Meta’s Orion AR Glasses
Meta (via Hacker News, MacRumors):
Today, we unveiled Orion, previously codenamed Project Nazare, which we believe is the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made.
Orion combines the look and feel of a regular pair of glasses with the immersive capabilities of augmented reality – and it’s the result of breakthrough inventions in virtually every field of modern computing.
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While Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: this is not a research prototype. It’s one of the most polished product prototypes we’ve ever developed, and is truly representative of something that could ship to consumers. Rather than rushing to put it on shelves, we decided to focus on internal development first, which means we can keep building quickly and continue to push the boundaries of the technology, helping us arrive at an even better consumer product faster.
They look almost like a normal pair of glasses.
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Zuckerberg imagines that people will want to use AR glasses like Orion for two primary purposes: communicating with each other through digital information overlaid on the real world — which he calls “holograms” — and interacting with AI.
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The hardware for Orion exists in three parts: the glasses themselves; a “neural wristband” for controlling them; and a wireless compute puck that resembles a large battery pack for a phone. The glasses don’t need a phone or laptop to work, but if they’re separated from the puck by more than 12 feet or so, they become useless.
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At 98 grams, the glasses weigh significantly more than a normal pair but also far less than mixed reality headsets like the Meta Quest or Apple’s Vision Pro.
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As Meta’s executives retell it, the decision to shelve Orion mostly came down to the device’s astronomical cost to build, which is in the ballpark of $10,000 per unit. Most of that cost is due to how difficult and expensive it is to reliably manufacture the silicon carbide lenses. When it started designing Orion, Meta expected the material to become more commonly used across the industry and therefore cheaper, but that didn’t happen.
Meta has decided to hold off on shipping a consumer version until they can bring the price down. That will be a tall order, and that challenge should be kept in mind with everything that follows.
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What follows is unadulterated praise. Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro. It is incredibly comfortable to wear, for one. What was the most striking to me, however, is that the obvious limitations — particularly low resolution — felt immaterial. The difference from the Quest or Vision Pro is that actually looking at reality is so dramatically different from even the best-in-class pass-through capabilities of the Vision Pro, that the holographic video quality doesn’t really matter. Even the highest quality presentation layer will pale in comparison to reality; this, counter-intuitively, gives a lot more freedom of movement in terms of what constitutes “good enough”. Orion’s image quality — thanks in part to its shockingly large 70 degree field of view — is good enough. It’s awesome, actually. In fact — and I don’t say this lightly — it is good enough that, for the first time ever, I felt like I could envision a world where I don’t carry a smartphone.
Meta still hasn’t posted today’s keynote address on YouTube; best I’ve found is this recording of the livestream, starting around the 43m:20s mark. I watched the most of the keynote live and found it engaging. Just 45 minutes long — partly because it was information dense, and partly because Mark Zuckerberg hosted the entire thing himself.
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In terms of actual products that will actually ship, Meta announced the $300 Quest 3S. That’s more than an entire order of magnitude lower-priced than Vision Pro. Vision Pro might be more than 10× more capable than Quest 3S, but I’m not sure it’s 10× better for just playing games and watching movies, which might be the only things people want to do with headsets at the moment. They also launched a 7,500-unit limited edition of their $430 actually-somewhat-popular Ray-Ban Wayfarer “smart” glasses made with translucent plastic, iMac-style.
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It really is true that Meta’s Ray-Ban Wayfarers are nearly indistinguishable from just plain Wayfarers. Orion isn’t like that at all. If you went out in public with these — which you can’t, because they’re internal prototypes — everyone would notice that you’re wearing some sort of tech glasses, or perhaps think you walked out of a movie theater without returning the 3D goggles. But: you could wear them in public if you wanted to, and unlike going out in public wearing a VR headset, you’d just look like a nerd, not a jackass. They’re close to something. But how close to something that would actually matter, especially price-wise, is debatable.
The end goal was always glasses – never VR headsets.
I’m incredibly excited about a near future where AR glasses look like regular glasses we can wear.
Previously:
- Glowtime Ennui
- Takeaways From the Vision Pro After 6 Months
- Can Anyone But a Tech Giant Build the Next Big Thing?
- Humane Ai Pin Reviews
- John Carmack Is Leaving Meta
- Apple’s Next Big Thing: Augmented Reality
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
This looks pretty neat. Shame it's Facebook. Hopefully one won't need to be tracked to use it. Can this be used without an internet connection?
