Orion AR Glasses? They almost like a typical set of glasses.
That’s the first thing I see as I enter into a conference room at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The black Clark Kent-style frames on the table in front of me appear inconspicuous, but they symbolize CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the computers that will follow after smartphones.
They’re called Orion AR Glasses and are Meta’s first pair of augmented reality spectacles. The corporation was going to sell them, but opted against it because they are currently too intricate and expensive to make. It is showing them to me anyway.
I can feel the employees’ anxiousness in the room as I put the glasses over my eyes and their lenses light up in a swirl of blue. For years, Zuckerberg has hyped glasses that overlay digital information on the real world, dubbing them the “holy grail” item that will eventually replace smartphones.
Now it’s time to see if he’s onto anything.
To put it simply, Orion is a fancy computer that you wear on your face. The challenge with all face computers has long been their displays, which have typically been heavy, hot, low-resolution, or had a small field of view.
Orion’s presentation is a step forward in this regard. Meta created it, and it includes Micro LED projectors inside the frame that beam graphics in front of your eyes through waveguides in the lenses. These lenses are constructed of silicon carbide, not glass or plastic. Meta chose silicon carbide for its durability, light weight, and ultrahigh index of refraction, allowing light from projectors to fill more of your view.
Zuckerberg envisions people using AR glasses like Orion for two key purposes: conversing with one another via digital information overlayed on the real world — which he refers to as “holograms” — and interacting with AI.
“I had thought that the hologram part of this was going to be possible before AI,” he shares with me. “It’s an interesting twist of fate that the AI part is actually possible before the holograms are really able to be mass-produced at an affordable price.”
Orion extends the generative AI capabilities seen in the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses by adding a visual aspect to what you’re looking at. During a demo last week, I utilized Meta AI in Orion to recognize ingredients on a table and produce a smoothie recipe. In a few seconds, it correctly labeled the components and generated recipe directions in a floating window above them.
To show how two individuals wearing Orion could interact with the same holograms, I played a 3D version of Pong with Zuckerberg. We paired our glasses by scanning a QR code, and then used hand tracking to operate the paddle. This worked really well, and there was little to no latency in the game.
Zuckerberg beat me, unfortunately.
I also used a version of the Messenger software designed just for the glasses to make what I was told was the first external video call from Orion to The Verge’s Nilay Patel on his iPhone. He couldn’t see me (Meta intends to eventually present an avatar that tracks the wearer’s facial movements), but I could see and hear him clearly in the 2D window that floated in front of me. To demonstrate how avatar chats will function one day, a Meta employee contacted me and appeared across the room as a cartoonish full-body avatar.
Here’s where I’ll mention that my demonstration was on guardrails. There were computers to the side of the room that might activate specific memories for me. Employees in the room primarily walked me through what they wanted me to attempt, but I did depart from the directions to ensure that what I was seeing was not entirely faked.
Orion isn’t a mirage. It’s also not a product. It’s somewhere in between.
Orion’s hardware is made up of three parts: the glasses themselves, a “neural wristband” for controlling them, and a wireless compute puck that looks like a giant phone battery pack. The glasses do not require a phone or laptop to function, but if they are more than 12 feet away from the puck, they become worthless.
Orion has a 70-degree field of view, which is wider than any pair of AR glasses I’ve tried so far. In my opinion, a tighter field of view makes AR feel smaller and less immersive, as if you are gazing through a peephole. With Orion, I had to get rather near to virtual objects before their edges began to fade.
The glasses weigh 98 grams, which is slightly more than a conventional pair but far less than mixed reality headsets such as the Meta Quest or Apple’s Vision Pro. The frames are built of magnesium, which is lighter than aluminum and used for even heat distribution.
Seven cameras implanted in the frames serve to anchor virtual items in real space, aid with eye and hand tracking, and enable Meta’s AI assistant to understand what you’re looking at. You can leave a virtual window open, turn your head, and walk away; as long as your glasses are on, it will be there when you return.
Given the form factor, the display quality on the Orion is quite good. Video calls appear crisp enough to be enjoyable, and I had no trouble reading text from a webpage many feet away. However, I wouldn’t want to see Avatar in them; the battery only lasts about two hours, so I’m unlikely to finish it.
The glasses are controlled by eye tracking, hand tracking, voice, and the neural wristband, which resembles a Fitbit without a screen. It’s made of high-performance textile material that interprets neural impulses from hand gestures using electromyography (EMG). In milliseconds, these signals are converted into input. It isn’t reading your mind, but it feels like it.
It’s not reading your thoughts, but it kind of feels like it
The bracelet recognizes a few gestures: pinching your index finger with your thumb chooses items, pinching your middle finger and thumb activates or hides the app launcher, and executing a coin-flipping gesture with your thumb against your closed palm scrolls up or down. Haptic feedback in the band alerts you when a gesture is registered, which is a great touch.
In Orion’s interface, your eyes operate as a pointer, while pinching your fingers together acts as a click. Overall, Orion felt more precise than manually manipulating a Quest or Vision Pro. I breezed through a Space Invaders-style game in which I controlled the spacecraft by tilting my head and pressing my fingers together to fire its lasers. And because the band did not have to be visible to the glasses’ sensors and cameras, I was able to manage them with my hand behind my back or in my jacket pocket.
The neural wristband feels more finished than Orion, which is likely since Meta will begin selling it soon. While the business has declined to comment, my sources say Meta plans to release a pair of spectacles with a smaller heads-up display that will operate with the bracelet, dubbed Hypernova, as early as next year.
Orion was planned to be a buyable product. When the glasses emerged from a skunkworks project in Meta’s research division in 2018, the plan was to begin delivering them in the low tens of thousands by now. However, in 2022, during a period of broader cost-cutting across the corporation, Zuckerberg made the decision to postpone its release.
This decision is clear in the fact that Meta isn’t using a number of Orion’s hardware components, ranging from front-facing cameras that can collect video but don’t to the computing puck’s deactivated GPS. There is a built-in modem for cellular data that is not operational. “We’re saving $20 per month,” says Alex Himel, Meta’s VP of Wearables.
According to Meta’s management, the decision to shelve Orion was primarily motivated by the device’s exorbitant construction costs, which are estimated to be around $10,000 per. The majority of this cost is due to the difficulty and expense of reliably manufacturing silicon carbide lenses. When Meta started designing Orion, it expected the material to become more widely utilized and thus less expensive, but this did not happen.
“You can’t imagine how horrible the yields are,” says Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth of the lenses. Instead, the company decided to produce approximately 1,000 pairs of Orion glasses for internal development and external demonstrations.
“It’s probably turned out significantly better than our 50-50 estimates of what it would be, but we didn’t get there on everything that we wanted to,” Zuckerberg says of the gadget. “We still want it to be a little smaller, brighter, with higher resolution, and more inexpensive before we release it as a product. And look, we have a clear view of all of those things.”
He now claims that Meta anticipates the first consumer version of Orion in a few years, rather than the second generation that was planned. Executives are tight-lipped on the price, although they say it will be comparable to current phones and laptops.
“It was a science problem to get to a large field of view,” Rahul Prasad, Orion’s product lead, explains. “The next phase is an engineering problem to get to higher resolution, higher brightness, and lower cost.”
The lenses will not be composed of silicon carbide, so the field of view will be smaller, despite the better resolution. If all goes as planned, the frames will be about half as thick as the Orion glasses are now.
“I think we aspire to build things that look really good,” Zuckerberg says. He understands that for AR glasses to succeed at scale, they must perform equally effectively when the AR is turned off. “It needs to be good in order for you to want to keep it on your face.”
It needs to be good in order for you to want to keep it on your face.
Meta believes that the transition to fully functional AR glasses will be gradual, rather than abrupt. At one end of the spectrum, there will be AI-powered smart glasses without displays, such as the Ray-Ban Meta. Then there will come glasses with small displays, like the upcoming Hypernova, that allow for lighter-touch activities, such as conversing with Meta AI and texting with pals. Orion symbolizes the final stage: full-fledged AR glasses with enough computer power to leave your smartphone at home.
Zuckerberg has been attempting to move away from his reliance on smartphones for quite some time. “A lot of it goes all the way back to our relationship with mobile platforms,” says the executive. “Mobile phones and smartphones got started around the same time as Facebook and early social media, so we didn’t really get to play any role in that platform transition.”
In practice, this has meant living under the thumb of Google and Apple, who jointly control the mobile app stores via which users access Meta’s apps. Apple, in particular, has long been a source of frustration for Zuckerberg. It has temporarily stopped Meta’s internal apps and implemented policy changes such as the App Tracking Transparency prompt, which have temporarily harmed Meta’s advertising revenue.
Now, Apple is competing in headsets with the Vision Pro and developing its own AR glasses. Snap is competing for developers with its next-generation AR Spectacles. Google recently attempted to enter Meta’s relationship with Ray-Ban’s parent firm, EssilorLuxottica, and is now developing headsets with Magic Leap and Samsung.
At the same time, Meta has yet to establish itself as a mainstream hardware company. The Quest headset gained early momentum among gamers but struggled to establish itself as the general-purpose computing device that the manufacturer had hoped it would be. Headlines continue to focus on the billions of dollars it spends each year on Reality Labs, the division that produces Quest, Ray-Ban glasses, and AR glasses.
“We’re not just making this shit up here.”
It’s evident that perceptions — that Meta is spending a lot of money with little to show for it — have influenced the company’s choice to showcase Orion now. “We’re not just making this shit up here,” says Bosworth. “We are not burning cash. The investments we’re making are for real, concrete technologies.
After years of talking about the AR glasses it plans to make, Meta now has something concrete. It’s an outstanding demonstration. Now comes the difficult part.
