Meta Project Nazare Are The Real Facebook AR Glasses

One of the most important announcements made this week by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was about a pair of augmented reality glasses. The hardware is being developed at what was until this week Facebook and Oculus. Now they're all under the Meta brand umbrella – and they want to present an all-encompassing universe in which we'll all live virtually. That'll be made possible with Project Nazare.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced a collaboration with Ray-Ban. They created Ray-Ban Stories, a pair of glasses that can capture pictures and ... that's about it. When Ray-Ban Stories were announced, it was almost as if they appeared as a half-step (or less) toward real-deal augmented reality glasses.

Rumors over the past year suggested Facebook and/or Oculus were working on real AR glasses, but they'd not materialized in any significant way before now. Facebook Connect 2021 had Zuckerberg speak about Project Nazare, a pair of glasses that'll fit AR visuals inside.

These glasses will include "hologram displays, projectors, batteries, radios, custom silicon chips, cameras, speakers, sensors to map the world around you, and more." These glasses are in development now and are aimed at appearing approximately 5mm thick. A lot may change between now and the point at which Project Nazare is ready for public viewing.

It's expected that it'll be "a few years" before we see this pair of augmented reality glasses available for public purchase and use. It's likely we'll see more than a couple of other similar pieces of hardware released by Meta before then – with virtual reality as the key presentation and goal. The future of Meta has the metaverse as an ultimate goal. Meta wants to be the company that provides the Facebook of the metaverse – the place we go and the tools we use because everyone else is using them, basically. Cross your fingers someone else goes open source and makes the metaverse open and free before Zuckerberg gets there first.