Facebook parent Meta has revealed a prototype for a future product: fully holographic Augmented Reality (AR) glasses. Nearly a decade in the making, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a working prototype, named Orion, at the Meta Connect keynote this week. The company says it plans on further developing the design to make it a bit “smaller and more fashionable” before bringing the product to market.
It says that Orion weighs less than 100 grams, has a wide field of view, and holographic displays that are sharp enough to pick up details and bright enough to see in different lighting conditions. The display doesn’t use passthrough — what the wearer sees is the real physical world with holograms overlaid onto it. These holograms might be a cinematic screen, a desktop window for working, a game, a little app window for replying to messages, or even a hologram version of the person you’re on a call with.
The display’s screen isn’t made of glass, but of silicon carbide and uses tiny projectors in the arms of the glasses that “shoot light into waveguides that have nano-scale 3D structures etched into the lenses that can refract light” and “put holograms of different depths and sizes in the world in front of you.” The frames are made of magnesium to keep the glasses light and to radiate heat away instead of using a fan. Zuckerberg noted there was a battery in the arms of the glasses, but also mentioned a “small puck” that would be used to help power the wearable.