Why Augmented Reality Glasses?
There are three primary the reason why AR glasses are key to unlocking the following great leap in human-oriented computing.
- They enable digital experiences which can be unconstrained by the bounds of a smartphone screen. With large holographic displays, you should utilize the physical world as your canvas, placing 2D and 3D content and experiences anywhere you wish.
- They seamlessly integrate contextual AI that may sense and understand the world around you as a way to anticipate and proactively address your needs.
- They’re lightweight and great for each indoor and outdoor use, and so they let people see one another’s face, eyes, and expressions.
That’s the north star our industry has been constructing towards: a product combining the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a big display, high-bandwidth input, and contextualized AI in a form that individuals feel comfortable wearing of their every day lives.
The Evolution of Smart Glasses
Ray-Ban Meta glasses have demonstrated the ability of giving people hands-free access to key parts of their digital lives from their physical ones. We can seek advice from a sensible AI assistant, connect with friends, and capture the moments that matter – all without ever having to tug out a phone.
Yet, while Ray-Ban Meta opened up a completely latest category of display-less glasses super-charged by AI, the XR industry has long dreamed of true AR glasses – a product that mixes the advantages of a giant holographic display and personalized AI assistance in a snug, all-day wearable form factor. Orion rises to the challenge.
Groundbreaking AR Display in an Unparalleled Form
We’ve been hard at work for years to take the incredible spatial experiences afforded by VR and MR headsets and miniaturize the technology mandatory to deliver those experiences in a pair of lightweight, stylish glasses.
Nailing the shape factor, delivering holographic displays, developing compelling AR experiences, creating latest human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms – and doing it multi functional cohesive product – is some of the difficult challenges our industry has ever faced. It was so difficult that we thought we had lower than a ten% probability of pulling it off successfully. Until now.
Orion is a feat of miniaturization – the components are packed all the way down to a fraction of a millimeter. Dozens of innovations were required to get the design all the way down to a up to date form that you simply’d be comfortable wearing day-after-day.
Augmented Reality Experiences
Of course, as with every piece of hardware, Orion is barely nearly as good because the things you possibly can do with it. And while it’s still early days, the experiences afforded by Orion are an exciting glimpse of what is to come back.
We’ve got our smart assistant, Meta AI, running on Orion. It understands what you are looking at within the physical world and may enable you with useful visualizations. So you possibly can open up your refrigerator and ask for a recipe based on what’s inside. Or video call a friend while adjusting a digital family calendar as you wash the dishes.
A Purposeful Product Prototype
While Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: this just isn’t a research prototype. It’s some of the polished product prototypes we have ever developed, and is actually representative of something that would ship to consumers. Rather than rushing to place it on shelves, we decided to deal with internal development first, which suggests we are able to keep constructing quickly and proceed to push the boundaries of the technology, helping us arrive at an excellent higher consumer product faster.
What Comes Next
Beginning today at Connect and continuing all year long, we’re opening up access to our Orion product prototype for Meta employees and choose external audiences so our development team can learn, iterate, and construct towards our consumer AR glasses product line, which we plan to start shipping within the near future.
We’re focused on a couple of things:
- Tuning the AR display quality to make the visuals even sharper
- Optimizing wherever we are able to to make the shape factor even smaller
- Building at scale to make them cheaper
Conclusion
In the following few years, you possibly can expect to see latest devices from us that construct on our R&D efforts. Orion is not just a window into the longer term – it is a have a look at the very real possibilities nearby today. From Ray-Ban Meta glasses to Orion, we have seen the great that may come from letting people stay more present and empowered within the physical world, while tapping into all that the digital world has to supply.
