For years, Silicon Valley and Wall Street have questioned Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to invest tens of billions of dollars in Reality Labs. This week, Meta’s wearables division unveiled a prototype of its Orion smart glasses, which the company hopes will one day replace the iPhone. That idea sounds crazy… but maybe a little less so than it did a week ago.
Orion is a prototype headset that combines augmented reality, eye and hand tracking, generative AI, and a gesture-detecting wristwatch. With micro LED projectors and silicon carbide lenses (which are quite expensive), the Meta seems to have overcome the longstanding AR display challenge. You can look through Orion — you know, like a pair of glasses — but also project application windows onto lenses that seem embedded in the world around you. Ideally, you can navigate the environment using your hands, eyes and voice.
To be clear though, Meta’s Orion smart glasses are more than just your average reader. 10,000 is said to cost A pop, not available for sale anytime soon. We are talking years later. All of the technology in Orion is relatively young, and it all needs to be cheap, smart, and small enough to work in a pair of smart glasses you can buy at the mall. Zuckerberg said the company has already been working on Orion for 10 years, but still has no path to a marketable product.
However, Meta is the only company trying to put a smartphone in your face.
This month, Snap unveiled its latest generation of glasses, which are larger and less field-of-view than the Orion. A former Snap engineer says the latest glasses are “Obviously worse” — you can actually order them. Google mentioned it during its I/O conference in May It also works on a pair of smart glassesPerhaps a rehash of its failed Google Glass experiment of the past decade. Apple is said to be Working on AR glasses that sound like Orion. And we can’t rule out Jony Ive’s new start, Loveframe, which he recently confirmed Working on wearable AI with OpenAI (Although we don’t know if they are glass, pin or something else).
Among big tech’s wealthiest companies, a race is brewing to create a sleek pair of smart glasses that can do everything your smartphone can do. Meta’s premise made two things clear: There’s something out there, but we’re not “there” yet.
The devices are a significant departure from the Quest virtual reality headsets Meta has been following for years and Apple’s Vision Pro. There are many similar technologies, such as eye tracking and hand tracking, but they feel completely different to use. VR headsets are bulky, uncomfortable to wear, and make people nauseous from watching the visuals. On the other hand, sunglasses and eyeglasses are relatively pleasant to wear and millions of Americans use them every day.
To Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s been pushing the glass form factor for a long time, and it’s certainly not unpopular. It has been reported for a long time Meta’s CEO hates it His popular social media apps must be accessed through Apple phones (probably leading to the ill-fated Facebook phone). Now, Meta’s rivals are also dipping their toes into the Mirror PC.
This is where Metta’s initial investment seems to be paying off. On Wednesday Zuckerberg gave a keynote presentation on Orion that we won’t soon forget, filling a room full of skeptical journalists with electricity and excitement. TechCrunch hasn’t demoed Orion yet, but early reviews are very positive.
What Meta offers today is the Ray-Ban Meta: a pair of glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers, sensors, on-device LLM, and the ability to connect to your phone and the cloud. The Ray-Ban Meta is much simpler than the Orion, but comes in at a relatively affordable $299 — not really much more than a regular pair of Ray-Bans. Although the Ray-Ban Meta glasses seem more popular, they are similar to the Spectacles 3 released by Snap a few years ago.
Despite big differences in price and capabilities, the Orion and Ray-Ban Meta are more related than you might think.
“Orion is really the future, and we want to eventually have a full holographic experience. You can think of the Ray-Ban Meta as our first step,” said Li-Shen Miller, Meta’s VP of Product, who leads its wearables team, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Making sure it’s comfortable, people People want to wear it, and we really need to do the fundamentals like people find value in it every day.”
One of the things the Meta is trying with the Ray-Ban Meta is AI. Currently, smart glasses use Meta’s llama models to answer questions about what you see in front of you, take pictures and run them through an AI system along with the user’s verbal requests. The Ray-Ban Meta’s AI features aren’t perfect today: OpenAI’s natural-feeling lag is worse than the advanced voice mode; Meta AI requires very specific stimuli to work properly; It is illusion; And it lacks a tight integration with multiple apps, making it less useful than just picking up my iPhone (perhaps by Apple’s design). But updates to the meta coming later this year are trying to address these issues.
Meta announced that they will soon release live AI video processing for their Ray-Bans, meaning the smart glasses will stream live video and verbal requests to one of Lama’s multimodal AI models and generate real-time, verbal responses based on that input. It gets basic features like reminders and more app integrations. If it works, it should make the whole experience much smoother. Miller says these improvements will filter down to Orion, which runs on the same generative AI systems.
“Some things make more sense for one form factor than another, but we’re definitely cross-pollinating,” Miller said.
Likewise, he says some of Orion’s features may be filtered out as his team focuses on making AR glasses more affordable. Orion’s various sensors and eye trackers are not cheap technologies. The problem is that Orion needs to get better at both And And economical.
Another challenge is typing. Your smartphone has a keyboard, but your smart glasses don’t. Miller spent nearly 20 years working on keyboards at Microsoft before joining Meta, but he says it’s “liberating” to not have an Orion keyboard. He argues that using smart glasses will be a more natural experience than using a phone. You can simply talk, gesture with your hands and see things that Orion has navigated; Everything that comes naturally to most people.
Another device criticized for not having a keyboard is, ironically, the iPhone. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Palmer He smirked at the iPhone In 2007, it said it would not appeal to business customers because it lacked a business keyboard. People adapted, however, and his ideas seem innocent more than 15 years later.
I think making Orion feel natural is definitely more of a goal than a reality at this point. The Verge mentioned it Direct inspection The windows occasionally fill the entire glass lens, completely blocking the user’s view of the surrounding world. It is far from natural. To get there, Meta needs to improve its AI, typing, AR and a long list of other features.
“With the Ray-Ban Meta, we aimed it very much at certain things, and then it does them well,” Miller said. “But if you want to build a new, futuristic computing platform [with Orion]We have to do a lot of things, and we have to do them all well.
