Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed the smartphones that primarily provided those connections. Now, in a multi-year, multi-billion dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all-in on computers for your face.
At today’s annual Connect developer event in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the headliner was Orion, a prototype pair of holographic display glasses that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said has been 10 years in the making.
Zuckerberg stressed that the Orion glasses, which are currently available only to developers, are not your average smart display. And he argued that these glasses will be so interactive that they will replace smartphones for many purposes.
“Building this display is unlike any display you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Meta Connect. Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth had previously described the technology as “the most advanced thing we’ve ever produced as a species.”
The Orion glasses, like many heads-up displays, look like the fever dream of the techno-utopians who have spent the past few years toiling away at a top-secret facility called “Reality Lab.” A WIRED reporter on the scene noted that the thick black glasses looked “chunky” on Zuckerberg.
As part of the on-stage demo, Zuckerberg showed how Orion glasses can be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of someone, quickly respond to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messaging example, Zuckerberg noted that users don’t even have to pick up their phones. They navigate these interfaces by talking, tapping their fingers together, or simply looking at virtual objects.
There will also be a “neural interface” built into it that can interpret brain signals, using a wrist-worn device that Meta first announced three years ago. Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate on how any of this will actually work or when a consumer version might materialize. (Nor did he address the various privacy complications of connecting this rig and its visual AI to one of the world’s largest repositories of personal data.)
He did say that the images that appear through the Orion glasses are not pass-through technology, where external cameras show the wearer the real world, nor are they a display or screen that shows the virtual world. It is a “new kind of display architecture,” he said, that uses projectors in the arms of the glasses to shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect light into the wearer’s eyes, creating volumetric images for you. Meta designed this technology itself, he said.
The idea is that instead of the images appearing as flat, 2D graphics before your eyes, the virtual images now have shape and depth. “The big innovation with Orion is the field of view,” said Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who was at Meta Connect. “The field of view is 72 degrees, which makes it much more attractive and useful for most applications, whether it’s gaming, social media or just consuming content. Most headsets have a range of 30 to 50 degrees.”
