Amazon’s AR Glasses Could Help Train Its Humanoid Delivery Robots

On Wednesday, Meta Platforms took a big step towards dominating the still-nascent augmented reality market when it unveiled the latest version of its Ray-Bans smart glasses, this time with a see-through display and a wristband for controlling the device. People will be able to send text messages via hand motions interpreted by the wristband.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the glasses were a step towards “superintelligence,” his artificial intelligence holy grail. But is there another AI angle to AR glasses, such as gathering data for training models? 

That does seem to be a possibility with the AR glasses being developed by Amazon, which we scooped last week. The ecommerce giant has a consumer version in the works and a bulkier version for its delivery drivers. The one for delivery drivers will show instructions for how to sort packages and where to deliver them. But the device could also serve a more futuristic purpose: collecting training data for the humanoid robots Amazon is developing to handle deliveries.

Its built-in camera could capture how delivery people expertly grab packages from the top of a pile, for example, and how they navigate from a delivery van to a customer’s doorstep.