Meta Orion AR Glasses
Hardware is exciting again.
Few times I’ve been really excited by hardware to the point that I felt like I saw the future with my own eyes. (Note: This is strictly based on my own personal experience and not saying these are the pinnacle moments of technology.)
These were:
- The launch of the Nokia 3210, finally realizing that everyone will eventually have a phone in their pocket. It was just the right size: you can actually fit it in your pocket being the first mass market phone with an internal antenna. The design was just expressive and curvy enough to warrant style, reminiscent of other devices at the time like the Walkman and the G-Shock, and yet it was robust and sleek. It might not have had the apps we think of today, but it made T-9 as a typing mechanism that changed communications behavior and ushered in SMS to the mass market. This was also my first cellphone. I still get a very nostalgic feeling when I see an image of the 3210. Being in a Nokia store in the early 2000s felt like being at a sports car dealership; the marketing met the product, and the experience elevated the brand.
- The iPhone 3GS, arguably the first fully-fledged version of the iPhone. This was met with lukewarm reception but this was the first iPhone with things we consider basic features now like cut, copy, and paste functionality, MMS support, and video recording. Its predecessor the iPhone 3G was the first iPhone to have GPS and it was released alongside the App Store. By the time 3GS came out, it finally felt like this was what a smartphone really ought to be: have access to 3rd party developer applications which can integrate the phone’s native features making it have a natural synergy between software and hardware. The iPhone 5 is a work of art from a form basis, but the 3GS was the first phone to really push Apple’s domino into smartphone dominance.
- Being inside a Tesla Model X for the first time was an experience. The falcon wings opening gloriously, the large display at the center console with a futuristic interface unlike anything I’ve seen before, the smoothness of the ride. It wasn’t perfect: it was raining and water went in the car a lot when the doors were open. The interior felt lackluster in comparison to everything else. But seeing it on Autopilot in the highway that felt like it was gliding on pavement was something else. All of a sudden, the future in Minority Report where all cars were self-driving felt like it was inevitably near and not something that was still a century away. We’re still waiting for that future, but it’s only a matter of time.
There’s a common pattern to these devices:
- they’re used everyday,
- they’re a glimpse into what the future can be, and
- there’s a harmony with the hardware & the software.
Seeing the demo of Meta Orion glasses, I felt that same feeling. Obviously I haven’t seen or used one in person but instantly I wanted to see all the videos for it. It’s not close to being ready in the market and that may still be a few years away, but I love the bet (which is now more than a decade-long) that Zuck is taking on with it. It’s both strategic but also fits well with their ethos:
Form factor still matters.
Maybe Google Glasses were onto something even if they were really really, but they looked utterly geeky and there was no real application for it. Meta’s bet is that being able to wear glasses everyday as if they’re just a part of one’s natural way of life is the real differentiator. They leverage their Ray Ban partnership and understand that to make something mass market, it ought to feel cool, just like the 3210, the iPhone, and the Model X. Granted it still looks on the thick side, but nowhere close to any other AR device. And time will only make these smaller thanks to Moore’s Law. Making the compute unit external is genius so as to not put everything on the device itself allowing it to still be what it actually is: a pair of glasses.
They can be used everyday by everyone.
This is what the Vision Pro and Snap Spectacles are missing. Fantastic devices with fantastic technology. And they can very well also be used everyday—except they’re not designed to be ubiquitous. The Orion feels like it can seamlessly blend in someone’s life, not something to take you out of it. It was genius the move the compute out of the device itself. Sure you may still need to carry it around, but it’s so much better than having all of that on your actual head.
If there’s something Meta knows how to do, it’s create products that are used everyday, multiple times a day, and maybe most importantly, be able to use it with others. Meta does not do any single purpose products—everything is designed to use and keep you in the network.
It’s about hardware and software.
Really cool to see Meta work on something ambitious in hardware the same time they’re investing heavily in Llama, their family of large language models. Zuck has been very outspoken about being overly reliant on the smartphone manufacturer (and they’ve even attempted creating one of their own). It’s clear they want to move away from this and set their own fate. While imperfect, seeing the AR glasses work with AI by suggesting a smoothie to make based on the ingredients one is looking at is pretty amazing. You can extrapolate how useful this can be, with applications we’ve never even thought of before because it’s a totally new interface. Here, eye tracking and body movement interpreted by electromyography is how you navigate.
Just like the hardware I mentioned above that got me really excited the first time I saw them, the Meta Orion meets the same criteria: they can be used everyday, they’re a glimpse into what the future can be, and they promise harmony of hardware & software perhaps in a way we’ve never seen before.
So what’s next?
As a designer, this gets me hyped because it means there are just new worlds to design. The past two decades have been mostly designing towards flat surfaces relegated to scrolling functions and buttons, both physical and in the graphical user interface. AR presents something that’s totally paradigm shifting. There may still be buttons in that future, but what is the “computer” like when vision, audio, movement are seamless? What is it like when you’re interacting with super fast AI in real-time whose response to you is also via vision, audio, and movement?
Our worlds are about to change. If we thought the PC, the Internet, and the smartphone were game-changing, we’re entering an era when the speed of advancement in these technologies will be eclipsed. We’ll have the bandwidth, the network, the processing power, and eventually the hardware all working in unison to do things we never even thought before.
It’s a new era. Buckle up.
September 27, 2024