Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed the future of wearable technology to the world at Meta Connect 2024 when he unveiled Orion, the world’s first truly augmented reality glasses.
Zuckerberg told the crowd this is something that they have been working on for 10 years and then debut him to the public along with a video showing creators testing out the Orion glasses and having their absolute minds blown by how incredibly powerful clear, crisp light, and useful the glasses are. What’s funny to me as I was just having a conversation about this two days ago with a friend who previously worked at Facebook and he was speculating when Meta will announce truly the augmented reality classes to the world, and I personally speculated that we were still several years off. As it turns out, I was way off.
Well, they aren’t available to the public yet and were debuted to us in the crowd at Meta Connect 2024 strictly as a prototype, but Meta has rolled them out to individual creators and select audiences so they can begin to learn how the public interfaces with these glasses and where they can begin to improve.
They discussed how nailing the design of turning these into looking like actual sunglasses was one of the biggest hurdles because something is powerful would typically need a full headset so being able to pack such powerful technology into a pair of sunglasses was a hurdle they at one point thought they would never be able to achieve.
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The demo video shows how you were able to truly set up digital workspaces with browsers against the wall, where you can have one screen displaying everything you might need within a work monitor on one wall you could have your entertainment on another wall you can be pinching and swiping, and literally interfacing with the real world as the neuralink element comes into play with a bracelet that you wear around your wrist, which interfaces with the Orion glasses.
Ultimately with the Orion holographic glasses is doing is fusing the 2-D world with the 3-D world. Then by adding in an AI element to everything you have a literal Jarvis at your command. Meta says “they seamlessly integrate contextual AI that can sense and understand the world around you in order to anticipate and proactively address your needs” and “they enable digital experiences that are unconstrained by the limits of a smartphone screen. With large holographic displays, you can use the physical world as your canvas, placing 2D and 3D content and experiences anywhere you want.”
Meta believes one of the driving goals of the company is to make life easier and more connected for everybody and it’s hard to imagine a product that could do that better than these Orion glasses where you can feel as if you’re right next to someone you love and might be on the other side of the world. There’s no substitute for being in the presence of the ones we love the most but at times when we have to be away there’s truly nothing quite like this.
For a full rundown on the announcement, visit Meta’s website here.