Meta Orion could be our AR future, but not with the lenses you get
You’ll never own a pair of Meta Orion AR glasses – at least not as 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 groundbreaking smart glasses introduced this week by prodigy, Billionaire CEO and now cool guy Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s not that Orion can’t do the things Zuckerberg claimed during his controversial keynote. Orion is a pair of slightly thick, black-framed glasses with what appear to be translucent screens (more on that later), hand and eye tracking, neural input (via a wrist device), and the ability to integrate virtual environments with your real ones almost seamlessly.
The demo was exciting and reminded me a bit of something Magic jump showed itself almost ten years ago. This too apparently had excellent resolution, a wide field of view and seemed 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 became narrow. It required physical connectivity to a pack and was more like a pair of glasses than glasses. The company still exists, but now focuses on business customers (a final destination for almost all mixed reality headsets).
Meta Orion is not a magical leap. First, in addition to showing off the AR glasses on stage (about 50 feet away from where I was sitting), Meta gave hands-on demos to a handful of celebrities, industry figures (including Gary Vee and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang), and some media channels.
What is clear from all of this 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 illuminate the transparent silicon carbide lens with an image. That’s exciting because it means the viewport for these AR glasses could outperform most AR glasses on the market. You no longer have to look up at a special area where the AR experience will live. If, like me, you wear glasses every day, vision correction should cover your entire field of vision. AR won’t be immersive unless it can appear the same way wherever I look. Orion is like wearing regular glasses, but with a hidden superpower.
The joy you saw on the faces of those who experienced Orion firsthand may never be your joy.
The “neural interface” is a bit of a push. It’s just a wristband that, I think, can 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 quite intuitive. Of course, the $3,499 Apple Vision Pro reads hand gestures without a wristband.
The Orion AR glasses still don’t look so much like glasses thanks to a major breakthrough; there’s a pocket puck that houses a lot of the processing power. At least it’s wireless.
Despite these caveats, this is an exciting piece of technology and I can’t wait for it to hit the market. Only that will never happen.
According to The Verge’s practice-oriented reportthis 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 important caveat. The silicon carbide lenses (material commonly used in the aerospace and semiconductor industries) cannot be affordably manufactured at scale, and that means the Orion V2 won’t have them. As a result, if and when the shipping Orions arrive, they 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 isn’t just the ability to connect the physical world with your virtual world, it’s how boundaries don’t break that illusion. A smaller field of view means the AR magic breaks quickly and will only be available to part of your viewing window. That adjustment will turn the Orion experience from transformative to unsatisfying, if not gimmicky.
The joy you saw on the faces of those who experienced Orion firsthand may never be your joy. Part of the Orion shipping experience might make you smile, but then you look left or right or look too far up or down and your AR will disappear.
Maybe I’m wrong, but think about how Zuckerberg announced these frames. He specifically pointed to the silicon carbide lenses as a defining feature, something chosen for its excellent refractive power, which is crucial when projecting an image onto a surface that then needs to reach your eyes. Essentially it was an act of brilliance to turn the entire lens into a screen, and now it looks like there’s overreach.
If the final Orion is all 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 portable AR disappointment.
@techradar
♬ original sound – Ny Breaking