[HN Gopher] Meta Project Aria - Smart Glasses Research Kit
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Meta Project Aria - Smart Glasses Research Kit
Author : walterbell
Score : 121 points
Date : 2025-02-16 10:13 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.projectaria.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.projectaria.com)
| Etheryte wrote:
| The specs [0] are quite interesting, in that they're nothing
| fancy which enables the small form factor. I'm guessing the main
| intent here is to do as much as possible off-device? 4GB of RAM
| is not nothing, but it's not much if you want to use any advanced
| models, never mind what that'll do to battery life.
|
| [0]
| https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/te...
| fatnoah wrote:
| It's been a few years since I worked on wearables at Meta, so
| things may have changed, but the goal from the beginning was to
| move as much compute off the device as possible to deal with
| the related problems of power consumption and heat generation.
| For the particular wearable my time was very focused on at the
| time, heat was actually the larger issue.
| cco wrote:
| Then why can't my Meta Ray Bans use a non-Meta AI
| assistant???
|
| Haha I understand why but my only real complaint about the
| glasses is that I'm stuck with Meta AI. Would be so nice if I
| could plug Gemini or Open AI into it.
|
| Great product overall but suffers from not having an SDK and
| lock in on the model.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Unfortunately pretty much every modern product suffers from
| the same fate, we can't even have widely used open
| standards for messaging interoperability. We're lucky the
| open internet, email, irc and etc were invented before all
| of this enshittification, all of those would be very
| different if they were invented today.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| how are the other smart glasses of meta doing? The ray ben one
| seems to be the new instagram.
| ConfusedDog wrote:
| I got one transition lens RayBan Meta glasses. It's pretty
| useful to free up my hands when shooting a video of my kid
| playing. I also like it can replace ear plugs if you don't care
| about premium sound quality. The only downside is a tad bit too
| heavy...
| kaivi wrote:
| For those who won't read the article: it's only a wearable camera
| with an SDK for capturing data, there's no AR projection.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Reminds me of the original Oculus Rift, it was a def device.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I'm glad Mark managed to dig Meta out of the hole it was in a few
| years ago. I remember they were dumping so much money into the
| metaverse telling everyone it was the future. Seems now they have
| less of a focus on that and more of a focus on VR hardware and
| their AI models, which IMO is a better place for them than where
| they were.
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| I don't know if you're conflating 'Metaverse' with 'NFTs' or
| something, but in Meta land it's very much a VR/AR term.
|
| If you're interested in where they're currently focusing their
| spending and the timelines for return on investment, the
| recently leaked memo isn't a bad place to start
| https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-cto-to-staff-leaked-memo-2025-...
| skizm wrote:
| I feel like the original messaging was terrible. Everyone
| thinks "metaverse" == Horizon Worlds, since that was the demo
| they showed at the time. It was actually supposed to be a
| blanket term for all post-phone tech that will be integrated
| into daily life. Including but not limited to AR/VR, all sorts
| of wearable tech, robotics, AI integration into everything,
| etc. People walked away from their original presentation
| assuming they were trying to clone second life in VR (they
| were, but that was just one random project they demoed).
| jayd16 wrote:
| I do appreciate the big swing and the R& D is quite cool.
|
| The Quest is a marvel and they seem to be making real gains
| towards a mythical hands-free AR glasses experience.
|
| I was also very excited to see a big tech company moved towards
| premium hardware and premium software.
|
| Sadly I fear a return to freemium, now AI generated, and soon
| to be advertisement filled slop. Meta is still Meta but
| hopefully their goals keep them on a better path.
| loeg wrote:
| They're still dumping roughly the same amount of money into the
| Metaverse hole as they were in 2022 ($4-5B/quarter), investors
| have just warmed up to it (and spending growth slowed down).
| modeless wrote:
| I don't know why people are so focused on the amount they're
| spending on VR/AR. It's a tenth of their revenue, a quarter of
| their profit. They spent more on stock buybacks. As far as I'm
| concerned _all_ the tech companies that are printing money
| should be spending like this on specific technologies they
| believe in, instead of stock buybacks. E.g. Google ought to
| have gone all in on Waymo instead of seeking outside
| investment.
| nprateem wrote:
| It's called diversification
| gessha wrote:
| > Mark managed to dig Meta out of the hole
|
| He himself put Meta in that hole, found out he couldn't
| manifest better hardware out of the magical money hat, and
| finally gave up on the idea, firing a whole bunch of engineers
| in the process.
| robbbbbbbbbbbb wrote:
| The original paper abstract [1] cuts through a lot of the jargon
| on the website, but yeah it's just a research platform for
| capturing (and doing limited processing on) video and telemetry
| for the purposes of AR-focused ML research.
|
| It's not a new headset or a protoype for one.
|
| "Egocentric, multi-modal data as available on future augmented
| reality (AR) devices provides unique challenges and opportunities
| for machine perception. These future devices will need to be all-
| day wearable in a socially acceptable form-factor to support
| always available, context-aware and personalized AI applications.
| Our team at Meta Reality Labs Research built the Aria device, an
| egocentric, multi-modal data recording and streaming device with
| the goal to foster and accelerate research in this area. In this
| paper, we describe the Aria device hardware including its sensor
| configuration and the corresponding software tools that enable
| recording and processing of such data."
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.13561
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Am I the only one who wants to see these things banned in most
| public places?
| phyrex wrote:
| I assume you're consistent and therefore also want to ban any
| other photo or video device in most public places?
| darkwater wrote:
| Are you recording non-stop all the time? If so, yes, you
| should not be able to do it.
| paxys wrote:
| The glasses aren't recording non stop
| phyrex wrote:
| I wish we had batteries so small and powerful but there's
| no way to record constantly with a tiny device like that
| Timpy wrote:
| Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at the
| thing they're photographing or recording, it's a very clear
| visual signal to others and there are cultural norms for this
| behavior. If a person is doing this in a common tourist
| destination that's more acceptable than pointing your camera
| at somebody else's children without asking them first.
| Imagine how uncomfortable it would be for somebody to hold
| their phone at eye level and point it at you the entire time
| they're having a conversation with you, even if they say
| they're not recording or anything like that. Having a
| distaste for smart glasses is pretty consistent with the
| status quo.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at
| the thing they're photographing
|
| I mean, that really isn't true. There have been wearable
| and carryable hidden cameras for ages and we also have 360
| cameras that no longer need to be pointed at what they are
| capturing.
|
| This isn't changing anything about what is available to
| purchase, and if anything, these are relatively more
| obvious.
|
| The actual change would be, that if these become widely
| adopted, those types of cameras would be everywhere.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| especially if it's being made by Facebook
| unsui wrote:
| This is key.
|
| If this were pushed by Apple, people would be responding much
| differently, since there is an inherent level of trust in
| regards to Apple's privacy protections, vs Meta.
|
| So, not so much the technology, but rather the trust (or lack
| thereof) behind the implementor.
| michaelt wrote:
| There's certainly a weird aspect to it.
|
| Historically, body-worn hidden cameras have been for perverts,
| spies and journalists. Normal folks don't mind people knowing
| they're taking a photo, and want to be able to frame the photo
| and suchlike. Gopros would be clearly visible, front and centre
| on people's helmets - and only while doing sports. Guards and
| cops with body cameras _want_ people to know they 've got a
| camera, as a deterrent.
|
| You'd occasionally see hidden camera footage used by
| investigative journalists - but outside of that, the market for
| body-worn hidden cameras was mostly weird lonely pervs who
| wanted to take photos at the topless beach and upskirt photos
| without getting into trouble.
|
| A glasses-camera product won't succeed among us normal folk if
| wearing it makes you look like a weird lonely perv.
| ctoth wrote:
| > A glasses-camera product won't succeed among us normal folk
| if wearing it makes you look like a weird lonely perv.
|
| You say this, and yet as a blind user of the Meta glasses
| (they're actually great for accessibility!) I am not ...
| seeing it. They are far more ubiquitous and warn by far more
| people than you would expect, especially when comparing to
| Google Glass.
| ge96 wrote:
| Gotta wear clothes with embedded data to poison the recording
| (not an original thought by me saw it in GITS SAC 2045)
| jimiasty wrote:
| Founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13) here -- we do beacons.
|
| In Project Aria video, they claim to have installed beacons at an
| airport to enable indoor location, only to dismiss it as
| something that "doesn't scale."
|
| Instead, they say they "trained" an AI model using vision from
| glasses, allowing for vision-based localization.
|
| So, here's an honest question: which approach is actually easier,
| more cost-effective, and energy-efficient?
|
| 1) Deploying 100 or even 1,000 wireless, battery-operated beacons
| that last 5-7 years--something a non-tech person can set up in a
| day or two.
|
| 2) Training an AI model for each airport, then constantly burning
| compute power from camera-equipped glasses or phones that barely
| last a few hours.
|
| Thoughts?
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > So, here's an honest question: which approach is actually
| easier, more cost-effective, and energy-efficient?
|
| Really it's more like three questions.
|
| 1. Easier? I guess that depends how you define ease, but it
| largely depends on what resources you have available to you. If
| I'm Meta and I already have a ton of compute and AI training
| expertise but don't have relationships with all of the
| airports, stadiums, etc., their approach is probably easier.
| You'd have to spin up new teams of people all over the world to
| get beacons everywhere you want them.
|
| 2. Cost-effective? I don't know enough about the costs of your
| solution to give an accurate answer here, but again it just
| seems like they're probably already spending resources training
| models on a huge number of images of the world, so maybe not a
| lot of incremental cost here.
|
| 3. Cost efficient? I would assume your approach wins here.
| bantz_thoughts wrote:
| 1) Is a $1-$20M business requiring "humans in the loop"
| deploying, monitoring, and maintaining beacons with a single
| purpose, getting past lots of "humans with opinions" on
| "aesthetics" and "not in my back yard".
|
| 2) Is a $1-??? business requiring a few dedicated nerds working
| on CV with inf more applications and doesn't require "invading"
| physical buildings you dont own.
| simne wrote:
| It depends on scale need to achieve. 1000 beacons easier for
| one town scale, but train model for each airfield is Earth
| scale(in 1990 in US was ~6000 airfields, whole Europe have less
| number of airfields).
|
| Also exist some nuances, as some cities are flat but others
| have large hills, so need to place few beacons on sides of hill
| (rough surface need much more beacons).
|
| Practically, I have experience in project to deploy LoraWan
| network in large city Kiev, and one concurrent bought research
| from cellular network planners and for first look they drawn
| ~300 access points to have more than 99% coverage.
| optymizer wrote:
| In my experience with a mesh wi-fi project, physical devices
| come with real world physical side-effects: accidents happen,
| devices go offline, or get stolen, or knocked off the
| walls/shelves, a physical location needs to be negotiated with
| the space owner (less of a problem if the number of venues is
| in the hundreds as we have business people to handle those at
| scale), dust, water, heat, animals, etc.
|
| It's not a big problem if you want to equip one venue or a
| couple, but scaling the operation means these side-effects
| scale too, and we had to work on solutions to handle those,
| rather than working on our core competency of mesh wi-fi.
| Unsurprisingly the project was scrapped despite being
| technically feasible on a small scale - we had a couple of
| sites.
|
| Virtualizing a physical space gives you more flexibility. It
| keeps most problems in the software engineering space and
| limits physical requirements (eg someone might still need to
| walk around an airport to update the model, but I can't think
| of any other major ones).
|
| That said, AI is sexy (right now), Meta is heavy in the MR
| space and the tech is reusable, even if it's not the most
| energy-efficient solution.
|
| (disclaimer: just my personal ramblings, I don't work on
| project Aria)
| Kuinox wrote:
| > 2) Training an AI model for each airport, then constantly
| burning compute power from camera-equipped glasses or phones
| that barely last a few hours.
|
| It's their purpose in VR/AR to have cheap indoor location, for
| them it's one more step in that direction. Eventually they will
| achieve doing it with little compute.
| strangescript wrote:
| AI will get faster and more energy efficient over time.
| Deploying physical hardware will never improve in any
| meaningful way that fixes the biggest problem, deploying X
| amount of things everywhere you need it. Its a non-starter.
| pitched wrote:
| Getting permission to install hardware is a lot harder than not
| getting permission to install hardware. It isn't the hardware
| that doesn't scale, it's the people.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| And here's an honest answer - it is likely to be option 2.
|
| In over a decade of indoor robotics I have _never_ seen a
| beacon-based solution that practically scales (even marker-
| based solutions are challenging). And it's not because the tech
| is even bad - it's just that any process that involves
| _installing things_ is a PITA and wildly more expensive and
| time-consuming that it should be.
|
| This kind of sucks but it is an unfortunately reality, in my
| experience at least.
| fny wrote:
| With beacons, you need to install something---with glasses, you
| don't.
|
| With glasses, you can map the space while identifying POIs---
| with beacons you can't.
|
| Unfortunately, no one really cares about energy use.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Well judging from consumer VR people will pick inside out
| tracking over beacons most of the time.
|
| The headset needs the inside out tracking anyway to draw
| specially locked virtual objects.
|
| To create a fresh spatial anchor at home on mobile hardware is
| maybe 1 second of compute time. But that doesn't really matter
| because the anchors would be shared across every user and
| computed offline beforehand.
|
| As far as scaling the device itself can be used to crowdsource
| these anchors so it's not even close that the visual solution
| wins out.
|
| That said beacons are probably better for supporting handset
| platforms. Powering up modern cell phone cameras to use AR is
| pretty slow and tedious for the user.
| alsodumb wrote:
| When Valve came out with their VR headset that had base
| stations, everybody thought that'd be the holy grail, that you
| can never achieve better localization and tracking without base
| stations, and a base station free method can never be better
| than that.
|
| Well, Meta poured a shit ton of money into making Quest base
| station free and they got there. We use to use valve setup for
| our robotics applications but we swapped it out with Quest
| cause honestly Quest was as good but much more easy to setup
| and operate.
|
| The bitter lesson is that don't bet against data or compute.
| Also, I don't think you'd have to train a AI model for each
| location at every time in the future. Things get more
| efficient, etc.
| verdverm wrote:
| > Training an AI model for each airport
|
| This is where I think the gap is. We only have to train one
| model for all environments, not per
|
| How do the costs compare for training one big model vs
| installing billions of beacons?
|
| Also consider the pace at which model sizes, training, and
| operating costs are falling
| hansonkd wrote:
| > which approach is actually easier, more cost-effective, and
| energy-efficient?
|
| I think you are asking the wrong question. The right question
| is: "Which approach will people use?"
|
| Doesn't matter if it is the easiest cheapest most energy
| efficient thing, if people don't use it.
| numpad0 wrote:
| They already have perfected vSLAM system for their VR headsets.
| Feature point extraction -> ego motion derivation ->
| environmental mesh reconstruction.
|
| The data will all be relative to initial positions and it will
| have drifts, but how those affect your research goals will be
| use case dependent(esp. since this is pitched for researches
| than as ready to go entertainment).
| escapecharacter wrote:
| I've used beacons a lot in installations. I found their
| reliability was a bit over-promised [1]. If you want to know
| whether a user is within a 4 metre sphere, in a time window of
| about 5 seconds, then it's fine. But don't hope for anything
| more precise than that; the false positives/negatives aren't
| great.
|
| A large part of the variation I found was due to how individual
| users held their phones, and the resulting signal attenuation.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.com/2015/12/18/immersive-theatre-via-
| ibeaco...
| mezeek wrote:
| was that Bluetooth or UWB? Cause that's like saying VHS vs.
| 4K
| sgnelson wrote:
| My answer is why not both? Is the end goal energy efficiency or
| making a product that works?
| asadm wrote:
| do we really still train model for EACH airport?
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| using wifi routers?
| ponty_rick wrote:
| Why not just set up QR codes that link the location to your
| phone that the glasses can scan instead of a beacon? You could
| just as many as you want and slabber them on the wall.
| elif wrote:
| I'm a little shocked by the use of beacons outside of
| manufacturing or logistics or robot safety contexts.
|
| Anything you want to track in the meat realm, especially a
| place like an airport, the airtag or google equivalent mesh
| networks are going to be far more dense than your beacons and
| last forever with no power required.
| e12e wrote:
| 3) paint some qr codes on walls/signage to help make 2) easier?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Why glasses? Why not a headband / bandeau / frontlet / taenia?
| verdverm wrote:
| People want smart glasses so they can see virtual overlaid on
| the real world.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| That's not what these do though.
| verdverm wrote:
| Obviously, they are an early development device for what
| will be smart glasses. Why use a different form factor for
| this?
| k__ wrote:
| Don't know how hyped people are about this after Meta let Spark
| users standing in the rain...
| qwertox wrote:
| One question: as a person who is far and nearsighted at the same
| time, I basically see only sharp at a distance of around 20 cm,
| could I even use such glasses?
| corysama wrote:
| It would probably involve a small physical adjustment to the
| device. Whether or nor Meta provides that option is a good
| question.
|
| VR and AR devices so far always use a fixed focal plane for
| everything. Usually around 1 meter. So, if you are looking at a
| distant object in VR or through AR video passthrough, your eyes
| need to focus at around 1 meter.
|
| I know some VR headsets that offer customizable lens. But, I
| don't know about this device in particular.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| The glasses don't have a display, they're just normal glasses
| with audio/video recording functionality.
| clueless wrote:
| Seems like they've been pushed to release this as open source
| alternatives are catching up, if not passing them by [1] ...
|
| [1] https://augmentos.org/
| hx8 wrote:
| Was anyone else disappointed not to see any sort of display built
| into the lens? When Google Glass came out 12 years ago I thought
| he would have DBZ Scouter level tech by now.
| qwertox wrote:
| Link to hardware specifications provided by the manual, has good
| images:
|
| https://facebookresearch.github.io/projectaria_tools/docs/te...
| ge96 wrote:
| Oh this one isn't Orion, Orion looks amazing
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