by Juli Clover
Facebook parent company Meta today unveiled “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made,” called Orion. Meta claims Orion looks and feels like a regular pair of glasses, but with augmented reality capabilities.
The glasses have been in development for the last five years, and Meta describes them as lightweight and great for indoor and outdoor use. Unlike a VR headset, AR glasses augment the real world rather than shutting it out, providing digital experiences that are not constrained by the display of a smartphone or headset.
Orion has the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form to date. That field of view unlocks truly immersive use cases for Orion, from multitasking windows and big-screen entertainment to life-size holograms of people – all digital content that can seamlessly blend with your view of the physical world.
According to Meta, Orion is a “feat of miniaturization,” featuring components that are sized down to a fraction of a millimeter. The glasses have clear lenses that allow the wearer to see other people’s eyes and expressions.
Orion includes built-in contextual AI that is able to “sense and understand” the world around the wearer to “anticipate and proactively address” the wearer’s needs. Meta AI can do things like craft a recipe from what’s inside your refrigerator, or phone a friend while the user washes dishes.
Orion is not a consumer focused product, but it is also not just a research prototype. Meta is providing its employees and “select external audiences” with access to Orion, so that it can use the data to “learn, iterate, and build” toward a consumer AR glasses product line.
Going forward, Meta wants to improve the AR display to make visuals sharper, optimize for a slimmer form factor, and work to build at scale to make the AR glasses more affordable.
Apple too is rumored to be working on AR glasses, but the product is still many years away from launching at this point. Apple has struggled with getting the power of an iPhone into a device that uses only a fraction of the power to prevent overheating.
Along with AR glasses, Facebook today introduced new AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta Glasses and unveiled a super cheap $300 Meta Quest 3S mixed reality headset that is a successor to the Meta Quest 3.
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