Although Meta Connect 2024 lacked a marquee high-end product for the holiday season, it still included a new budget VR headset and a tease of the "magic glasses" Meta's XR gurus have been talking about for the better part of a decade. In addition, the company keeps plowing forward with new AI tools for its Ray-Ban glasses and social platforms. Here's everything the company announced at Meta Connect 2024. Today's best mixed reality gear -- like Apple's Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3 -- are headsets with passthrough video capabilities. But the tech industry eventually wants to squeeze that tech into something resembling a pair of prescription glasses.

In the past, the biggest AR/VR event of the year has been known alternately as Oculus Connect and then Facebook Connect. Much like last year, we can likely predict the biggest news coming out of Meta Connect 2024 with just two acronyms: AI and AR. Like every other big tech firm this year, Meta will be desperate to demonstrate how it plans to stay relevant in a future powered by AI. And now that we're seven months beyond the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, which arrived alongside a short-lived spike in interest in augmented reality (AR), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely eager to show off his own plans to make AR a reality. While Zuckerberg isn't as hot on the metaverse as he was when he renamed his company, the union of AI and AR is one way he can still make the dream of persistent virtual worlds come true.

It used to go by at least two different names -- Oculus Connect and then Facebook Connect -- but whatever the moniker, Meta's fall event is still a big showcase for the company's latest and greatest achievements in the virtual reality and mixed reality space. Much like last year, we can likely predict the biggest news coming out of Meta Connect 2024 with just two acronyms: AI and AR. Like every other big tech firm this year, Meta will be desperate to demonstrate how it plans to stay relevant in a future powered by AI. And now that we're seven months beyond the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, which arrived alongside a short-lived spike in interest in augmented reality (AR), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely eager to show off his own plans to make AR a reality. While Zuckerberg isn't as hot on the metaverse as he was when he renamed his company, the union of AI and AR is one way he can still make the dream of persistent virtual worlds come true.

It used to go by at least two different names -- Oculus Connect and then Facebook Connect -- but whatever the moniker, Meta's fall event is still a big showcase for the company's latest and greatest achievements in the virtual reality and mixed reality space. Much like last year, we can likely predict the biggest news coming out of Meta Connect 2024 with just two acronyms: AI and AR. Like every other big tech firm this year, Meta will be desperate to demonstrate how it plans to stay relevant in a future powered by AI. And now that we're seven months beyond the launch of Apple's Vision Pro, which arrived alongside a short-lived spike in interest in augmented reality (AR), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is likely eager to show off his own plans to make AR a reality. While Zuckerberg isn't as hot on the metaverse as he was when he renamed his company, the union of AI and AR is one way he can still make the dream of persistent virtual worlds come true.