Meta’s big reveal at last week’s Connect conference was the Orion prototype AR glasses, which the company says it has been working on for about five years. It’s very difficult not because of the integration, but because Meta says it wants to turn the feature into a consumer product.
You may have found our top story on the Orion theme here, but our friend Norman Chan from Tested he got to sit down with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to test the glasses and learn about the Orion project. In his profile, he digs deep into the fascinating details of headphones. You can watch his full video below, or scroll down to hear a summary of the techniques Chan learned from his presentation and discussion:
Although Orion is not ready for mass production, Meta says it plans to build about 1,000 units for internal testing. At an estimated cost of $10,000 per display, that’s a $10 million investment the company will need to acquire enough equipment that it can test and develop at scale.
The Orion glasses weigh just 98 grams, which is well under the 100 grams that Meta believes is necessary to create something that looks and sounds great. glasses rather than glasses. In comparison, Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses weigh about 30 grams, and Ray-Ban’s Meta smart sunglasses weigh about 50 grams. So Orion AR sunglasses can be called sunglasses, but they’re still chunky bois.
However, 100 grams is very light if you consider that the Orion is carrying the same information as the Meta Quest 3 head, which is more. five times weight – 515 g.
In addition to the silicon carbide lenses we heard, which enable the lenses to reach a (for its size) 70 ° diagonal field-of-view, Orion also uses MicroLED projectors that are not only small, but very bright. Meta is said to be able to emit thousands of bright lights. It’s important to start with the brightest source because it’s a very difficult process that loses a lot of light along the way. When it reaches your eyes, you will be seeing only 300-400 ribs.
It’s a little brighter than your average VR headset, but still far from bright enough to use outside on a bright day. You would need about 3,000 nits for outdoor use. This means that Meta will need to get a much brighter light, or reduce the inefficiency in the light path, if it wants the Orion to be something that people will wear outside their homes.
As for resolution, Chan says the Orion’s main display has a resolution of 13 pixels-per-degree, which is pretty impressive. Because AR glasses often have smaller screens than their VR counterparts, they often have an advantage over PPD because the available pixels are spread over a smaller area. But even with a 70° field of view, the Orion has half the PPD of the Quest 3 (25PPD).
However, the Meta seems to be showing a similar version of the Orion which was 26 PPD, but it came at the price of image brightness. The company told Chan that its goal is to meet the 30 PPD resolution by the time Orion becomes a viable product. This is still far from the ‘retina’ resolution of 60 PPD, but it should be enough to make the headset useful for writing.
One of the most interesting things from Chan’s talk is how Orion’s glasses are used for eye tracking.
Like other headsets, the method involves illuminating the eye with a series of infrared LEDs, then pointing a camera at the eye to re-engineer the eye’s position based on the IR LEDs. Usually the IR LEDs are placed in a ring around the lens, but Chan noted that Orion places the LED chips directly in the user’s field of view – right on the lens.
In order to make everything invisible to the owner, the wires that run the LEDs are arranged randomly so that you can easily make a mistake like a little hair on the lens.
A random choice is less attractive than a clear image (the basis of many visual effects). Between the unchanging shape, the thinness of the wires, and the closeness to the eye, Chan said it was all invisible when looking through the glass.
It was also reported that the ‘compute puck’, which downloads many functions of the glasses, uses the Wi-Fi 6 protocol to connect, with 10 or more points.
The conventional protocol focuses on ‘streaming’ data from the puck (rather than just downloading it) to reduce heat generation and power consumption. We can think of this as a packet-like process where instead of continuous communication from puck to glasses, the outgoing information is collected over time before being packaged and transmitted.
Although the puck is quite large and is said to last an “all-day” battery, the glasses can run for up to three hours – essentially the same battery life you’d expect from a stationary VR headset.
Compared to the prototypes shown by Meta in the past, Orion is not only designed to show people what the company wants to offer. Orion is a preview of something Meta is rapidly developing.
The company says it still plans to make smaller, better, and cheaper glasses. And so far Meta says it expects the future version of the Orion to be available before 2030 and cost somewhere around $1,500.
There’s more packed into Chan’s video than we’ve covered here! If you want to hear it all, watch the full video.
#Meta #Glasses #Questions #InDepth #Details #Stability #Battery #Life