At Meta’s Connect event in Menlo Park, California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion, an early prototype of AR spectacles.
TakeAway Points:
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during its Connect event in Menlo Park, California, showed off an early concept for AR glasses, Orion.
- Orion, a fully functional prototype of smart glasses with augmented reality that will not be offered to consumers, was also displayed by Meta.
- The Orion glasses won’t be available for sale; they will be used internally.
Orion; AR glasses
The company announced that the thick, black-framed prototype, called Orion, won’t be sold to consumers; however, they will be used internally as the company continues working toward the consumer glasses it hopes to one day sell.
“This is where we are going,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta hopes the next version of Orion will be available to consumers as the company’s first full AR glasses, Zuckerberg said without giving a timetable for when that may be.
Orion is Meta’s first “fully-functioning” prototype AR glasses, Zuckerberg said, and the device is tethered wirelessly to a small “puck.” The prototype uses a wristband component to pick up on users neural signals and let them control the Orion glasses using their brains. That technology stems from the company’s 2019 acquisition of CTRL-Labs.
Orion enables users to play games, multi-task with multiple windows and videoconference with people around the world represented by a realistic avatar, Zuckerberg said.
Meta’s Orion prototype comes a week after Snap announced its fifth-generation Spectacles AR glasses. Those thick-framed glasses will only be made available to developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for one full year if they want to build AR apps for the device.
This isn’t the first time Meta has publicly revealed a prototype of future devices or research projects to signal to investors and employees where VR and AR technology is headed. The Orion glasses are an improvement on Project Nazare, the prototype smart glasses that Zuckerberg announced in 2021, when the company changed its name from Facebook.
Meta does sell a pair of glasses with a built-in camera in partnership with EssilorLuxottica called Ray-Ban Meta, which start at $299 and were announced in 2023. While these glasses don’t have any displays, they do have tiny speakers that allow the device to play music or interact with Meta AI, the company’s voice assistant.
As part of Wednesday’s event, Meta announced new Meta AI features for its Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Use cases
For example, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses will be able to detect when a user is looking at a sign in Spanish and, if asked, can translate in the user’s ear, a new improvement, Meta said. The camera can scan QR codes, and it can also extract information like book titles out of photos it takes.
Another new capability for the glasses is the ability to remember facts like where the user parked.
Li-Chen Miller, the vice president of product in charge of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, said that she uses the glasses to take photos of her hotel room door, and later, she asks Meta AI to recall the number.
Those features will become available “later this year,” the company said.
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have sold more than 730,000 units in their first three quarters, according to market researcher IDC. In July, Zuckerberg told investors that they were “a bigger hit sooner than expected.”
Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced that they had extended their partnership to develop more smart glasses.
