Meta shared some big updates for its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses during the Meta Connect keynote, but it also revealed a prototype for a future product: fully holographic AR glasses. After almost 10 years of work, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off his team’s first fully functioning prototype, named Orion. Described as “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen,” the Orion frames are genuinely very close to just being a normal pair of glasses, which is something even many of the current best smart glasses don’t achieve.
In fact, for people who like chunky statement glasses, they’re not even too big as they are — though Meta says it plans on further developing the design to make it a bit “smaller and more fashionable” before bringing the product to market. To meet their goals, the team behind Orion had to develop a prototype that was — first and foremost — a pair of glasses. That meant no headset, no wires, a weight of less than 100 grams, a wide field of view, and holographic displays that were sharp enough to pick up details and bright enough to see in different lighting conditions.
On top of all that, the wearer needed to be able to see through the glasses, and people around them needed to be able to see the wearer’s eyes through the lenses. The result is a display that 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 worki.
