops an increasing amount of Moohan information, an XR headset due to release this year. Last year, Meta debuted Quest 3s, a low-cost MR headset, and the Ray-Ban AR-lite smart glasses, with the latter proving a massive sales success for the firm, according to reports from last year. So, it appears the competition is continuing to rise.
Now, following a busy January for XR, which also included Samsung’s continued unveiling of Moohan and CES XR announcements, Meta is claiming its stakes in the XR world – a space Meta has had a tentpole in for years.
The second half of the decade may prove fruitful for XR and the companies leading it as AR smart glasses and other related technologies continue incubating in the workplace and consumer market. Moreover, this is only supercharged by the AI landscape, which is helping to create XR content, use cases, and democratization – another technology market Meta is investing in.
What Did Zuckerberg Say About AI Smart Glasses?
In addition to the reported $100 billion XR investment, Mark Zuckerberg spoke on the past year’s success at distributing Ray Ban Meta AI smart glasses, which include AR-lite features and appear to be a testbed for emerging AR smart glasses features like translation visualizations.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, noted:
Our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are a real hit, and this will be the year when we understand the trajectory for AI glasses as a category. Many breakout products in the history of consumer electronics have sold 5-10 million units in their third generation. This will be a defining year that determines if we’re on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses — and glasses being the next computing platform like we’ve been talking about for some time — or if this is just going to be a longer grind.
Moreover, Zuckerberg explained that smart glasses are “the perfect form factor for AI,” a revealing quote as this may indicate Meta’s view of the marriage between AI and XR, which is a continued combined interest of Zuckerberg’s firm.
“I expect this to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people, and I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant,” Zuckerberg added. AR-ready smart glasses look to be an entry to that future.
Zuckerberg explained:
We have a really exciting roadmap for this year with a unique vision focused on personalization. We believe that people don’t all want to use the same AI — people want their AI to be personalized to their context, their interests, their personality, their culture, and how they think about the world. – People will get to choose how AI works and looks like for them. I continue to think that this is going to be one of the most transformative products that we’ve made.
The road towards personalized, agentic AI systems will be a busy one. Many firms are jumping into the market from many angles. As mentioned, Samsung is also combining AI and AR with the Moohan device, and Apple is looming in the background with Vision Pro—but not AR smart glasses, as reports recently revealed.
Meta is investing $60-65 billion into AI infrastructure alongside the massive $100 billion XR investment, so the stakes are high for Zuckerberg. As also shown by the DeepSeek effect on NVIDIA stocks, the future is not sown, and the market can change dramatically.
“We’ve put together a plan that will hopefully accelerate the pace of these initiatives over the next few years,” remarked Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg of Broader XR Investments
The investments in Meta’s XR portfolio are not just due to the success of its smart glasses; the firm made this investment to boost its MR headset products and metaverse ambitions.
The metaverse was once the hottest technology topic in a post-COVID landscape, where immersive shared spaces were posied by hopefuls as the future of work and socialisation- a promise perhaps inflated due to the remote working boom and isolation of many. Therefore, leading emerging technology providers to market an exciting new way for dispersed individuals to connect.
While online shared virtual applications—hence metaverse solutions—still have traction for specific use cases, the first hype wave no doubt slowed down as AR and AI took their place in the emerging technology space.
However, Meta is not yet done with the metaverse. “This is also going to be a pivotal year for the metaverse,” proclaimed Zuckerberg, who also added:
The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been steadily growing — and this is the year when a number of long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.
In closing, Zuckerberg explained that Meta is accelerating its efforts towards building “some awesome things that shape the future of human connection. As always, I’m grateful for everyone who is on this journey with us.”