Hands On With Meta’s New Orion Augmented Reality Glasses

This week, I became one of the few people outside Meta to try its new ‘Orion’ augmented reality glasses. The product is a technological marvel, layering computing on top of the real world in a lightweight wearable device. It’s so good — bright, smart, and fast — it makes mainstream augmented reality feel real for the first time. And while still internal to Meta, a broader release seems inevitable. 

I put on Orion for about thirty minutes at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. The device felt like a normal pair of glasses, albeit with a bit more bulk and weight than usual. Then the display came on. With a 70 degree field of view, the glasses seem like they’re appending computing on almost your entire field of vision. I used them to make video calls, watch YouTube, scroll through Instagram, and play a few games. Throughout the demo, I had to keep reminding myself that I was wearing glasses, not a VR headset. I saw right through the lenses, and others in the room could see my eyes as I used Orion’s features. 

With a device like Orion, you can see how we might soon access always-on computing discreetly, without the distracting wrist turns to look at a smartwatch, or palm turns to view a phone screen. It’s potentially disconcerting that the glasses might detach us even further from being present in real life. But Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth — in a conversation to air next week on Big Technology Podcast (Apple, Spotify, etc.) — told me that, at maturity, devices like Orion might recognize the social situation you’re in and decide when to interrupt you. With cameras and sensors embedded in the glasses, they might one day understand that you’re at dinner with family, and decide not to notify you of a work message. Your phone would never have that awareness. Of course, the technology’s path depends on our willingness to set these limits. And in our tolerance for these devices’ monitoring of our lives.

Even without that social awareness, we’ll likely adopt AR glasses once they’re good-looking and cheap enough — and publicly available. Imagine you arrive early for dinner and use the glasses to pull up a large screen TV to watch Netflix while you wait. Or, if you’re going for a walk, and speak with a friend, life size and in full hologram, with a relatively unobstructed view of the street. Or if you scour your fridge for something to cook, and have your glasses scan for ingredients and suggest what to fix up.

Many of these activities seem nice in theory in VR (or XR) goggles, but they’re more realistic with AR glasses. Goggles are bulky, obscure the eyes, and are not practical in public. (Witness anyone wearing a Vision Pro or an Oculus out of the house and you’ll understand.) But with AR glasses, the dream can be realized. The Orion team told me they thought they had about a 10% chance to develop the product successfully. But thanks to technological breakthroughs — within Meta and across the broader tech field — they pulled off a first version. Orion today can almost pass as a regular pair of glasses, though it does have an accompanying puck to handle some computing. The real challenge from here will be shrinking the device and making it cheap enough to sell at the cost of a laptop.

Should AR glasses like Orion go mainstream, we could see a new computing paradigm emerge, one that combines AI with an awareness for the real world. If you’re using the glasses to examine your refrigerator, for instance, you might not need a traditional recipe app. Or at least, you would need it less than you do today.

All manner of applications — navigation, games, productivity, entertainment — could find new expression in a world where AR plus AI becomes a prominent form of computing. These types of applications will be critical to the rise of the medium, since without them glasses like Orion might just feel like another way to use your phone.

Meta definitely has some self-interest in pushing this vision forward. The company’s been under the thumb of Apple and Android since the dawn of the smartphone age, and it’s spent billions on its Reality Labs bet, in part, to mitigate platform risk. So despite its pushing, there’s always a chance we’ve reached device maturity and the phone is the final stop along the way. Still, to give AR a chance at success, Meta needed to first build a moonshot device that long felt like technological fantasy. In Orion, it has a solid beginning.

What Else I’m Reading, Etc.

Goldman Sachs has an in-house AI pessimist [New York Times]

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is leaving [CNBC]

Other OpenAI executives followed [Techcrunch]

OpenAI’s painful transformation into a real business [WSJ]

Meta’s Ray Ban glasses will remember things for you now [The Verge]

People did not like Marques Brownlee’s wallpaper app [The Verge]

SBF and Diddy are cellmates in a Brooklyn jail [New York Times]

Reuters and newswire startup EZ Newswire ink an exclusive distribution deal [Reuters] (sponsor)

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Quote Of The Week

We have figured out how to melt sand, add some impurities, arrange it with astonishing precision at extraordinarily tiny scale into computer chips, run energy through it, and end up with systems capable of creating increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, putting humanity’s AI advances in perspective, in a new essay about the dawn of the so-called Intelligence Age

Number of The Week

24

Months in prison FTX star witness and ex-Alameda Research head Caroline Elison received in a sentence this week after her association with the crypto scam. FTX head Sam Bankman Fried got 25 years.

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