At Meta Connect 2024, the company unveiled its first augmented reality (AR) glasses, named Orion. These innovative glasses feature silicon-carbide architecture, enabling holographic projections of various sizes to integrate seamlessly with the physical environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted that Orion will include AI voice assistance, hand tracking, eye tracking, and a wrist-based neural interface, allowing users to control functions with brain signals. The Meta Orion appears poised to replace smartphones in the future, as it enhances real-world visuals with advanced AR capabilities, unlike the earlier Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The Orion can be likened to the face computer seen in Marvel’s Iron Man, boasting the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form factor to date. It supports high-level tasks previously unseen, such as multitasking across windows, large-screen entertainment, and life-size holograms—all while blending digital content with the user’s physical surroundings. Meta emphasizes that these glasses are lightweight and versatile, making them suitable for indoor and outdoor use, facilitating face-to-face interactions even from a distance.
A standout feature is that Orion resembles regular glasses in both appearance and comfort, featuring transparent lenses that allow for visibility of others’ eyes and expressions, unlike traditional mixed-reality headsets.
Integrated with Meta AI, Orion can understand your environment and provide useful visualizations. For instance, you can look into your refrigerator and ask for recipe suggestions based on its contents or video call a friend while updating a family calendar as you wash dishes.
Orion also enables hands-free video calls, keeping you connected through WhatsApp and Messenger for messaging and notifications. With the introduction of Meta Orion glasses, users can perform tasks without needing to pull out their phones—like letting a friend know they’ll be late for dinner—directly through their glasses.
