Five Years in the Making: Introducing Orion AR Glasses
Five years ago, we announced our vision of building AR glasses, driven by the belief that people shouldn’t have to choose between having information at their fingertips and staying present in the physical world.
Today, we’re excited to unveil Orion, which we believe to be the most advanced AR glasses ever created. Orion bridges the gap between the physical and virtual worlds, placing people at the center so they can stay more connected, present, and empowered in their surroundings.
Why Augmented Reality Glasses?
There are three core reasons why AR glasses represent the next significant leap in human-oriented computing:
- Expanding Beyond the Smartphone Screen
AR glasses enable digital experiences that aren’t limited by the small display of a smartphone. With large holographic displays, you can turn the physical world into your canvas, placing 2D and 3D content and experiences anywhere you desire. - Seamless Integration with Contextual AI
These glasses incorporate AI that can sense and understand your environment, anticipating your needs and addressing them proactively in real time. - Lightweight and Versatile
Designed for both indoor and outdoor use, Orion AR glasses are lightweight and allow for natural face-to-face interactions, preserving the ability to see each other’s faces, eyes, and expressions.
The North Star of AR Innovation
Our industry’s north star has always been to create a product that merges the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a large display, high-bandwidth input, and contextual AI, all in a form that people feel comfortable wearing every day.
The Evolution of Smart Glasses
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses showcased the power of giving people hands-free access to their digital lives while staying rooted in the physical world. With these glasses, users can interact with a smart AI assistant, connect with friends, and capture important moments—all without ever needing to reach for their phone.
While Ray-Ban Meta introduced a new category of display-less glasses supercharged by AI, the dream of the XR industry has always been true AR glasses: a product that combines a large holographic display and personalized AI assistance, all packaged into a comfortable, all-day wearable form. Orion rises to meet this challenge.
Groundbreaking AR Display in a Revolutionary Form
For years, we’ve been working to miniaturize the spatial experiences offered by VR and MR headsets into a pair of lightweight, stylish glasses. The journey has been one of overcoming immense technical hurdles—nailing the form factor, delivering holographic displays, developing immersive AR experiences, and creating new human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms—all within a single cohesive product.
The challenge was so daunting that at one point, we believed we had less than a 10% chance of success. But today, Orion stands as a triumph of miniaturization. We managed to reduce the components to fractions of a millimeter, with dozens of innovations required to deliver a sleek design you can comfortably wear every day.
Orion features the largest field of view ever seen in AR glasses, unlocking truly immersive experiences. Whether multitasking with floating windows, enjoying big-screen entertainment, or interacting with life-sized holograms, Orion seamlessly blends the digital with the physical world around you.
But what makes Orion unique is that it is unmistakably a pair of glasses in both look and feel – complete with transparent lenses. Unlike MR headsets or other AR glasses today, you can still see other people’s eyes and expressions, so you can be present and share the experience with the people around you.
Augmented Reality Experiences
Of course, as with any piece of hardware, Orion is only as good as the things you can do with it. And while it’s still early days, the experiences afforded by Orion are an exciting glimpse of what’s to come.
We’ve got our smart assistant, Meta AI, running on Orion. It understands what you’re looking at in the physical world and can help you with useful visualizations. So you can open up your refrigerator and ask for a recipe based on what’s inside. Or video call a friend while adjusting a digital family calendar as you wash the dishes.
You can take a hands-free video call to catch up with friends and family in real time, and you can stay connected on WhatsApp and Messenger to view and send messages. No need to pull out your phone, unlock it, find the right app and let your friend know you’re running late for dinner – you can do it all through your glasses.
Our teams continue to iterate on the experiences available through Orion today to build new immersive social experiences, and we can’t wait to share what’s next.
A Purposeful Product Prototype
While Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: this is not a research prototype. It’s one of the most polished product prototypes we’ve ever developed, and is truly representative of something that could ship to consumers. Rather than rushing to put it on shelves, we decided to focus on internal development first, which means we can keep building quickly and continue to push the boundaries of the technology, helping us arrive at an even better consumer product faster.
What Comes Next
Beginning today at Connect and continuing throughout the year, we’re opening up access to our Orion product prototype for Meta employees and select external audiences so our development team can learn, iterate and build towards our consumer AR glasses product line, which we plan to begin shipping in the near future.
And now that we’ve shared Orion with the world, we’re focused on a few things:
- Tuning the AR display quality to make the visuals even sharper
- Optimizing wherever we can to make the form factor even smaller
- Building at scale to make them more affordable
In the next few years, you can expect to see new devices from us that build on our R&D efforts. Orion isn’t just a window into the future – it’s a look at the very real possibilities within reach today. From Ray-Ban Meta glasses to Orion, we’ve seen the good that can come from letting people stay more present and empowered in the physical world, while tapping into all that the digital world has to offer.
