Meta’s ‘Orion’ Glasses Are Desperate To Make AR Mainstream

The new Orion AR specs from Meta might be the best AR gadget yet—better even than Apple’s Vision Pro headset. But Big Tech is looking for another smartphone moment, and it’s not likely to happen.

Meta’s Orion glasses are AR (augmented reality) done the way we always imagined it. They might be clunky and too expensive to manufacture, but they’re actual glasses with projectors inside, not giant VR headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro. The problem is they’re trying to replace phones, and nobody but Meta wants that to happen.

“The tech industry’s current challenge is figuring out how to put the features, specs, and quality of Vision Pro into a pair of glasses that are the size of Orion. It’s a massive technical challenge that will require multiple breakthroughs,” Ben Lang, co-founder and executive editor of Road to VR, told Lifewire via email.

Orion

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the Orion glasses at the Meta Connect event, and they are impressive. They’re a big dorky pair of specs that make cinema 3D glasses look cool, but they pack in everything you need to do AR. For a start, they’re glasses, not a honking great VR face computer, so you can wear them outside (not yet though—they’re still just a tech demo, not a shipping product).

They also don’t have a battery pack snaking to a belt clip or pocket. Orion has batteries built in, but it also has an offboard brain in a plain oblong puck, similar in size to a small TV remote or an old feature phone. This keeps the bulk, and presumably the heat, off the face. And instead of an array of 3D sensing cameras to monitor your hand gestures, you can wear a wristband that detects hand and finger movements.

The glasses use specially designed micro LED projectors to beam graphics into the silicon carbide lenses, and this is how they overlay visuals onto the real world. The glasses also have cameras to scan and understand the world around you.

Interestingly, it seems that despite a relatively low-resolution display, the glasses are much better for augmented reality than Apple’s huge Vision Pro, with its arrays of cameras and super-high-def displays. Tech pundit and Facebook fan Ben Thompson tried Meta’s and was impressed.

“What was the most striking to me, however, is that the obvious limitations—particularly low resolution—felt immaterial. The difference from the Quest or Vision Pro is that actually looking at reality is so dramatically different from even the best-in-class pass-through capabilities of the Vision Pro,” writes Thompson on his Stratechery blog.

The Verge’s Alex Heath said that he could comfortably read text, but would not want to watch a whole movie in them.

In short, they’re the AR glasses we always imagined, only not quite perfected yet. But nobody is going to buy them.

The Pocket Computer Anomoly

It’s the 1990s. Imagine telling your friends and family that they will all be carrying an expensive pocket computer with them, one that they will have to charge every day and pay a monthly subscription to use. They’d laugh at you, of course, but as we know that’s exactly what ended up happening.

The smartphone is a historical anomaly. It snuck in through the back door of cellphones, which already had a great selling point: stay in touch when you’re not at home. Cellphones were already popular when smartphones came along, and as we were already paying for them, and carrying them, it was not a difficult switch. Especially as it offered the exact same thing as a regular phone: stay in touch with family and friends, only now with photos and video calls.

“With smartphones, people already understood mobile phones and personal computers. As revolutionary as smartphones were, they really just boiled down to a combination of these two familiar technologies,” Maeva Sponbergs, CMO and head of publishing at Beyond Frames Entertainment, told Lifewire via email.

This may well have been a one-off glitch in the market. The majority of people in the world now carry pocket computers, so it seems to follow that they will all hop to the next thing, which in this case is smart glasses.

But what do they offer? Nothing more than your phone, and quite a bit less. An AR video call isn’t better than a regular Zoom or FaceTime, it’s just different. Typing messages is harder. And you have to wear them on your face the whole time.

Now, there’s definitely a place for AR glasses, and that’s as a professional tool. Google Glass got this right years ago, as does the Magic Leap 2 right now. In the workplace, especially in an industrial or engineering environment, gear can look as dorky and unwieldy as it needs to with no problem, while the advantages of a heads-up display and hands-free operation are much more obvious.

The only person who really wants mass-market AR glasses to happen is Zuck. Meta is at the mercy of Google and Apple, having to pay a cut of any transactions made in its iOS and Android apps to the platform owners. Facebook also wants to track you much more deeply than Apple will allow. Meta lost the smartphone race, which is why it’s betting so much on AR. Facebook AR glasses that will know where you are, what you’re doing, what you’re looking at, and what’s around you, at all times.

No thanks, Meta.