Meta dominated online social connections over the past 20 years, but neglected to make the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multi-year, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all-in on in-your-face computing.
At its annual Connect developer event today in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S virtual reality headset and its improved AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the headliner was Orion, a pair of prototype glasses with a holographic display that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said had been in the works for 10 years.
Zuckerberg emphasized that the Orion glasses, which are currently only available to developers, are not your typical smart display. And he pointed out that this kind of glasses will be so interactive that they will usurp the smartphone for many needs.
“The creation of this display is unlike any other screen you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Meta Connect. Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth previously described the technology as “the most advanced thing we’ve ever produced as a species.”
As part of the demo on stage, Zuckerberg showed how the Orion glasses can be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of someone, quickly respond to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messaging example, Zuckerberg noted that users won’t even have to take out their phones. They will navigate these interfaces by speaking, tapping with their fingers, or simply by looking at virtual objects.
It will also have a built-in “neural interface” that can interpret brain signals using a wrist-worn device that Meta first teased three years ago. Zuckerberg didn’t specify how any of this would actually work or when a consumer version might materialize. (He also didn’t get into the various privacy complications of connecting this platform 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 wearers the real world — nor is it a display or screen that shows the virtual world. It’s “a new kind of display architecture,” he said, that uses projectors in the arms of the glasses to shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect light into the wearer’s eyes and create three-dimensional images in front of you. Meta designed this technology itself, he said.
The idea is that images don’t look like flat, 2D graphics in front of your eyes, but virtual images already have shape and depth. “The big innovation with Orion is the field of view,” said Anschel Sagg, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who attended 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 in the 30 to 50 degree range.
