Meta is officially in the AR game. Orion is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bid to make smartphones a thing of the past. The glasses, which contain both VR and AI assistance, look nothing like the clunky offerings we’ve seen before. In fact, they almost look like a regular pair of glasses, The Verge reports.

The future’s a little freaky. Sleek black frames with micro LED projectors in the frame beam graphics into your field of vision through silicon carbide lenses — a lightweight and durable lens with an ultrahigh index of refraction. You control the glasses through a combo of eye tracking, hand gestures, voice commands, and a neural wristband that interprets brain signals triggered by your hand motion into actions. The Verge’s Alex Heath, who received a personal tour of the tech by the Zuck himself, reported that Orion “felt more precise than controlling a Quest or Vision Pro.”

The AI is nothing new. What you’ll find in Orion are the same GenAI capabilities currently available in Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, but with an added visual element. We’re not saying it’s not impressive — even Marty McFly didn’t come across AI glasses — but as cool as it is, the tech isn’t groundbreaking.

Remember, Zuckerberg wants Orion to replace your phone — so you don’t need one for it to function. But you can’t go anywhere without the puck. The wireless compute puck, which looks like a portable charger, needs to be within ~4 meters of Orion, or else the glasses simply do not function. To add insult to injury, the glasses’ battery only lasts around two hours.

Hold your horses — you won’t be grabbing a pair anytime soon. The industry hasn’t quite caught up with Zuck’s vision just yet. When the glasses were originally developed in 2022, the CEO made the decision to shelve the product in response to budget cuts, thinking that silicon carbide would be more commonly used in the near future, and therefore cheaper to include. But it isn’t, meaning that one pair of glasses costs USD 10k to manufacture.

Insider knowledge: Heath claims that Meta plans to manufacture a scaled-down version of Orion called Hypernova and get them on the shelves “as soon as next year.” The company itself has declined to comment on the rumor.

Tags: