Meta's biggest reveal at last week's Connect conference was definitely the Orion prototype AR glasses, which the company says it's been working on for about five years. This is important not only because it is compact, but also because Meta has said it wants to eventually turn the prototype into a consumer product.
You may have caught our high-profile coverage of the Orion headset here, but our friend Norman Chan tested I sat down with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to try the glasses and learn about the Orion project. Typically, it dives deep into the headset's intriguing technical details. You can check out his full video below, or scroll down to see a summary of the technical details Chan learned from his demo and chat:
Although the Orion is not ready for mass production, Meta says it plans to produce around 1,000 units for internal testing. At a claimed cost of $10,000 for each prototype, that's a cool $10 million of hardware that the company will spend to get enough devices that it can test and develop at a reasonable scale.
Orion glasses weigh only 98 grams; which is just under the 100 gram threshold that Meta believes is important to making something that truly looks and feels. glasses in its place glasses. For comparison, classic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses weigh around 30 grams, while Meta's own Ray-Ban smart glasses weigh around 50 grams. So the Orion AR glasses could reasonably be called glasses, but they are still oversized.
Still, when you consider that the Orion packs many of the same core capabilities as Meta's own Quest 3 headset, it's incredibly light at 100 grams; five times It is heavier at 515 grams.
In addition to the new silicon carbide lenses we heard about, which help the glasses achieve a large (for their size) 70° diagonal field of view, Orion also uses MicroLED projectors that are not only small but also super bright. Meta says they can produce hundreds of thousands of nits of brightness. It's very important to start with such a bright light source because it's a complex optical path that loses a lot of light along the way. You will only be seeing 300-400 nits when it reaches your eyes.
This is slightly brighter than your average VR headset, but it's still far from bright enough to be used outside on a bright day. For reasonable outdoor usability you'll need around 3,000 nits. This means that if Orion wants to be something people will wear outside their homes, Meta will have to find a brighter light source or reduce the inefficiency in the optical path.
As for resolution, Chan says the main Orion demo has a resolution of 13 pixels per degree, which is a bit of a surprise. Since AR glasses generally have a smaller field of view than their VR counterparts, they often gain an advantage in PPD because the available pixels are spread over a smaller area. But even with its 70° field of view, the Orion only has half the PPD of the Quest 3 (25PPD).
However, Meta was apparently also promoting a similar Orion prototype that was 26 PPD, but this came at the expense of image brightness. The company told Chan that its goal was to achieve a resolution of 30 PPD by the time Orion became a viable product. This is still a long way from the 'retina' resolution of 60 PPD, but it should be enough for the headset to be useful for text-based work.
One of the most interesting details from Chan's interview was the way the Orion glasses implemented eye tracking.
Like other headsets, this technique involves illuminating the eye with an array of infrared LEDs, then pointing a camera at the eye to reverse engineer the eye's position based on the visible reflection of the IR LEDs. Usually IR LEDs are placed in a ring around the lens, but Chan noted that Orion places absolutely tiny LEDs directly in the user's field of view, i.e. above the lens.
To make it all invisible to the user, the wires powering the LEDs are arranged in an almost random pattern; so you can easily make a mistake like a piece of hair on the lens.
A random pattern is less eye-catching than a clearly defined pattern (the basis of many optical illusions). Between the random pattern, the thinness of the wires, and their proximity to the eye, Chan said they are nearly invisible when viewed through the lens.
It was also stated that the 'computing disk', which takes most of the processing work from the glasses, uses a special Wi-Fi 6 protocol to communicate with a range of up to 3 meters.
The proprietary protocol is claimed to focus on 'pulsing' data on disk (rather than broadcasting it continuously) to reduce both heat generation and power consumption. We can imagine this as a packet-like approach where, instead of constantly communicating from disk to cup, outgoing information is collected over a discrete time period before being packaged and transmitted.
While the drive is fairly large and is said to have “all-day” battery life, the glasses themselves can currently run for up to three hours; essentially the same battery life you'd expect from a standalone VR headset.
Compared to research prototypes shown by Meta in the past, Orion is designed not just to give people a glimpse into the experience the company eventually wants to deliver. Orion is more of a preview of a product that Meta is actively developing.
The company says it still plans to make the glasses smaller, higher resolution and more affordable. So far, Meta says it expects the final consumer version of Orion to be available before 2030 and be priced around $1,500.
There's a lot more detail in Chan's video than we've covered here! Check out the full video if you want to hear it all.