It’s 2030. You wake up, and instead of reaching for your phone, slip on sleek smart glasses. Throughout the day, you interact with a powerful AI assistant that uses the glasses to prep you with useful information, seamlessly merging your physical and digital worlds. Using advanced display technology, it projects holograms directly into your field of vision. Sounds exciting?
This is what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted five years ago while announcing the AR glasses. On track with the projection, smart glasses are expected to replace phones by 2030 and become the next major computing platform.
At Meta Connect this year, Zuckerberg unveiled a range of new tech, including the $300 Quest 3S VR headset. However, the real highlight was Project Orion, a pair of AR smart glasses.
Many companies have attempted to create AR glasses, but the results have often been bulky or tethered by cables. Meta’s Project Orion stands out by avoiding these issues. Despite all the high-end technology packed into the frame, these hologram-generating glasses almost resemble regular eyewear, bearing a striking similarity to Meta’s Ray-Bans.
The Orion glasses pack in a host of features like eye-tracking, hand-tracking, voice controls, and even a neural interface, although it reads signals from your wrist rather than your brain.
The glasses also come with a wireless compute puck that resembles a sleek power bank. While they don’t require a laptop or phone to operate, the puck must be within a few feet for them to function, which means you’ll likely need to carry it in your pocket.
Several publications tested the advanced hardware at the event. CNBC said the holograms “felt totally normal and very natural” thanks to the high-quality displays.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, renowned for his AI advocacy, got a chance to try on the Orion glasses. “The head tracking is good, the brightness is good, the colour contrast is good, and the field of view is excellent,” he said enthusiastically.
Some of the reactions after $META unveils it's first AR holographic headset "Orion". $NVDA Jensen Huang included in their reaction video. pic.twitter.com/aAn8rvkzNM
— Financial Berg (@FinancialBerg) September 25, 2024
Where Are We Heading?
Coincidently, Zuckerberg has returned at a busy time for Meta, which continues to expand its reach in the tech industry.
While Google Glass may have been an expensive failure for tech giant Google, it was a valuable case study for the rest of the tech industry. It taught the developers a lot about what people do not want, and those insights were instrumental in shaping the current crop of smart glasses.
To make matters worse, it also did appear like a prop from ‘The Matrix’, whereas most of today’s smart glasses have a much more low-key design. This helps wearers avoid being stigmatised as modern-day “glassholes” trying to film others without their consent (even if it doesn’t actually stop this from happening).
Meta envisions that within the next ten years, up to 2 billion people who wear regular glasses will transition to the smart ones, with even those who don’t need thema medically, eventually adopting them.
While the smart glasses market is growing, there’s still no guarantee that the device will ever become mainstream, let alone replace smartphones as our go-to personal gadget. While the industry is still searching for its “killer app” – a feature that would allow people to access everything with just one tap – this might be the one thing Google got right about smart glasses with Google Glass.
Zuckerberg’s ‘normal-looking glasses with a camera, microphone and great audio that can stream video and capture content without a display’ is Ray-Ban Meta, which was jointly developed by Meta and Ray-Ban. However, he noted that AI was the most important feature for smart glasses and described Ray-Ban Meta, which has access to Meta AI, as ‘on the way to building a complete holographic pair of glasses’.
However, as impressive as Orion may appear, the company has admitted that this specific model will never reach the consumer market. The estimated production cost of the glasses is around $10,000 per unit, which is prohibitively expensive for consumer sales.
The CEO indicated that substantial work is required to make the glasses commercially viable and affordable for the average consumer. “It may be really difficult to make normal-looking glasses that can do holograms at an affordable price but you can now get normal-looking glasses with a camera, microphone, and good audio that can stream video and capture content, even if they don’t have a display,” Zuckerberg said.
He also emphasised that the technical hurdles involved in developing AR glasses capable of delivering a seamless experience are immense. These challenges include creating a compact form factor while integrating features like holographic displays and interactive capabilities.
Meta’s team believed there was less than a 10% chance of successfully achieving their ambitious goals when they began this project nearly a decade ago.
Currently, the glasses are a prototype available only to Meta employees and select partners, not slated for consumer release. They envision that future iterations could potentially be available by 2027, contingent on technological advancements that lower production costs and enhance functionality.
For now, they are focusing on internal development and demonstrating the technology rather than rushing to market with an unready product.
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