Meta has dominated online social networking for 20 years, but it failed to make smartphones the primary way to deliver those connections. Now, as part of a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to be at the forefront of connected devices, Meta is going all-in on in-your-face computing.
At its annual Connect Developer Event today in Menlo Park, Calif., Meta showed off its modern, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta astute glasses. But the star of the show was Orion, a prototype pair of glasses with a holographic display that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said was 10 years in the making.
Zuckerberg emphasized that the Orion glasses — which are currently available only to developers — are not your typical astute display. And he argued that such glasses will be so interactive that they will replace smartphones in many needs.
“The design of this display is unlike any other display you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on the Meta Connect stage. Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, previously described this technology as “the most advanced thing we’ve ever created as a species.”
The Orion glasses, like many heads-up displays, look like the fever dream of techno-utopians who have been strenuous at work for several years in a highly secretive place called the “Reality Lab.” One WIRED reporter noted that the hefty, black glasses looked “fat” on Zuckerberg.
As part of his onstage demonstration, Zuckerberg showed how the Orion glasses could be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of someone, quickly reply to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messaging example, Zuckerberg noted that users won’t even need to take out their phones. They’ll navigate these interfaces by talking, tapping, or simply looking at virtual objects.
There will also be a built-in “neural interface” that can interpret brain signals using a wrist-worn device that Meta first hinted at three years ago. Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate on how it would all work or when a consumer version might arrive. (He also didn’t mention the various privacy complications that would come with connecting that hardware and its visual AI to one of the world’s largest repositories of personal data.)
He said the images that appear through the Orion glasses are not pass-through technology — where external cameras show users the real world — or a display or screen that shows a virtual world. It’s a “new kind of display architecture,” he said, one that uses projectors in the arms of the glasses to shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect lithe into the user’s eyes and create volumetric images in front of you. Meta designed the technology itself, he said.
The idea is that instead of images appearing flat and two-dimensional, virtual images now have shape and depth. “The biggest innovation in Orion is the field of view,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who was present at Meta Connect. “The field of view is 72 degrees, which makes it much more engaging and useful for most applications, whether it’s gaming, social media, or just consuming content. Most headsets are between 30 and 50 degrees.”