“Orion has the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form to date” is the elevator pitch for these glasses. Note that while they kind of look like the Ray-Ban Stories, these are proper AR glasses with a pair of holographic displays and 3D mapping that can put virtual objects into the real world. The Meta Orion glasses are suitable for indoor and outdoor use. The company says that they are lightweight and have “large” holographic displays, but doesn’t get into more details.
The holographic displays are transparent –
you can see through them and people around you can see your eyes. There’s no
need for an external display trickery that a certain Cupertino-based company
had to resort to. However, these displays are also capable of drawing color
graphics. This could be as simple as virtual displays hovering in the air or as
complex as tapping into the contextual Meta AI to recognize objects and tag
them with additional info. In one demo, Meta showed foodstuff on a counter, the
glasses recognized them, tagged them and offered a potential recipe to make
with them.
Meta says that to make Orion compact and
stylish, it had to pack components as tightly as possible, down to fractions of
a millimeter. And while these are the most advanced AR glasses yet, they still
need polish. ”Rather than rushing to put it on shelves, we decided to focus on
internal development first, which means we can keep building quickly and
continue to push the boundaries of the technology, helping us arrive at an even
better consumer product faster,” writes Meta.
Starting today, Meta employees and select
external audiences will have access to the Orion prototype. This will help the
team learn and improve to build a consumer product that will ship “in the near
future”. Before that happens, Meta wants to improve the display quality, to
shrink the hardware even further and to figure out how to build these at scale
so that the finished product will be affordable to consumers.
