Meta missed out on smartphones. Can smart glasses make up for it?

Meta has dominated online social connections for the past 20 years, but it missed creating the smartphone that primarily provided those connections. Now, in a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to keep itself at the forefront of connected hardware, Meta is focusing solely on the computer for your face.

At its annual Connect developer event in Menlo Park, California today, Meta unveiled its new, more affordable Oculus Quest 3S Virtual Reality Headsets and Its Better, AI-Powered Ray-Ban Meta Smart GlassesBut the main attraction was Orion, a prototype pair of holographic display glasses that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said has been in the works for 10 years.

Zuckerberg stressed that Orion Glasses—which are currently only available to developers—are not your typical smart display. And he argued that such glasses would be so interactive that they would replace smartphones for many needs.

“Making this display is different from every other screen you’ve ever used,” Zuckerberg said on the Meta Connect stage. Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth had previously said This technique was described “This is the most advanced thing we’ve ever created as a species.”

The Orion glasses, like so many heads-up displays, look like the fever dreams of techno-utopians who have been toiling away for the past several years in a highly secretive space called the “Reality Lab.” A WIRED reporter on the ground noted that the thick black glasses looked “chunky” on Zuckerberg.

As part of the onstage demo, Zuckerberg showed how the Orion glasses could be used to project multiple virtual displays in front of someone, quickly respond to messages, video chat with someone, and play games. In the messaging example, Zuckerberg said users wouldn’t even need to take out their phone. They could navigate these interfaces by talking, tapping their fingers together, or simply looking at virtual objects.

It will also create a “neural interface” that can interpret brain signals using a device worn on the wrist Meta was first teased three years ago. Zuckerberg didn’t go into detail about how exactly this would all work or when a consumer version might materialize. (He also didn’t address the various privacy implications of connecting this rig and its visual AI to one of the world’s largest personal data repositories.)

He said the images seen through the Orion glasses are not pass-through technology — where external cameras show the real world to wearers — nor is it a display or screen that shows a virtual world. He said it’s a “new kind of display architecture” that uses projectors in the arms of the glasses to shoot waveguides into the lenses, which then reflect light into the wearer’s eyes and create volumetric imagery in front of you. He said Meta designed this technology in-house.

The idea is that images no longer appear as flat, 2D graphics in front of your eyes, but rather virtual images now have shape and depth. “The biggest innovation with Orion is the field of view,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moore Insights & Strategy, who was in attendance at Meta Connect. “The field of view is 72 degrees, which makes it much more engaging and useful for most applications, whether it’s gaming, social media or just consuming content. Most headsets are in the 30 to 50 degree range.”