Thematic Spotlight: Meta’s Orion Glasses Augment Reality

Last Wednesday, Meta surprised the tech world as it revealed a slew of new innovations at its annual Connect conference. The company made impressive hardware updates for its ‘Quest’ VR headsets and announced a new version of the Ray-Ban smart glasses, but the true showstopper was the announcement of ‘Orion’ – Meta’s new take on augmented reality (AR) glasses.¹

What is AR? Paraphrased, Meta defines it as the ability to have digital experiences that are unconstrained by screens and uses the physical world as a canvas.² For Orion, this means lenses that can display text messages, host calls and project YouTube videos onto the user’s field of vision – all while looking like and also functioning as normal, albeit slightly thick-framed glasses. To interact with the projections, in-ward facing cameras track eye movements to guide user controls, while a high-tech wristband which senses nerve stimulation enables ‘clicking’ or ‘scrolling’ with just finger movements.

Meta’s experimental glasses are the culmination of a decade of expensive, and at times painful, investment and development.³ But unfortunately for tech enthusiasts, the company has chosen not to release Orion to the public just yet.⁴ Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, says that while the technology is one of the most polished product prototypes the company has ever developed, they still see the final iteration as possibly a decade away.⁵ Eventually, it is the hope of the company that Orion will be thin and powerful enough that consumers will be compelled to switch from traditional platforms such as the smartphone. For now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg simply pitches the glasses as ‘a glimpse of a future that is going to be pretty exciting’.⁶

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