Facebook developing ‘Meta’ watch as it continues with metaverse rebrand, hidden pictures suggest

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Facebook’s smartwatch appears to have been revealed by images found in its own app.

Icons within the app made for its smartglasses – launched in partnership with Ray Ban – appear to show a watch with a camera mounted inside it, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the find.

The watch is identified only as “Milan” in the app’s code, and it does not give away much about the watch itself.

The image does seem to show a front-facing camera, however, hidden in a notch that sits alongside a screen.

Rumours have suggested that Facebook has long been working on a watch that would be able to track people’s health as well as allowing them to message each other.

(Bloomberg/Facebook)

The Verge has reported that Facebook is also working on a watch that would have a detachable camera ready for taking pictures. It is not clear whether the new rumours and images refer to the same watch.

Neither watch could ever make it to market, though previous rumours have suggested that some kind of watch could appear next summer.

It is also not clear how the watch plays into Facebook’s plans for the metaverse, and its recently announced rebrand of the company to be known as “Meta”.

Facebook has been clear that it thinks of the Ray-Ban glasses as the beginning of a plan to make much smarter glasses in the future, as part of its approach to augmented and virtual reality. But it may also just be a consequence of the fact that it is another wearable technology being developed by Facebook.

Mr Zuckerberg has suggested that the wrist – if not the watch – could have a key role in its plans for the metaverse. In an interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, he said that “one of the killer use cases” will be allowing people to message while talking to others, in a way that would make use of muscle sensors in the wrist.

“I do think that for augmented reality, for example, one of the killer use cases is basically going to be you’re going to have glasses and you’re going to have something like [muscle-sensing technology] EMG on your wrist and you’re going to be able to have a message thread going on when you’re in the middle of a meeting or doing something else and no one else is even going to notice”.