Meta Orion AR glasses have taken us one step closer to Marvel’s E.D.I.T.H.

Meta announced years ago that it was developing a pair of smart glasses, and while the tech giant has collaborated with Ray-Ban to create the Ray-Ban Meta glasses over the past few years, it didn’t quite explore the full vision Meta had for these products. To fix that, Meta has now launched the Meta Orion Augmented Reality glasses.  

The glasses bring a lot of new capabilities, including a neural wristband that can be used to control things through gestures. Here’s everything you need to know about the Meta Orion AR glasses.

Meta Orion AR Glasses: What’s new?

While we’ve had AR glasses for years now, the challenge has always been to make them as compact and minimal as real spectacles. The Meta Orion is the closest we have reached to that point. The glasses look like a regular pair of glasses, albeit with a chunky frame, and have no protruding components like a battery pack. 

ALSO READ: Meta AI comes to India on Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram 

This is done by miniaturising a lot of the components, and Meta says most of the key components of the Orion are packed down to “a fraction of a millimetre.” The glasses also come with a neural band that recognises one-hand palm and finger gestures to navigate around the AR elements.  

Unlike conventional AR and VR devices like Apple Vision Pro, the Meta Orion is not just compact and light, but also lets the glasses, function like glasses. What this means is both the user and the people on the other end can see each other when the glasses are in action.

Apart from pulling life-size holograms on your wall, the Meta Orion is also equipped with Meta AI. This lets the glasses look at the physical world in front of the user and understand commands better. This lets users do things like open up a refrigerator while wearing the glasses and ask for recipes with the available ingredients.  

Meta also announced some future plans in the AR space, which include tuning the AR display to make the visuals even sharper, optimising the form factor to make the glasses even more compact, and building at scale to make the form factor even smaller.