- Facebook is working on tech that will monitor human life, the company said in a new blog post.
- The idea is to build AI that sees the world as humans do, from a first-person perspective.
- This AI could be used for what Facebook envisions as the future of smartglasses.
Facebook envisions a future where smartglasses "become as useful in everyday life as smartphones," the company said in a new blog post.
In order to achieve that future, such devices will require powerful AI software that can read and respond to the world around the headset's user. And the only way to train AI to see and hear the world like humans do is for it to experience the world like we do: from a first-person perspective.
"Next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the center of action," the blog post said.
Facebook's solution to this problem is a new project, titled, "Ego4D," which will collate data from "13 universities and labs across nine countries, who collected more than 2,200 hours of first-person video in the wild, featuring over 700 participants going about their daily lives."
The data will be open to the research community, the blog post said, but the goal of the project is clear: To create the type of AI that can power a slew of Facebook devices currently in the works.
There's even a Facebook division, known as Reality Labs, that's focused on research and development for the future of VR and AR tech.
That division is headed by longtime Facebook exec Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, who shared images of himself in various prototypes this past week:
-Boz (@boztank) October 13, 2021
The company already makes a very popular virtual reality headset in the Oculus Quest 2, and it has plans to transition from VR to augment reality (AR) in the coming years.
Notably, Facebook currently produces a set of smartglasses in collaboration with Ray Ban, named Ray Ban Stories, and previously deployed a team of staffers to capture data in the world around them using pairs of prototype smartglasses.
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