Meta Orion – The Future Pulled Forward to Today
To ground this perspective, we need to embrace that a glasses form factor is the end goal for any company serious about wearable, head computers (whatever we end up calling them). I think often people have missed that for Apple the Vision Pro is a stepping stone to a glasses form factor. What Apple did with Vision Pro was come to market with the best possible experience at a price point that is suited for early adopters, developers, and even corproate customers. No one credible belives Apple believes Vision Pro is a mainstream product. In fact, Tim Cook clarifies this in a recent article with the Wall Street Journal.
“I’d always like to sell more of everything, because ultimately, we want our products to be in as many people’s hands as possible,” he says. “And so obviously I’d like to sell more.” But there’s a limit to the number of faces this version of the Vision Pro will be on. “At $3,500, it’s not a mass-market product,” Cook says. “Right now, it’s an early-adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today—that’s who it’s for. Fortunately, there’s enough people who are in that camp that it’s exciting.” – Tim Cook
Anyone who has tried Apple Vision Pro knows that some part of the future exists in that product. We just aren’t sure what part yet, but the fact that customers and developers can use Vision Pro to experience a part of the future today is a significant milestone in developing a category.
While we don’t know yet how much of a market there will be for fully immersive mixed reality headsets in the future, these devices, which include Meta’s Quest, are crucial parts of the iteration process.
Meta’s Journey
For me, what has been the crux of my mental model for Meta is whether or not they could pivot, or evolve, into a hardware company. This is no insignificant challenge, but it is one Meta has been investing in for many years, which includes growing a team of hardware engineers capable of developing things that turn into viable consumer experiences.
It turns out Meta’s hardware has become quite good. A few years back, we ran our proprietary product experience benchmark, called the Delight Scale, on Meta’s Oculus headsets. To our surprise, the product scored quite well, and we discovered Quest owners were, on average, quite pleased with the overall experience of the Meta Quest.
By all accounts, Meta’s hardware team has proven quite capable, and the pinnacle of that, for now, is certainly Meta Orion. During a briefing I had with Ming Hua, VP, Wearable Devices, and Dan Katz, Product Manager, Wearable Experiences, they showed me the evolution of Orion. As any engineer will tell you, it takes many iterations and grinding on product development to achieve a vision for a product experience. Hardware is HARD, as anyone with experience will tell you. The challenge to miniaturize computers is incredibly challenging, as the below visual of Orion’s iterations will demonstrate.
Miniaturizing key components is going to be the challenge facing everyone who aspires to get to a glasses form factor but, for now, a key decision for Meta was to offload the compute to the puck pictured above.
Custom Components
That puck runs a Qualcomm SoC as well as a custom designed discrete GPU made by the growing silicon team at Meta. In fact, Orion includes numerous custom pieces of silicon designed in-house at Meta. Which just goes to show how much delivering on the experience product designers have requires the ability to customize almost every key component when we are in the early stages of a category. But I’d also go out on a limb and say that more and more companies who will compete in mainstream consumer computing in the future will rely more and more on some level of custom silicon in order to differentiate their solutions.
As interesting as the custom silicon elements of Orion are, the optics and display are equally interesting. In fact, it is the display/lens technology that I feel will be most difficult for any company with ambitions in AR to develop in a way that is scalable and affordable. The glasses feature Micro LED projectors inside the frame that beam graphics through waveguides embedded in the silicon carbide lenses. The system specifically uses diffractive waveguides with complex nano-scale 3D structures to bend light and deliver images to the user’s eyes. Silicon carbide was also chosen due to its high refractivity, which is a key reason Meta could get up to ~70 degrees FOV with Orion. I asked Ming Hua, VP, Wearable Devices, during our meeting if ~70-75 FOV is about the max we can expect on a glasses form factor and she agreed. This makes sense given a pair of glasses only extends out to ~80 degrees total and due to the physical design simply won’t extend farther into your peripheral vision.
The Experience
My thoughts on the experience with Orion are in line with nearly everyone else who has taken the demo and shared their thoughts. Had Apple’s Vision Pro not existed, this would have been easily the most amazing thing I have experienced technologically. But while Apple Vision Pro is the best mixed reality experience I have used to date, Meta Orion is the best augmented reality experience I have used to date.
Because Orion is in a physical glasses form factor, with clear lenses, there is no virtual pass through to the real world required like there is on Quest and Vision Pro. While my first impressions with Vision Pro were it was the highest fidelity pass through I have experienced in a mixed reality headset the fact that no pass through video of the world is requried in an AR glasses experience just ups the ante. With AR glasses the real world in all its high fidelity is preserved and graphics simply layered onto it.
From a visual perspective, I’d say the graphics quality was impressively rich and maybe just a bit shy of the graphical quality of Quest, with just a bit more pixelation. I was able to experience a video call in the demo of both a live video and an avatar representation, and both were high quality from a graphics standpoint. Games had quality graphics, with limited pixelation. Overall, the visual quality of the AR graphics experience was impressive, and it will only get better.
The wristband, which is central to the neural interface, was fascinating. The wristband detects the current in your muscles that react to your brain giving a signal for an action. I asked if it was theoretically possible to use this technology and not even have to move your fingers or use gestures, and Ming Hua said that it was. I had zero issues using the neural wristband, and it worked flawlessly for all the gestures needed to navigate and use Orion.
The eye tracking was spot on. If you have used an Apple Vision Pro, the eye tracking on Orion is as good, as responsive, and as accurate. Between the eye tracking and the neural band, I easily played interactive games that required precise eye tracking, in this case to pilot a spacecraft, and use the finger pinch gesture to shoot objects with near zero latency.
Lastly, the feel of the hardware was impressive. The glasses were so light that at times I forgot I was wearing them. Comfort is critical to get consumers to wear these for long periods of time, and Meta is on the right track having achieved a level of comfort that can easily be worn for long periods of time today.
Looking Forward
The Meta team was clear: they want to get to a consumer product that is affordable for the mainstream. For Meta, that means pricing something like a high-end smartphone, which would be in the $1000-$1500 range. They have quite a task ahead of them to get to this price point, and a good mix of innovation and invention is required to get there.
That said, I had been waiting for the best-of-breed augmented reality experience that I could try to confirm my broad thesis that this is going to be something someday. And I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, there is a future for AR glasses. While it will take many more years to get there, Orion represents an inflection point moment in AR development – the first time we can see the true potential of AR in a form factor that could feasibly become a mainstream product.
Right now, the battle is on between Apple and Meta to court developers to take their vision of the future seriously. This isn’t just a technical race – it’s a race to build the next major computing platform. The winner of this battle won’t just lead a new product category; they’ll shape how we interact with computing for the next decade or longer.
The battle for developers is on, and while Apple and Meta are currently leading the charge, the stakes couldn’t be higher. We’re witnessing the early days of what could become as transformative as the smartphone revolution – a shift that will redefine the boundaries between our digital and physical worlds. For developers, the opportunity to help shape this future is now. For consumers, the promise of truly useful, wearable AR is finally on the horizon.