Meta will showcase its first AR glasses, Orion, at the Connect conference as scheduled. On the early morning of September 26th Beijing time, in Menlo Park, California, the Orion prototype was placed in a silver safe and brought onto the stage by a staff member. The safe was solemnly chained to the staff member's left hand.
Taking the glasses, Zuckerberg introduced that this is Meta's first AR glasses and "the best AR glasses in the world." In its official promotional video, Meta invited Huang Renxun to experience it first. Huang Renxun praised it, "The display is great, the tracking is great, and the colors are also very good
Orion's hardware is divided into three parts: the glasses themselves, a "neural wristband" used to control the glasses, and a wireless computing device similar to a phone battery pack.
The glasses need to be paired with a "neural wristband" and a wireless computing device
Users can control the glasses through a combination of eye tracking, hand tracking, voice and nerve wristbands.
The Orion frame is embedded with seven cameras, which are responsible for capturing images such as gestures. The images can be projected to the front of the eyes through the waveguide in the lens;
The wristband is made of high-performance textile materials and recognizes several gestures through muscle electrical signals;
Some rendering and conventional computing processes run on wireless computing devices, so the glasses do not require an external phone or laptop to run. However, once they are more than 12 feet away from the computing device, the glasses become useless.
From the demonstration video, it can be seen that users can wear Orion to browse the web, make video calls, and play some simple 3D games.
At first glance, Orion's appearance is very simple, like an ordinary black framed glasses. Why does it have the confidence to call itself the best AR glasses? The highlights include a large field of view, holographic display, silicon carbide lenses, and a new human-computer interaction mode. Based on Meta's introduction and technology media reports:
Orion has a stronger sense of immersion, with the largest field of view (up to 70 degrees) among the smallest AR glasses to date. It adopts a diffractive optical waveguide design and selects Micro LED micro LED displays. With the help of a large holographic display screen, users can seamlessly integrate 2D and 3D digital content with the physical world, achieving an immersive experience;
Capable of running intelligent assistant Meta AI, utilizing generated AI to perceive and understand the surrounding world;
Identify the ingredients placed on the table and provide a recipe
Lightweight (98 grams), easy to carry, the frame is made of magnesium, which is lighter than aluminum and has more uniform heat dissipation;
Unlike VR headsets, Orion is equipped with transparent lenses that allow people to see each other's faces, eyes, and expressions, resulting in better interactivity;
Meta mentioned that Orion's glasses end uses customized chips, which are rarely endorsed by Huang Renxun. Many netizens speculate that this customized chip may have been created by Nvidia.
It is worth noting that unlike other AR glasses, Orion's lenses use silicon carbide material.
As a third-generation semiconductor material, silicon carbide has the advantages of durability, light weight, and ultra-high refractive index. However, the high cost and difficulty of manufacturing silicon carbide lenses have also become key obstacles for Orion's landing.
Previously in 2022, during Meta's comprehensive cost cutting phase, Zuckerberg had decided to shelve the release of this pair of glasses. A Meta executive revealed to TheVerge that the main reason for deciding to shelve Orion is its astonishingly high manufacturing cost, approximately $10000 per pair of glasses, with most of the cost coming from silicon carbide lenses. When designing Orion, Meta expected that silicon carbide materials would become popular throughout the industry, thereby reducing the cost of glasses, but this did not happen.
Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth also said about these lenses, "You can't imagine how low the production volume is
However, Meta emphasized that Orion can already be delivered to consumers, and the reason why it has not been launched is to focus on internal development and create more perfect products. There is still room for improvement in display effects, external dimensions, and cost reduction for this product.
This device may be much better than expected, but it hasn't achieved the final effect we wanted, "Zuckerberg said of the device." Before it's officially launched, we still hope it's smaller, brighter, higher resolution, and more affordable
He expects that the second generation Orion planned by Meta will become the first consumer grade product within a few years. But it is said that the second generation of Orion will use non silicon carbide optical waveguide lenses, with a smaller field of view, higher resolution, and thinner frames. Executives are secretive about cost issues, only revealing that their prices should be comparable to today's smartphones and laptops.
Next, Meta will open access to Orion product prototypes to employees and selected external audiences, so that the development team can learn, iterate, and build a consumer AR glasses product line, with plans to begin shipping in the near future.
Ten years of sharpening a sword is equally crucial for the software ecosystem
Zuckerberg is committed to ushering in the next computing era after smartphones, and smart glasses are seen as the best carrier for personal AI computing platforms. Orion represents his decades long, multi billion dollar gamble in the computing field.
Meta has released multiple smart glasses, and the popular product is the smart glasses co branded with the well-known eyewear brand Ray Ban. According to a Reuters report in July, in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone, the shipment volume of Ray Ban Meta exceeded the full lifecycle shipment volume of the first generation product Ray Ban Stories, reaching 1 million pairs, and this trend is expected to continue in 2024. It is expected that the annual shipment volume may exceed 1.5 million pairs, and the product is currently in a state of continuous shortage.
Zuckerberg's goal is clear - to replace smartphones with smart glasses. To achieve this goal, in addition to sufficiently good hardware, Meta also faces constraints in terms of software ecology. Nowadays, Google and Apple jointly control the mobile app store where people access Meta apps. Especially Apple, which temporarily disabled Meta's internal applications and released policy changes such as app tracking transparency alerts, which temporarily impacted Meta's advertising business.
In March of this year, The Information revealed that Google is vigorously developing the Android XR system and they have approached Meta in hopes of using it to expand Android into the XR field.
Meta refused and opened Horizon OS (VR/AR operating system) to third-party hardware partners.