Meta announced Project Aria in September 2020 as a research initiative to develop advanced AR glasses. The glasses have five cameras (including monochrome, RGB, and eye-tracking), Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), microphones, and environmental sensors. The project also has privacy safeguards such as anonymization algorithms, a recording indicator LED, and a physical privacy switch, according to Meta.
The purpose of Aria is to enable applications in robotics, accessibility, and 3D scene reconstruction. Meta rolled out the Aria Research Kit (ARK) on Oct. 9.
By using Project Aria glasses to record first-person video of humans performing tasks like shirt folding or packing groceries, Georgia Tech researchers built a dataset that’s more than 40 times more “demonstration-rich” than equivalent robot-collected data.
