Meta's head of AR Glasses Hardware claims they are saying the same thing: “Oh my God, wow! I can't believe this!” response like the original Oculus Rift.
The claim comes from an interview Caitlin Kalinowski gave to Android Central. Kalinowski previously served as head of VR hardware for consumer Oculus Rift, Oculus Touch, Oculus Go, Rift S, Oculus Quest, Quest 2 and Quest Pro. Two years ago, she moved to head of AR glasses hardware.
It's unclear whether Kalinowski's comment refers to the original Oculus Rift developer kit, which demonstrated more than 10 years ago that VR with a relatively wide field of view was possible with affordable and mass-produced hardware, or to the first consumer Rift released in 2016 launched. Either way, it's clear that Kalinowski means here that trying out Meta's AR glasses is just as mind-blowing as trying out good VR for the first time.
Kalinowski didn't reveal any specific details about the glasses other than saying they offer “high field of view immersion.”
The demonstrator or the final product?
What's also unclear is whether Kalinowski is referring to the AR glasses demonstrator hardware that Meta may plan to demonstrate at Connect later this year, or the downgraded product it reportedly plans to bring to market in 2027.
Meta has been working on AR glasses and spending money on them for at least eight years tens of billions of dollars about the project that Mark Zuckerberg hopes will one day give him an “iPhone moment.” The company has repeatedly talked about its intentions to bring AR glasses to market since 2017, and in 2021 it revealed that its efforts called Project Nazare.
But in 2022 Alex Heath from The Verge reported that Meta no longer plans to release its first AR glasses, codenamed Orion, as a real product. Instead, Heath wrote, Meta will distribute them to select developers in 2024 and also use them as a demonstration of the future of AR.
Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth seemed to confirm Heath reports in an interview with Heath in December. Bosworth said the glasses “may be the most advanced [consumer electronics device] that we have ever produced as a species,” so much so that they are “built on a prohibitively expensive technology path” that is not suitable for a real product.
Meta could demonstrate a real AR glasses prototype in 2024
Meta hinted that it could demonstrate a “priceless” prototype of true AR glasses in 2024. “In consumer electronics, this could be the most advanced thing we've ever produced as a species.”
This also seemed to confirm the report by Wayne Ma of The Information last year. Ma reported that the Orion prototype glasses use microLED displays and silicon carbide waveguides.
MicroLED is a truly new display technology, but no company has yet figured out how to affordably mass-produce it with decent resolution. It is self-emitting, just like OLED, meaning pixels output both light and color and do not require a backlight, but are more energy efficient and can theoretically achieve much higher brightness. This makes it ideally suited for glasses that need to be usable on sunny days and still need to be powered by a small and light battery. In 2019, Facebook all future production is secured from a start-up supplier, but Ma reported that the companies have still not been able to achieve high production efficiency, meaning they can only produce a small number of displays at a high cost.
The silicon carbide waveguides are also proving to be challenging to purchase. The material can provide a wider field of view than the glass waveguides used in current transparent AR headsets, but is also incredibly expensive. Furthermore, Ma's report explained that because the material is used in military radars and sensors, the US government imposes strict export controls on it. That means glasses that use them must be assembled in the US, significantly increasing production costs, despite most production and components coming from China and Taiwan.
Meta is reportedly downgrading key specifications of AR glasses
Meta is reportedly lowering key specifications of its in-development AR glasses to achieve lower costs. Full details here:
To ship AR glasses as an actual mass-produced product, Ma reported that Meta will use this degraded components: LCoS displays and glass waveguides.
LCoS displays are essentially LCD microdisplays, although they use reflection instead of transmission to form an image. LCoS is not a new technology; it has been used in projectors since the 90s, as well as in AR products such as HoloLens 1 and Magic Leap 2. They are less energy efficient and less bright than microLED could be, but much less expensive in the short term.
While the silicon carbide waveguide in the Orion glasses can reportedly achieve a field of view of approximately 70° diagonally, the glass waveguide in the actual product will only have a field of view of approximately 50° diagonally, such as HoloLens 2 and Nreal. We sharply criticized the field of view of both Hololens 2 And Nreal light in our reviews of each product. By comparison, opaque headsets that use camera passthrough have a field of view well greater than 100 degrees diagonally.
Ma reported that the goal is to ship this AR glasses product around 2027. Of course, it is possible that this plan has changed in the months since the report.
| Orion prototype | Consumer product | |
| Introduction | 2024 | 2027 |
| Availability | Select developers & Meta-staff |
Consumers (at high price) |
| Displays | MicroLED | LCoS |
| Waveguides (Field of view) |
Silicon carbide (70° diagonal) |
Glass (50° diagonal) |
These reductions reflect broader industry issues in the struggle to bring compelling transparent AR glasses from the realm of science fiction to real-world products. Reportedly Apple has postponed its full AR glasses “indefinitely” last year, and reportedly Google killed his internal glasses project to create the software for third parties instead.