Facebook parent company Meta today unveiled “the most advanced pair of augmented reality glasses ever created,” called Orion. Meta claims that Orion looks and feels like a regular pair of glasses, but with augmented reality capabilities.
The glasses have been in development for the past five years and Meta describes them as lightweight and great for use indoors and out. Unlike a VR headset, AR glasses expand the real world rather than exclude it, providing digital experiences that aren’t limited by a smartphone screen or headset.
Orion has the largest field of view in the smallest AR headset form factor to date. That field of view enables Orion to be used in truly immersive situations, 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,” with components reduced to a fraction of a millimeter in size. The glasses have transparent lenses that allow the wearer to see other people’s eyes and expressions.
Orion includes built-in contextual AI that can “sense and understand” the world around the user to “proactively anticipate and address” their needs. Meta AI can do things like create a recipe from what’s in the fridge or call a friend while the user is doing the dishes.
Orion isn’t a consumer-focused product, but it’s not just a research prototype, either. Meta is giving its employees and “select external audiences” access to Orion, so they can use the data to “learn, iterate, and develop” a product line of consumer augmented reality glasses.
In the future, Meta wants to improve the AR display to make images sharper, optimize it for a thinner form factor, and work to build at scale to make AR glasses more affordable.
Apple is also rumored to be Working on AR glassesbut the product is still many years away from being released. Apple has struggled to get the power of a iPhone in a device that uses only a fraction of the energy to prevent overheating.
Along with AR glasses, Facebook today introduced New AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta Glasses and introduced a super affordable pair of $300 glasses Meta Quest 3S Mixed reality headset that is the successor to the Meta Quest 3.
