-Silicon Valley oozes confidence and Meron Gribetz, founder of wearable startup Meta, contributes his fair share.
-I wanna change the way we use computers and I think I have a really compelling vision on the future.
A lot of people are buying into it.
-This is Gribetz's future for device, Meta SpaceGlasses.
A pair of augmented reality specs that layered digital information and content that users can manipulate
over their field of vision.
-Meta an analogy has a stereoscopic hair of glasses with a projector of that projects the each eye, allowing for a 3D screen that wraps around the entire world and the analogy to the mouse and keyboard is this camera that can track the edges of your fingers and their location and space at really high dexterity and low-latency.
-In a video highlighting how the glasses might be used, Meta presents a mind-boggling world where free floating virtual shapes
can be molded.
Then, actually produced with 3D printers and details like names and job titles pop up as unique people.
Watching this, it's easy to be odd, yet also hard not to be skeptical.
But during the recent visit to their makeshift headquarters in the Los Altos Hills, we experienced some of these demos first hand.
-Oh, there it is.
-Hey, look.
You can step back.
-With backing from venture fund white combinatory, Meta is off to a strong start.
It's received
pre-orders from 1300 developers that want to get their hands on the glasses.
-Architects looking to create 3D models collaboratively, that will be the first collaborative computer.
There are surgeons who wanna track CAT scans to the body and sort of rotate them with their hands in 3D as they perform surgery because their hands are bloody so they couldn't touch an iPad.
I mean, there are so many use cases that are coming in and surprising us.
-Meta's success will impart and join a robust app store and there are other
non-trivial hurdles.
-The prototype is a bit on the bulky side.
But Meta's goal is to shrink down the technology so that ultimately, the device is the size of a pair of Ray-Bans.
-All of this reminded us of another tech company's wearable device, Google Glass.
Though Gribetz doesn't see the similarities.
-We're not competing with the multi billion dollar company.
They created very different type device than ours.
So, their device is what I call a notification machine.
Okay?
It's a small screen
in the corner of your eye that you can only interact with, with your voice or by swiping the side of your head.
-Meta builds its device as a natural machine that's more intuitive.
-We use the thing that has evolved to manipulate your environment namely your hand and it just so much more immersive than Google Plus.
So, I think it's gonna bear different use cases.
-From its home base, Meta has sweeping views of Silicon Valley.
-You have little Apple over there in the distance, little Google over there, we can see all the way to San Francisco.
-A perspective that
inspires Gribetz and reminds him exactly what he's up against.
In San Francisco, I'm Sumi Das, CNET for CBS News.
