Today, Meta showed the world a new set of Augmented Reality glasses called Orion. For years now, we’ve been using Augmented reality headsets but Meta has been working on a future where the technology to achieve AR is miniaturised to the point it can fit in a set of glasses.
Today, the Orion glasses are probably the thickest framed glasses you’ve ever seen and some people will look at these and think they would never wear them and that’s ok, these aren’t being sold to customers.
Meta says the glasses are still very expensive and very difficult to make, but are playing the long game and investing heavily, as they see this as the next big frontier of computing after the smartphone.
Five years ago, Meta announced they were building AR glasses, but the real timeline is closer to a decade from the original concept.
By unveiling Orion today, Meta is showing what’s technically possible and from all accounts, the product is really impressive. The glasses may be thick, but they are glasses, not a big, bulky headset and that means you are far more likely to wear them out of the home and on your face as you go about your life, as its enhanced by the digital overlays.
It may be a few more years before Meta makes the commercial version of these glasses, and even then, they may be at a price point of a decent computer, but if they can deliver a super-human experience that doesn’t require putting a chip in your brain, it’ll be revolutionary.
Orion is a feat of miniaturization to get it to where it is today, with the components measured in fraction of a millimeter. Dozens of innovations were required to get the design down to a contemporary form that you’d be comfortable wearing every day.
The glasses tip the scales at just 100 grams, these are designed to be comfortable, but we also don’t have battery life specs.
What is impressive about Orion is that it has the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form to date. That field of view unlocks truly immersive use cases for Orion, from multitasking windows and big-screen entertainment to life-size holograms of people – all digital content that can seamlessly blend with your view of the physical world.
While the visual quality may not rival the flagship AR/VR headsets, the quality of text in windows is reportedly very impressive and text at a distance is easily viewable.
Orion today offers Meta’s LLM smart assistant, Meta AI, which allows you to understand what you’re looking at in the physical world and can help you with useful visualizations. You can also create content on the digital layer that stays in place, even if you move away and come back to the scene.
As with Meta’s RayBan smart glasses, being able to capture the world with on-board cameras, while keeping your hands-free, unlocks a lot of opportunities for putting down your phone and just enjoying life, knowing you can review it later.
Perhaps the most innovative part of the announcement today, or at least the most surprising is that the Orion glasses is actually a system made up of 3 devices. There’s the Orion glasses themselves, but also a band that goes on your wrist and monitors muscle movement. The data is then fed through AI algorithms to understand what your hand, wrist, arm movement means and then reflects that intent in the digital space.
Finally there’s the a compute device. This is likely to be replaced by your phone in the future, but for now, allows some of the compute and battery requirements from the glasses to this external device but importantly happens wirelessly, unlike Apple’s Vision Pro headset that has an external tethered battery.
Let us know in the comments if you would wear the Orion glasses and how much you’d spend on them.
