Hands On with the Meta AR 2

Alright, let's get this out of the way.

I know what you're thinking.

And yes, this T-shirt is all cotton.

No, no, this is the Meta 2.

It's an augmented reality headset, and it's one of the few

actually full-featured AR headsets that's out on the market.

It's still a developer version, but what it promises to do

is let people in corporate life

do away with their desktop monitors entirely.

For AR headsets, price remains a big concern.

The Microsoft HoloLens is completely

unaffordable unless you are in

the kind of corporate enterprise space.

It's multiple thousands of dollars.

Headsets from AR and mixed reality companies like

Avegant and Magic Leap haven't even come out yet,

let alone had prices attached to them.

Meta has the second generation

of its headset available for under $1,000.

Now, up until now, they haven't really

let people spend a lot of time with it.

But I got a chance to see if it could do what they said

it could do, which is do away with my

computer monitor entirely, and see if I could work with it.

So let's dive in, see how it works.

This is what's known as the Meta 2 Workspace, and,

as you can see, I can use my mouse, and I can move it

farther away in space, I can move it closer to me.

Now, you've got your regular browser window,

you can open up monitor spaces,

but let's start with something kinda fun.

Hey, check this out.

As you can see, your hands are

one of the primary input devices.

There's sensors on the headset itself that looks out

into space, sees where your hands are, so you can

grab and hold an object, you can bring it towards you,

farther away, you can move it to the side.

And if you use both hands, like I'm about to do now,

you can rotate the Earth.

Now, it is not foolproof and it's not exact,

but when you're using 'em for

the first time, it's pretty remarkable.

Let's get it a little bit bigger

and we can check in on China.

Then you let go, and it's just gonna stay there.

And anything you wanna do away with, you can just grab,

bring it back over here, pop it back on

the shelf of the Workspace, and as you can see, there it is.

(electronic music)

There's other stuff on here, too.

Basically proof-of-concept things to show some of the

promise of AR and spatial computing for design.

I mean, this is really who they're targeting with this.

This is designers, it's people who need

to see 3D renders in real space.

The problem with Meta, as with most things, this is not

Meta itself, but it's the content pipeline.

Which is why this thing is actually with

developers right now, and they're figuring out

what's gonna stock the shelves of the Workspace.

We don't know when there's an actual consumer-grade

headset coming from this, but this is what Meta employees

say they've actually been using at work,

instead of their usual computing setup.

(electronic music)

I'm confident we're gonna get to a point where this is

integrated into a lot of our lives, but for most people, I'm

talking about you, I'm talking about me, it's not the kind

of investment that you're necessarily going to need to make.

But as the software gets better, as more people create

more applications for this, it's gonna become

more and more useful, and you just might find yourself

needing it earlier than you thought.

Let's grab a campfire.

And put it on my keyboard.

For all those times you've wanted to

burn it all down, now you can.

(electronic music)