At Meta Connect 2024, Mark Zuckerberg gave us our first look at Meta's first fully functioning holographic AR glasses prototype, codenamed Orion. And they look pretty damn cool.
As a one more thing end to his section of the presentation which also introduced us to the Meta Quest 3S, new Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses features, and Meta AI updates including voice, Zuckerberg gave us a first look at his company's AR glasses efforts. It's the culmination of what he says is over a decade's work.
Even at this prototype stage, Orion looks pretty damn impressive. Acting just like you might expect, these glasses can provide a virtual overlay to augment what you see in the real world; this includes highlighting objects, letting you video chat with another person's life-like persona, and giving you access to web browsing and video streaming.
All of this takes shape as glasses that look pretty normal and are lightweight – coming in at under 100g – though Zuckerberg himself admitted the design isn't yet finalized as they aren't as fashionable as he wants them to be (and I'll be the first to agree that fashion is vital for tech wearables).
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Put your mind to it
Mark Zuckerberg is positioning Orion as a device that will revolutionize how we interact with technology and might even replace the smartphone. But to do that, the glasses will need to be easy to control.
With this in mind, there are three options for controlling Orion: eye and hand-tracking controls that mimic the Apple Vision Pro's control scheme, voice controls like those you use with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and a neural interface.
This takes the form of a wrist band (seen in the header image) that can detect your hand swipes and movements. The hope is that it'll eventually let you navigate the AR display just like you would a smartphone.
While you and I might not be able to get our hands on Orion unless we're lucky enough to try a demo of them (Meta, hit me up, please), some developers will apparently get Orion glasses as dev kits. Zuckerberg explained that this should help give them enough time to create exciting AR experiences before the consumer version arrives.
Before that consumer launch, Meta says it first wants to tune the display to make visuals sharper, optimize the hardware to make the form factor smaller, and work on making the glasses more affordable – I take that to mean Meta is targeting the Ray-Ban smart glasses $299 / £299 / AU$449 price.
However, how long this will take and when the public launch will arrive is anyone's guess. Zuckerberg hasn't offered any kind of timeframe for when a publicly available version of Orion will launch. A leaked internal road map from The Verge shared in early 2023 suggested 2027 as a launch year, and this certainly makes sense, but I, for one, am desperately hoping they come a lot quicker than that.
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