At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion, which he called “the most advanced pair of glasses the world has ever seen.”
Impressively smaller than Snap’s recently announced Spectacles 5, the glasses are true augmented reality. Orion uses tiny projectors built into the temples of the glasses to create a head-up display — kind of like a 2024 version of Google Glass.
Zuckerberg said the glasses have been 10 years in the making, but they don’t seem to be much beyond the concept stage at this point. “They exist, they’re awesome, and they’re a glimpse into an exciting future,” he said during the presentation. He added that the team still has a lot of “fine-tuning” to do before Meta is an official consumer product.
Image credit: Meta
Notably, in addition to standard voice prompts, Orion is controlled through a “neural interface” made possible by CTRL-labs, a company Meta acquired in 2019. CTRL-labs makes wristbands that are compatible with the device.
The company is positioning the upcoming glasses as a successor to its current livestream product, the Ray-Ban Meta.
While Ray-Ban Meta pioneered an entirely new category of AI-powered, display-less glasses, the XR industry has long dreamed of true AR glasses – a product that combines the benefits of large holographic displays and personalized AI assistance in a comfortable, all-day form factor. Orion rises to the challenge.
Now, Meta is making a number of claims, including that “Orion has the largest field of view (FOV) of any small AR glass to date.” While it’s too early to reveal any details at this point, this could be seen as a dig at the new Spectacles, which are very large and have a very narrow field of view.
TechCrunch logo, Meta 👀 Image credit: Meta
“This field of view enables truly immersive use cases for Orion, from multitasking windows and big-screen entertainment to life-size holograms of people,” Meta noted, “with all digital content seamlessly blending with your view of the physical world.”
What Orion and the new Spectacles have in common is that they will initially only be available to developers – of course, this is common in this world, with companies looking at such announcements as a kind of proof of concept to whet enthusiasm for building for the platform.
Image credit: Meta
The Ray-Ban Meta has been a bit of a surprise hit for the company, especially given the slow but steady growth of its Quest line, and if the product lives up to the demo, it’s hard to accuse Zuckerberg of exaggerating when compared to the likes of Snapchat Spectacles on the one hand and Apple Vision Pro on the other.
Ray-Ban’s latest addition, Meta AI, is a stepping stone to more fully realized augmented reality glasses, where features like translation and navigation become even more powerful with the addition of a visual element.
Getting to this stage hasn’t been without challenges, of course: Recent reports have put the cost of manufacturing Orion at around $10,000 per unit, and while it’s common for Meta to lose money on its Quest headsets, never this astronomical.
The report also suggests that Meta will ship glasses with a significantly smaller version of the HUD when it ships the wristband ahead of Orion’s eventual arrival.
“Over the next few years, you will see new devices that build on our research and development efforts,” Mehta wrote. “Orion is not just a window into the future, it’s a glimpse into the very real possibilities that are within reach today. From Ray-Ban Metaglasses to Orion, we have seen the good that can come from empowering people to be more present and powerful in the physical world, while also taking advantage of all the digital world has to offer.”
