Meta’s biggest reveal at last week’s Connect conference was definitely the Orion AR glasses prototype, which the company says it has been working on for nearly five years. That’s a big deal not just because of its compactness, but because Meta says it wants to turn the prototype into a consumer product.
You may have caught our top-notch coverage of Orion headphones here, but our friend Norman Chan from Tested I got to sit down with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to try out the glasses and learn about the Orion project. In typical form, it digs deep into the headphones’ intriguing technical details. You can watch his full video below or scroll further down to get a summary of the technical details Chan learned from his demo and conversation:
While Orion isn’t ready for mass production, Meta says it’s planning to build about 1,000 units for internal testing. With an assumed cost of $10,000 for each prototype, that’s $10 million worth of hardware that the company will shell out to get enough devices to do testing and development at a reasonable scale.
The Orion glasses weigh just 98 grams, which is just under the 100 gram threshold that Meta believes is important to make something that really looks and feels eyeglasses rather than eyeglasses. For comparison, classic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses weigh about 30 grams and Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses weigh about 50 grams. So the Orion AR glasses might reasonably be called glasses, but they’re still big bois.
However, 100 grams is incredibly light when you consider that the Orion packs most of the same core features as Meta’s Quest 3 headphones, which is more than five times heaviest at 515 grams.
In addition to the new silicon carbide lenses we’ve heard about, which help the glasses achieve a wide (for their size) 70° diagonal field of view, Orion also employs MicroLED projectors that are not only small, but super bright. Meta claims they can output hundreds of thousands of nits of brightness. It is essential to start with such an intense light source because it is a complex optical path that loses a lot of light along the way. When it reaches your eyes, you will only see 300-400 nits.
It’s a little brighter than your average VR headset, but it’s still far from bright enough to use outdoors on a bright day. You would need around 3,000 nits for reasonable outdoor usability. That means Meta will have to find a brighter light source, or reduce inefficiency in the optical path, if it wants Orion to be something people will wear outside of the home.
As for resolution, Chan says the main Orion demo has a resolution of 13 pixels per degree, which is a bit of a surprise. Since AR glasses often have a smaller field of view than their VR counterparts, they usually gain an advantage over PPD because the available pixels are distributed over a smaller area. But even with a 70° field of view, the Orion only has about half the PPD of the Quest 3 (25 PPD).
However, apparently Meta was also demonstrating a similar Orion prototype that was 26 PPD, but this came at the expense of image brightness. The company told Chan that its goal is to reach 30 PPD resolution before Orion becomes a proper product. That’s still far from a “retina” resolution of 60 PPD, but it should be enough to make the headset useful for text-based work.
One of the most interesting details from Chan’s interview was how the Orion glasses implement eye tracking.
Like other headsets, the technique involves illuminating the eye with an array of infrared LEDs, then pointing a camera at the eye to decode the eye’s position based on the visible reflection of the infrared LEDs. Usually IR LEDs are placed in a ring around the lens, but Chan noted that Orion places absolutely tiny LEDs directly in the user’s field of view, right on the lens.
To make everything invisible to the wearer, the wires that power the LEDs are arranged in an almost random pattern that you could easily mistake for a hair on the lens.
A random pattern attracts less attention than a clearly defined pattern (the basis of many optical illusions). Between the random pattern, the tiny thinness of the threads and the proximity to the eye, Chan said it was almost invisible when looking through the lens.
It was also mentioned that the “compute disk”, which offloads much of the processing work from the glasses, uses a custom Wi-Fi 6 protocol to communicate, with a range of about 10 feet.
The custom protocol supposedly focuses on “pulsing” data from the disk (rather than continuously streaming) to reduce both heat production and power consumption. We can imagine this to be a packet approach where instead of constantly communicating from disk to glasses, outgoing information is collected over a discrete period of time before being packaged and transmitted.
While the puck is very large and is said to be capable of “all-day” battery life, the glasses themselves can currently run for up to three hours, essentially the same battery life you’d expect from a standalone VR headset.
Compared to the research prototypes Meta has shown in the past, Orion wasn’t just created to give people an idea of the experience the company plans to ultimately deliver. Orion is more of a preview of a product that Meta is actively building.
The company says it still plans to make the glasses smaller, higher resolution, and affordable. And so far Meta says it expects the eventual consumer version of Orion should be available before 2030 and cost around $1,500.
There are even more details packed into Chan’s video than we’ve covered here! If you want to hear it all, watch the full video.
#Meta #Glasses #interview #delves #details #resolution #battery #life