Meta Orion hands-on: if this is a prototype the finished product is going to be incredible

Living up to the the AR hype

· TechRadar

Features By Lance Ulanoff published 11 October 2024

(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

I didn’t want to love it. My plan for my first Meta Orion AR glasses experience was to dispassionately try them and quickly identify the highlights, shortcomings, and pitfalls of this not-ready-for-primetime mixed reality product. But I can’t do that because I enjoyed every bit of it, almost to the point of giddiness.

Let’s back up for a minute.

Meta Orion AR glasses made their global debut just weeks ago at the Meta Connect Conference on the face of company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The live demo raised eyebrows for its build, image quality, eye and gesture tracking, and smart Meta AI integration.

Orion looked like everything Google once hoped Google Glass could be and, honestly, everything Apple Vision Pro should be today.

The look like fat glasses (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

I read some of the early hands-on' with interest and some jealousy. I’ve been trying AR, VR, and mixed-reality headsets, and smart glasses for well over a decade, and I sensed a tipping point in Orion. Even so, I assumed it couldn’t be that good. If Meta wasn’t ready to release it to the public, Orion had to be more experiment than product and the utility would be limited at best.

Meta invited me to its New York headquarters this week to wear and try Orion for myself. Since I first heard of them, it seemed like a long road to get to this moment, but to be fair, Meta’s traveled far further.

You can bend some at the hinges, but I never fully collapsed them (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

The Orion project started inauspiciously five years ago with a massive headset that was attached to a heavy backpack (see the progression below). Meta VP of Wearable Devices Ming Hua, who is also leading the Orion team, told me the joke at the time was that you had to be very strong to work on AI glasses.

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