Meta’s Orion AR Glasses Will Be Major Platform Shift, says Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg says that Meta’s Orion AR glasses, the new innovation in augmented reality will be a major platform shift.

There was a time when glasses with computer screens seemed to belong only to the world of movies and imagination. Well, with Orion, Mark Zuckerberg is making headway towards converting that into a reality.

Orion is Meta’s first pair of AR (augmented reality) glasses. Sadly, once they had designed and manufactured it, the process proved to be too expensive. The product, then, was shelved. But Zuckerberg is adamant about one thing: AR glasses will one day replace smartphones. This device has been labeled the “holy grail.”

Orion: Meta’s Pilot AR Glasses

Orion is faced with many problems, the least among them being its affordable mass production. AR glasses get hot and heavy and have to deal with low resolution or, if not, a small field of view. This glass holds many ingenious innovations to sidestep these issues. Micro LED projectors inside the frame cast the screen onto one of the glasses through waveguides in the lenses. The lenses are made of silicon carbide which has an uncommonly high index of refraction, in addition to being durable and lightweight. This high index allows the projections to fill more of the vision.

Interaction with AI and augmented reality, or holograms: Zuckerberg says these two things are the biggest features of AR glasses. Orion excels in both of these. The generative AI capabilities of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are combined with a layer of hologram over what the user sees. An example can be cooking. The AR glasses would place labels over the ingredients, telling you what goes when and how much.

Orion glasses can also be synced so that two people can play a video game, like Pong. With movement-tracking gear, these glasses have come close to perfecting the synchronization. These glasses can also make and receive calls with an altered version of the Messenger app. The caller would be able to see the receiver, but not vice versa. Meta plans to create an avatar that mimics the facial expressions of the user. The glasses have a surprisingly good display given their size. Video calls are good enough and webpages can be read easily.

The Orion glasses are simply the glasses. The whole kit is tripartite: the glasses, a neural wristband, and a compute puck (looks like a power bank). If the glasses are beyond a radius of 12 feet or so from the puck, they are as good as ordinary glasses. This AR glass has a 70-degree field of vision – more than any other AR glasses on the market. In this case, bigger is better as it leads to deeper immersion. A small field of vision is like looking through a peephole.

The Orion glasses weigh 98 grams, which is heavier than a normal pair of glasses but much lighter than mixed reality headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro or the Meta Quest. The frames are built of magnesium allowing for an even distribution of heat.

Seven cameras are embedded in the frame. Their function is to anchor real objects in spaces so that augmented reality can function smoothly. For instance, if you create a window somewhere and open it, then turn around, and then turn back, the window will still be there.

Input into the glasses happens through eye and hand tracking, voice commands, and signals from the neural wristband. The user’s eyes are like the pointer and their gestures are like the click. The wristband uses electromyography (EMG) to translate selected gestures into electronic messages. Put your index finger and thumb together to select things, flip an imaginary coin against the other hand to scroll, and make the middle finger and thumb meet to launch or hide the app launcher. When a gesture is recognized, the wristband issues haptic feedback.

Orion glasses came out of R&D in 2018. In 2022, however, in a round of cost-cutting by Meta, these glasses were deemed to be too expensive and subsequently shelved. The current price of one unit came out to be around $10,000. Meta projected that the material would soon become cheaper, but that didn’t happen. Apparently, Meta plans to put out a different pair of AR glasses, codenamed Hypernova, which uses a similar wristband.

Officials at Meta predict that it is the second version of Orion, under development, which will hit the market at about the price of smartphones and laptops. The field of view will be smaller and the silicon carbide material will be discarded.

Meta is not the only company that is pulling out all the stops to create AR glasses. Apple’s Vision Pro and soon-to-come AR glasses, Snap’s AR Spectacles, Google’s recent try at jumping into the collaboration of Meta and Ray-Ban’s parent company, EssilorLuxottica – all these are attempts to create the world’s first perfect pair of AR glasses and make a major platform shift. Meta’s has produced some real results but there’s still a lot to be done.