My First Dive Into Meta’s Orion AR Glasses And Neural Wristband video [CNET]

Self-contained, with eye tracking, wireless connections, and a wrist-worn neural input sensor, this is the most futuristic thing I’ve ever worn that you can’t buy yet.

Tony Stark style air glasses with an emg neural wristband sensor. Yeah, I was wearing Metas Orion, I’ll tell you about it. So somewhere between the VR headsets that we’ve got now and the smart glasses like meta ray bands, we keep thinking about the future of A R glasses. And I got to look at meta’s Moonshot of an idea that it’s been working on for a while. Orion which are fully self contained A R glasses. There are other companies pursuing this, not a ton that actually have physical product. I looked at snaps, spectacles which are self contained, but Orion goes for a higher standard, especially in terms of the field of view. Orion’s uh got a magnesium frame and the glasses look closer to everyday glasses. But the goal is to get even closer still. I mean, they still look super thick. Um they look artsy but they don’t look as large as snaps not to compare, but I glasses also have a 70 degree field of view. Now, if you’re a person who’s not following the A RVR side, that may not mean anything to you. VR headsets have a larger field of view than that. But what it meant when I looked at things was that it was like this and it meant that objects did not feel like they were leaving my field of view. A lot of things like magic, leap snaps glasses and others usually have a cut off and this cut off felt nearly invisible. I got to interact with things on the glasses, with eye tracking, with hand tracking with my voice and also with a neural input emg sensor on my wrist. Meta has been exploring this technology for years, but we haven’t seen products that have adopted it. It’s a wristband that has built in electronics into the fabric and has sensors that stayed pretty snug to my wrist and it could sense electrical impulses in my muscles that converted into motions. Now, if you’re used to gesture tracking on, maybe even your watch or headsets, this is a little more advanced than that. You can do taps. You can also do little thumb swipes. I got to see Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago, demoing this tech um at Meta’s reality labs research. Now I’m getting to wear it and the band is smaller and everything in this package is wireless. So the band’s wireless, there’s also a processing puck. So it’s not totally in the glasses, but that’s also wireless with two Qualcomm processors inside and a battery that meta claims will last all day along with the wristband. But the glasses will last about 2 to 3 hours. That’s pretty similar to what VR headsets right now can do. So when I was able to do those gestures, I felt like I was flipping around through Instagram videos while I was flipping around through Instagram videos, liking them with taps, looking around to open up chats with people chatting with somebody’s Kodak Avatar, which again is how meta is going to explore much like Apple’s personas, a 3d realistic version of you that will appear when you connect on phones or VR headsets or whatever it looks good. And I got to play a few games. I got to play this game where I was piloting this little starship around using my head motions using eyes to look at different Meteors and explode them with my fingers. And we played a two person pong where I looked at a QR code on the table to center it and then spread up this super cool retro arcade thing where I was using my hands to play pong across the room with one of Orion’s uh creators. So that was pretty fun. Did I see that there were rough points? Sure, because this product is not actually meant for anyone in the real world yet. This is something that’s being used internally met is working to update the resolution on the micro OLED displays to something even higher because that field of view can power a lot of pixels. There’s also going to be work in making the glasses slimmer and more affordable. The goal is supposed to be something in the range of a laptop or a high end smartphone. So that’s a lot more maybe than the VR headset you have, but less than something like an Apple Vision Pro or another high end industrial mixed reality headset, something like Hololens. In the meantime, you might see a lot of this tech start emerging in other places, meta has plans to work on that EMG wristband in other future products, maybe you’ll find it built into other wrist wear and wearable mixed reality headsets are exploring ways to blend the real world and the virtual and glasses like meta ray bands are looking at A I and multimodal A I which uses the camera to see the world and give you feedback, the glasses and the demos I saw also use multimodal A I quite a bit. I was able to look at a bunch of ingredients and ask what’s a recipe for that and it popped up some suggestions uh next to it and identified what the ingredients were. However, by the time Orion becomes a product that actually goes on sale in years to come, the apps and the experiences might evolve even more and peripherals that I could do more. I mean, I’m starting to do more work in a VR headset at home. And, you know, years before I didn’t think I would be doing that funnily enough though, you know, one thing you have to think about is prescriptions and glasses wars. Eventually these will have prescription support for the moment. I had to demo it, uh, without my glasses, but luckily I got to wear a pair of contacts that were apparently Mark Zuckerberg. So, um, that was a convenient thing. So I got to look at it at very near my prescription. Um, and I, I guess that’s Mark’s prescription and I got to see a lot of the glasses things and, uh pretty crisply and the experience was generally good and sometimes a work in progress and it made me think of the ray bands. It made me think of meta’s headsets. It made me think of where else a I could develop and it made me wonder who else is gonna be working on this and how soon and when can we start playing with this in our own everyday world questions that we won’t know for a while, but we got a peek at where the future is heading and I wanna try more. Thank you for watching.