Meta, the augmented reality technology company, has captured the attention of the gadget world with the launch of the Meta Pro, the $3,000 gadget that aims to bridge the gap between fully immersive virtual reality tools such as the Oculus Rift and (relatively) more subtle wearable devices such as Google Glass. You can read much more about the Meta Pro, which TechCrunch named one of the best devices at this most recent CES conference in Las Vegas, here and the earlier versions of its glasses here.
The Meta Pro is up for sale online now, but it won’t start shipping to customers until this summer. So we stopped by Meta’s Portola Valley, California headquarters to get an early look at the latest prototype of the device.
There are any number of uses for the Meta Pro, as the company has an SDK which allows developers to create programs to use with the device. In our visit, Meta’s CEO and founder Meron Gribetz showed us how the glasses can be used in place of traditional CAD software to design a 3D printed object using only your hands. I’m told that the final version of the glasses which will ship to users this summer will be a bit lighter and more sleek in the design, but this prototype gives a good idea of the core technology and capabilities. Check that out in the video embedded above.
Meta, which makes wearable devices with augmented reality technology, is a particularly ambitious breed of startup — a Y Combinator grad with a staff of fewer than 50 employees squaring away against competition from the likes of Google and Apple. But then again, it took a good deal of ambition for Gribetz to set out on his own with the goal of building a real-life version of kind of technology that had only really been seen in movies such as Iron Man . So it makes sense that that chutzpah would stick around as the company has grown and Gribetz’s vision has become more of a reality. It will be exciting to see how this technology continues to develop as more people play with it.
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