Meta Orion could be our AR future, but not with the lenses you’ll get
You will never own a pair of Meta Orion AR glasses – at least not like what I saw yesterday at Meta Connect 2024. That’s what I told myself after reading early hands-on reports that made one thing very clear about the ground-breaking smart glasses introduced this week by wunderkind turned billionaire CEO, and now cool guy Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s not that Orion can’t do the things Zuckerberg claimed during his buzz-worthy keynote. Orion is a pair of somewhat thick, black-framed glasses featuring what looks like see-through screens (more on that in a bit), hand and eye tracking, neural input (via a wrist device), and the ability to integrate virtual environments with your real one almost seamlessly.
The demo was exciting and reminded me a bit of what Magic Leap showed off almost a decade ago. It too had apparently excellent resolution, a wide field of view, and appeared to serve as a bridge between real and virtual worlds. Unfortunately, the reality of the hardware never lived up to the hype. The images were desaturated, and the field of view narrow. It required physical connectivity to a pack, and looked more like goggles than glasses. The company is still around but now focuses on enterprise customers (a final destination for almost all mixed-reality headsets).
Meta Orion is not Magic Leap. First of all, in addition to showing the AR glasses on stage (roughly 50 feet away from where I sat), Meta gave hands-on demos to a handful of celebrities, industry figures (including Gary Vee and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang), and some media outlets.
What’s clear from all of them is that this is real. The AR glasses function more or less as Zuckerberg promised. They offer full-frame ‘displays’ that use waveform microLED projector technology to light up the transparent silicon carbide lens with an image. That’s exciting because it means the viewport for these AR glasses could exceed most AR glasses on the market. No more glancing up at a special area where the AR experience will live. If you wear glasses every day as I do, eyesight correction must span your entire field of view. AR won’t be immersive unless it similarly can appear wherever I cast my eyes. Orion could be like wearing regular glasses, but with a hidden superpower.
That glee you saw on the faces of those who experienced Orion firsthand might never be your glee.
The “neural interface” is a bit of a push. It’s just a wristband that can, I think, read subtle hand gestures through the muscles and tendons in the wrist. That’s not neural technology as I understand it. Still, I like the idea of combining that control with eye tracking. That could be pretty intuitive. Of course, the $3,499 Apple Vision Pro reads hand gestures without a wristband.
Orion AR glasses still look like glasses not so much because of a big breakthrough; there’s a pocket puck where much of the processing power lives. At least it’s wireless.
Even with these caveats, this is an exciting bit of technology and I can’t wait for it to hit the market. Except it never will.
According to the Verge’s hands-on report, this version of Meta Orion will never see the light of day. The company is already working on thinner and lighter versions. And while that sounds good, there is one very significant caveat. The silicon carbide lenses (material that is typically used in aerospace and the semiconductor industries) can’t be manufactured affordably at scale, and that means Orion V2 will not have them. As a result, the shipping Orions, if and when they arrive, will have a smaller field of view.
Meta told the Verge that the screen will be sharper and brighter, but that doesn’t really matter to me. The key to a transformative AR experience is not just its ability to connect the physical world to your virtual one, it’s about how borders don’t break that illusion. A smaller field of view will mean that the AR magic breaks quickly and will only be available to a portion of your viewport. That adjustment will change the Orion experience from transformative to unsatisfying, if not gimmicky.
That glee you saw on the faces of those who experienced Orion firsthand might never be your glee. Some of the shipping Orion experience might make you smile, but then you’ll glance to the left or right or look too far up or down and your AR will vanish.
Maybe I’m wrong, but think about how Zuckerberg announced these frames. He specifically pointed out the silicon carbide lenses as a defining feature, something chosen for its excellent refractive capabilities, critical when you’re projecting an image onto a surface that has to then reach your eyes. Essentially making the entire lens a screen was an act of brilliance and now, it appears, an overreach.
If the final shipping Orion has just plastic or glass, the experience won’t be the same, and Orion 2, which may still cost as much as a laptop will be yet another wearable AR disappointment.
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