Meta's Orion glasses swap controllers for a neural wristband — holograms in a 100g frame

At Meta Connect 2024, Meta unveiled Orion, a prototype AR system it says was nearly ten years in the making. The company's own announcement called it 'the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made': holographic displays, contextual AI and all-day wearability squeezed into a frame that weighs under 100 grams and looks like a normal pair of glasses, so the wearer can still see other people's eyes and expressions.

The interface is the daring part. Instead of controllers, Orion combines eye tracking, hand tracking and a wrist-based neural interface — a wristband that reads the wearer's nerve signals and translates them into commands. Mark Zuckerberg described the vision as glasses that can put holograms in the world for presence and multiplayer work, and are the ideal device for AI, because they see and hear what the wearer sees and hears without pulling them out of the room.

Meta's engineers were candid about the difficulty: the company said it thought it had less than a 10% chance of pulling the design off. The result — a 70-degree field of view, the largest in the smallest AR form to date — impressed the first outside journalist to try it. But at a reported $10,000 per unit, mostly in silicon carbide lenses, Orion was never going to be sold; Meta turned it into an internal developer platform to learn from and build toward a consumer product.