Meta desperately tries to make smart glasses the new smartphones

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed out on making the smartphones that primarily delivered those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to position itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is going all in on computers for your face.

At its annual Connect developer event today in Menlo Park, California, Meta showed off its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S Virtual Reality (VR) headset and its improved, AI-powered Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. But the headliner was Orion, a prototype pair of holographic display glasses that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said have been in the works for 10 years.

Zuckerberg emphasized that the Orion glasses, which are available only to developers for now, aren’t your typical smart display. And he made the case that these kinds of glasses will be so interactive that they’ll usurp the smartphone for many needs.

“Building this display is different from every other screen you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on stage at Meta Connect. Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth had previously described this tech as “the most advanced thing that we’ve ever produced as a species.”

The Orion glasses, like a lot of heads-up displays, look like the fever dream of techno-utopians who have been toiling away in a highly secretive place called “Reality Lab” for the past several years. One reporter on the ground noted that the thick black glasses looked “chunky” on Zuckerberg.

As part of the on-stage demo, Zuckerberg showed how Orion glasses can be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of someone, respond quickly to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messages example, Zuckerberg noted that users won’t even have to take out their phones. They’ll navigate these interfaces by talking, tapping their fingers together, or by simply looking at virtual objects.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that there will also be a “Neural Interface” built in, like the one that was built into these glasses a while ago, that can interpret brain signals, using a wrist-worn device that Meta first teased three years ago. Zuckerberg didn’t elaborate on how any of this will actually work or when a consumer version might materialize but I’ve been seeing Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) being built into glasses and also patches for a while now. He also didn’t get into the various privacy complications of connecting this rig and its visual AI to one of the world’s biggest repositories of personal data.

He did say that the imagery that appears through the Orion glasses isn’t pass-through technology, where external cameras show wearers the real world, nor is it a display or screen that shows the virtual world. It’s a “new kind of display architecture,” he said, that uses projectors in the arms of the glasses to shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect light into the wearer’s eyes and create volumetric imagery in front of you. Meta has designed this technology itself, he said.

The idea is that the images don’t appear as flat, 2D graphics in front of your eyes but that the virtual images now have shape and depth.

“The big innovation with Orion is the field of view,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who was in attendance at Meta Connect. “The field of view is 72 degrees, which makes it much more engaging and useful for most applications, whether gaming, social media, or just content consumption. Most headsets are in the 30- to 50-degree range.”

To call this holographic display concept “new” isn’t totally accurate. Snap has similarly used projector and waveguide technology in its Snap spectacles. The heavily hyped mixed-reality company Magic Leap also attempted to pioneer waveguide technology. Even small startups like North, which couldn’t sustain itself and was eventually sold for parts to Google, have attempted to build their own custom projector and waveguide technology into stylish glasses.

Meta spokesperson Bryan Pope said in an email that the display in Orion is “unlike any other Augmented Reality (AR) glasses product attempted to date as far as we know.”

Pope said the lenses are made from silicon carbide, not glass, which has a “high refractive index” and contributes to Orion's relatively wide field-of-view (along with its intricate waveguide technology.) The projectors in Orion also use newer, uLED technology, which is supposed to be more power-efficient.

Meta hasn't put a price tag on the product, either what it will cost developers to acquire a pair and build on it or what something like this might eventually cost consumers. For now Orion is still a pie-in-the-sky experiment, a product that Zuckerberg described as a “time machine.”

“These glasses exist, they are awesome, and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting,” he said.

But Orion also drives Meta’s stake deeper into the mixed-reality ground, where massive hardware makers like Apple and Samsung and social competitors like Snap have all tried to make their mark. Apple’s strategy has been very Apple-y, releasing a $3,500 VR headset that emphasizes high-tech optics, impressive design, and Apple’s own software ecosystem, while Snap has taken a similar approach to Meta’s Orion by releasing an arguably cool but mostly inaccessible pair of holographic glasses for developers to toy with.

Meta, on the other hand, has been able to position itself well in the popular consumer market by offering more accessible VR devices, like the entry-level, $300 Meta Quest 3S and the inherently more wearable Ray-Ban Meta glasses and sunglasses. According to recent data from Counterpoint Research, Meta’s VR headsets account for about 80 percent of the total VR market. Meta hasn’t shared total unit sales numbers of its Ray-Ban glasses, but its product partner, EssilorLuxottica, recently said it had sold more pairs in the past few months than in the two years prior.

Sales of these face computers pale in comparison to global smartphone sales. (Certain AI features in Meta’s smart glasses also are banned in some parts of the world, like Europe, which puts a damper on revenue.) And there’s no saying if, or when, Meta will be able to bridge the projection technology it has built for Orion with the light, plasticky, popular eyeglass frames that people can wear every day.

Meta has also spent tens of billions of dollars over the past four years trying to make this Reality Labs vision a … reality.

The Orion glasses may never actually exist, especially in its brain-signal-interactions form. But Meta doesn’t need them to. It just needs enough of that tech to trickle down into its mainstream products that they become part of everyday life the same way smartphones once did. And, if all goes Mark Zuckerberg’s way, ultimately replace them.