Meta to Distribute Aria Gen 2 Research Glasses in 2026

• Applications are now open for researchers to receive Meta’s Aria Gen 2, with rollout planned for Q2 2026.
• Meta also released a whitepaper and pilot dataset highlighting the device’s multimodal perception capabilities.

Meta is now accepting applications for Aria Gen 2, with distribution to selected researchers set for Q2 2026. First announced in February 2025, the new device includes major upgrades in sensing capability, wearability, interactivity, and on-device computing.

Project Aria launched in 2020 to support egocentric research in areas like contextual AI, robotics, and human-computer interaction. Since then, nearly 300 academic labs in 27 countries have used over 1,000 Aria Gen 1 devices. Meta has also released open-source datasets from Aria Gen 1 to help develop and benchmark vision-language models and robot learning systems.

To support the adoption of Aria Gen 2, Meta released a device whitepaper and a pilot dataset. The whitepaper details the hardware’s all-day ergonomic design, the diverse multimodal sensor suite, the custom co-processor for ultra-low-power on-device machine perception, and the capabilities of the SDK. The pilot dataset shows how the device captures daily activities in controlled environments, featuring machine perception signals such as hand and eye tracking, visual-inertial odometry, and semi-dense point cloud maps. It also includes outputs from example algorithms, with tools and notebooks to help researchers explore the data.

Meta is showing live demos of Aria Gen 2 at the International Conference on Computer Vision, including real-time machine perception and depth sensing with NVIDIA’s FoundationStereo.

🌀 Tom’s Take:

With stronger sensing and on-device computing, Aria Gen 2 gives researchers a clearer window into the human perspective. This can fuel next-gen work in AI, context, and robotics.

Source: Meta

Disclosure: Tom Emrich has previously worked with or holds interests in companies mentioned. His commentary is based solely on public information and reflects his personal views.