Meta unveils AR glasses prototype Orion, Zuckerberg’s ‘time machine’ to future

MENLO PARK, California – Facebook owner Meta Platforms showed off its first working prototype of augmented-reality (AR) glasses, called Orion, during its annual Connect conference on Sept 25, as the California company sketched out its aspirations for products that would bring the virtual world into the real one.

“This is the physical world with holograms overlaid on it,” Meta’s chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said after pulling out the chunky black glasses from a metal case dramatically brought to him onstage.

“For now, I think the right way to look at Orion is as a time machine,” he said. “These glasses exist, they are awesome and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.”

Meta also showed off new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot capabilities for its services and a new Quest mixed-reality headset. Meta shares registered a record closing high on Sept 25, up 0.9 per cent at US$568.31.

The Orion glasses are made of magnesium alloy and powered by custom silicon designed by Meta. Users will be able to interact with the glasses through hand-tracking, voice and wrist-based neural interface. Meta plans to work on making it smaller, sleeker and more low-cost before releasing it to consumers later on, Mr Zuckerberg said.

Big Tech has been developing AR devices for years, although the most notable ones have been failures, such as Google’s Glass spectacles.

Mr Zuckerberg positioned AR technology as a sort of magnum opus when he first pivoted the world’s biggest social media company towards building immersive “metaverse” systems in 2021. Delivering products, however, has been hampered by high development costs and technological hurdles.

Mr Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, said there was no doubt of Meta’s aspiration to make virtual- and augmented-reality products as mass-market and affordable as possible. But he added that users were “still wary of AI” and needed some convincing.

Meta aims to ship its first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, by which point technical breakthroughs should bring down the cost of production, a source said before the event.

Mr Zuckerberg did not demonstrate Orion’s capabilities directly during his announcement, instead playing a video showing how people reacted to the device when they tried it. The video showed a few glimpses of text messages and images displayed through the glasses, and the CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang was prominent among the testers.

The closest thing to the prototype currently is the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which initially inspired little interest but caught on in 2023 after Meta added an AI assistant. Meta announced AI enhancements to those glasses in 2024, making it possible for users, for example, to scan QR codes and stream music from Spotify in response to voice prompts.

Later in 2024, the company plans to add video-generation capabilities and the ability to perform real-time language translation between English and French, Italian or Spanish. Mr Zuckerberg held a live conversation with Mexican mixed martial arts fighter Brandon Moreno demonstrating the language tool, in which the glasses spoke translations from English to Spanish and vice versa.

Tens of billions spent

Meta also announced a raft of other new product offerings for its ChatGPT-like chatbot, as well as plans to start automatically injecting personalised images created by the bot into people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds.

Among the AI updates announced was an audio upgrade to the digital assistant, called Meta AI, which will now respond to voice commands and offer users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities including actress Judi Dench and actor John Cena.

“I think that voice is going to be a way more natural way of interacting with AI than text,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

The company said more than 400 million people are using Meta AI monthly, including 185 million who are returning to it weekly.

In keeping with its strategy of sharing the AI models powering its digital agent for mostly free use by others, Meta released three new versions of its Llama 3 models, although it withheld the models from the European Union in light of regulations there.

Meta also announced an entry-level version of its Quest line of mixed-reality headsets, the Quest 3S, which will start at US$300 (S$385), and cut the price of the Quest 3 introduced in 2023.

The company has been ploughing tens of billions of dollars into its investments in AI, AR and other metaverse technologies, driving up its capital expense forecast for 2024 to a record high of between US$37 billion and US$40 billion.

Its metaverse unit Reality Labs lost $8.3 billion in the first half of 2024, according to the most recent disclosures. It lost $16 billion in 2023. REUTERS