Many of us still remember the arrival of the first mobile phone, not yet smart: the DynaTac 8000X, also known as “the brick.” Almost a kilo and about 33 centimeters long launched in 1984 at a price of about 4,000 euros. It only allowed calls to be made and the battery lasted barely an hour. We had to wait until 2001 for telephones to be able to connect to the Internet and some of them were available for a tenth of “the brick.” Something similar is happening now with Orion, the Meta project that wants to be uploaded to the iPhone.
The Orion smart glasses that the company Meta (read Mark Zuckerberg) presented this week are thicker than those normally used. At the moment, They have a price of about 10,000 euros, they will not be on sale for a while and they still have a lot to adjust… but they are the DynaTacs of the future.
All of Orion’s technology is relatively young and needs to be cheaper, lighter and more efficient. According to Zuckerberg, the company has already been working on Orion for 10 years and represents a notable change from the Quest virtual reality headsets that Meta has been pushing for years or Apple’s Vision Pro.
What we know so far about the Orion is quite brief and comes from the presentation made this week. For example, we know that control of glasses can be done using voice, as well as eye and hand tracking. Zuckerberg used the phrase “neural link” to describe another control methodbut it is actually an EMG bracelet that allows you to slide, click and scroll.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Orion glasses is the lenses, which are not made of glass or plastic. Instead, Meta uses silicon carbide where small projections are projected onto the lenses. This material is supposed to be more durable, lighter, and feature an ultra-high refractive index.
Some of the augmented reality interfaces during the presentation suggested that It is possible to view social networks, YouTube, listen to music through Spotify or check the results of sporting events.
Perhaps what would be interesting would be to compare the Orion with a current Meta product, such as the Ray-Ban Meta: a pair of glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers, sensors, some AI on the device and the ability to connect to the phone and the cloud. The Ray-Ban Meta are much simpler than the Orion, but relatively affordable at 299 euros (not much more than a normal pair of Ray-Bans).
Despite the huge differences in price and capabilities, Orion and Ray-Ban Meta are more related than you might think.
One of the things Meta is trying to master with Ray-Ban Meta is AI. Currently, smart glasses use the Llama model, Meta’s AI to answer questions about what we see, taking photographs and passing them through the system along with the user’s verbal requests. Ray-Ban Meta’s AI features today are far from perfect: latency is worse than OpenAI advanced speech modewhich gives a natural feeling. Add to that the fact that it requires very specific prompts to work correctly and doesn’t have tight integration with many apps, making it less useful than simply picking up my iPhone. But Meta updates coming later this year attempt to address these issues.
Many users have pointed out that another challenge is typing. While our phone has a keyboard, smart glasses do not. This, initially, would be a defect, but we must remember that in 2007 the former CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, laughed at the iPhone saying it wouldn’t be attractive to customers because it didn’t have a physical keyboard.
For those responsible for Orion, the lack of a keyboard would be liberating: “it would become a more natural experience than using a phone – explains Li Chen Miller, vice president of product at Meta in an interview -. You can simply talk, gesture with your hands, and look at things to navigate Orion; all things that are natural to most people”.
Will we see this future? Without a doubt and it will be very interesting.