Reality has been so lousy recently that companies keep trying to augment it to make it better. War, disease and misinformation but with ads and turn-by-turn directions poured directly into your eye holes? What's not to love?
Nothing, according to the social media/online habit brokers at Meta.
Recently, the company brought a choice circle of tech reporters to their HQ in Menlo Park, California for a taste of their latest experiment with augmented reality. They're calling it Orion. Shaped like a pair of Ray-Bans that got swole at the gym, these AR glasses were, according to The Verge, supposed to be on sale by now. However, Meta pumped the brakes on their release: Orion was deemed too complicated for consumer use. Given that Meta makes Facebook's privacy function hard to wrangle, that's saying a lot.
Orion boasts a 70-degree field of view, which is wider than any pair of AR glasses I've tried to date. In my experience, a narrower field of view causes AR to feel small and less immersive, like you're looking through a peephole. With Orion, I had to get pretty close to virtual objects before their edges started to disappear.
At 98 grams, the glasses weigh significantly more than a normal pair but also far less than mixed reality headsets like the Meta Quest or Apple's Vision Pro. The frames are made of magnesium, which is lighter than aluminum and used for evenly distributing heat.
Seven cameras embedded in the frames are used to anchor virtual objects in real space, assist with eye and hand tracking, and allow Meta's AI assistant to understand what you're looking at. You can leave a virtual window open, turn your head and walk away, and as long as the glasses stay on, it'll still be there when you come back.
The Verge
This all sounds promising. However, as The Verge's Alex Heath points out, much of what he experienced while testing Orion was carefully curated by the Meta AR team and the Meta-Kahuna, Mark Zuckerberg. However, as we mentioned earlier, Orion is a little bit finicky. Currently, the face computer doesn't require a smartphone to operate. It relies on a wireless module sized to stuff into a pocket or purse and a wristband that tells the AR glasses what to do by registering the movement of your muscles. It's pretty sweet… until you get too far away from the wireless module, and the whole work shuts down. Carrying a smartphone, wearing a pair of glasses, a wristband (maybe in addition to a smartwatch), and carrying a wireless hub? That's a lot of gear. It's no mystery why Meta declined to release the hardware in its current form–especially when you consider that what Meta wants the most is for their glasses to one day supplant the place smartphones currently have in our lives.
If you're looking forward to a future that includes augmented reality, think of Orion as a step in the right direction. If you loath the notion of AR, rejoice: it'll be a spell before we have to worry about it permeating our culture.
