REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — I stood in the dead center of a small, bland office, staring straight ahead. Behind me was a desktop computer and in front of me nothing. An employee of the startup company I was visiting placed a headset on me — a bit like being crowned, but the crown also had a clear visor that covered my eyes. Then the headset was cinched tight around my noggin, and the demo began.
If you’ve seen some of the virtual reality headsets being promoted in 2016, such as the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, you’ve noticed that they are like chunky digital Viewmasters that you strap to your face, retreating entirely into the virtual world. With the Meta 2 headset on, I was still in the room, talking with Evan Helda, the Meta Co. staffer who was overseeing my demo. But digital images with a dazzling amount of dimensionality began to float in the air between me and Helda, like a rotating planet Earth or a sneaker that I could grab with my hand and look inside.
One way to think of virtual reality is that it’s similar to going to the movies or playing a console video game — it’s an immersive experience that asks you to tune other things out. But what Meta is doing, called augmented reality or mixed reality, is a blend of real and virtual. As Meron Gribetz, the company’s CEO, describes it, it’s a way to “untether yourself from your desk” and view and manipulate digital information anywhere you are.
“I call it the Hawaii-fication of work,” Gribetz said. “You could sit on a beach and do all your work from there in a very natural way.” (Of course, some might see it as the work-ification of Hawaii.)
But if work will always be with us, the Meta headset transforms it into a very different experience. A high point of the demo I experienced was seeing another Meta employee through the visor, who was “videoconferencing” with me from another part of the company’s office. But he could hand a three-dimensional object to me, and I could take it and examine it. You can also use your hands to stretch objects or pull them into their component pieces — extracting, for instance, the circulatory system from a model of the human body to learn about it. An architect and a client in two different cities could look at the same model of a building, walk around it, and point to features that needed changes.
Meta won’t have the world of augmented reality to itself: Google is apparently retooling its Google Glass product for a relaunch, and while I was visiting Meta earlier this month, Microsoft was demonstrating its HoloLens headset at a gathering of software developers in San Francisco. A Florida startup, Magic Leap, raised $793 million earlier this year for its own augmented reality device, which hasn’t yet been shown to many people outside of the company and its investors.
As a startup, Meta knows it has to move fast to get its product to market, build buzz, and attract software developers who will create or adapt programs to run on the headset. The company plans to begin shipping it to software developers in the third quarter, at a price of $949. Microsoft last month began shipping a version of its HoloLens headset to software developers, priced at $3,000. But while Meta’s headset is tethered to a laptop or PC, Microsoft’s has all the computing power it needs built in. Gribetz touts his headset’s wider field of view and higher resolution. Both companies say the price will drop with higher-volume production.
Meta is in the midst of raising about $50 million in a new round of funding, some of which will come from Massachusetts Avenue Capital Partners, a new firm in Cambridge. Last year, the company raised $23 million from investors, and a 2013 crowdfunding campaign for an earlier version of the headset collected $2 million.
And the company is bringing on John Werner, an executive at the MIT Media Lab’s “camera culture” research group, as its vice president of strategic partnerships. Werner says he will help Meta connect with hospitals, universities, and architecture and construction firms, among others, that might want to explore the possibilities of augmented reality. Gribetz says the company is considering opening an East Coast office but hasn’t yet decided between Boston and New York.
Some companies locally are already planning for how these new headsets and goggles will fit into their businesses. One example is Boston-based Wayfair, the online retailer of furniture and home goods. Mike Festa, of the company’s research and development group, says Wayfair is building 3-D models of some of the 7 million products it sells so that customers will be able to see whether a couch they’re interested in will fit into their living room, and look at it from different angles. Festa says the company has both the Meta and Microsoft headsets on order, but in the meantime is creating simpler augmented reality apps that you’ll be able to use with a mobile phone.
Back in 2002, I got a demo of an early augmented reality system from MicroOptical Corp., then based in Westwood. The startup was building displays that could clip onto a pair of glasses, allowing soldiers to see maps while they were in enemy territory, or a surgeon to view patient data without turning away from the operating table. The product never caught fire, and the company’s assets were sold in 2010. A few of MicroOptical’s patents, incidentally, were acquired by Google, and MicroOptical founder Mark Spitzer worked on the original incarnation of Google Glass.
Sometimes, observes Paul Zavracky, MicroOptical’s former chief executive, waiting for a technology to get smaller, better, and cheaper — and waiting for the market to be ready to accept it — is the right strategy.
“You can be a pioneer, but you can also be in too early,” said Zavracky, now retired.
Gribetz thinks the moment is now. “The market will be as big as the market of mobile phones plus PCs plus tablets,” he says of augmented reality. By March 2017, he says all of Meta’s employees will “be throwing away our external monitors” and working exclusively in augmented reality.
A few years after that, he predicted, “if you want to get a promotion in any field, you’ll need a pair of augmented reality glasses.”
We’ll see.
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.