Zuckerberg just pulled a pair out of a suitcase brought out to him onstage at Meta Connect. He calls them “our first fully functional prototype” and the “most advanced AR glasses the world has ever seen.”
I’ve got a deep dive on Orion you can read and watch below, which includes a demo I did with Zuckerberg last week. And here’s my full interview with Zuckerberg that just dropped on Decoder.
Meta’s CEO on his first pair of AR glasses, partnering with Ray-Ban, why he’s done with politics, and more.
Orion is an impressive demo of AR glasses, but can Mark Zuckerberg beat everyone else to the next big platform?
At Meta Connect, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Quest VR headset users will be able to connect to Windows 11 PCs just by looking at their keyboard — much the same way Apple’s Vision Pro can do that when you look at a MacBook.
Here’s a gallery of pics from the presentation.
A Reddit user posted an off-screen video of a certainly real-looking ad for Meta’s leaky Quest 3S VR headset, as reported by UploadVR.
The ad puts a $299.99 price tag on the 128GB model, which seems affordable compared to the Quest 3 that launched at $500.
Here at Snap’s annual Partner Summit in Santa Monica, he’s asking for suggestions from the audience as he generates AR effects with AI while wearing a pair. (You can read my full impressions of the hardware here.) Bring back more live tech demos like this, please!
Will developers finally help Snap take AR glasses mainstream?
I’m here at Snap’s annual conference in Santa Monica where the company just announced its biggest redesign to Snapchat in years. You can read more about that below. They keynote is still going and I hear there’s some other big news coming, so stay tuned for more.
The “Quest 3S,” which Meta could sell without controllers, is slated to debut at Meta Connect on September 25th and 26th and could be priced at $300 or $400, writes Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
The company is also expected to show its advanced Orion AR glasses concept at the event.
In the Apple Vision Pro, that is. Disney Plus has rolled out a National Geographic edition virtual environment for its visionOS app that lets you watch movies in a snowy corridor in Iceland’s Thingvellir National Park.
The environment uses “3D models captured on-site using photogrammetry,” according to Disney’s announcement. When you watch a movie, it turns dark and shows you the Northern Lights!
Apple has released Lake Vrangla, one of two Vision Pro Environments that have spent months marked “coming soon,” and boy is it moody.
So what is Lake Vrangla? Well, it’s a small lake roughly 25 miles west (as the crow flies) of Oslo, Norway. You can see it fog-free on YouTube. Seems pretty!
Whatever this “Vision for you” is, the silhouette HTC shows at the end looks very pointedly Vision Pro-like, while also looking like it fits into the HTC Vive Focus 3 design mold.
The video hints at “a new kind of power.” Perhaps it involves that new Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 headset chip with 4.3K-per-eye resolution support, which Qualcomm said it’s working with HTC (among others) on.
Demos on this Meta blog show how the company will implement its promise to bring AI to its VR headsets. Like the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, you can ask it questions about things you see (in passthrough), and it will answer.
The experimental feature rolls out in English next month, in the US and Canadia (excluding the Quest 2).
An eagle-eyed Threads user spotted the glasses in a photo posted by Mark Zuckerberg in April, with the Meta CEO replying that more details will be shared “later this year.”
That checks out with Zuckerberg recently teasing that Meta was “almost ready” to reveal a prototype. Rumor has it Meta is planning to demo its “Orion” augmented reality smart glasses at Meta Connect in September.
The once-high-flying AR startup laid off its entire sales and marketing division this week, or about 75 people, several sources tell me. (Amazingly, Magic Leap had about 1,100 full-time employees before this.) The new strategy, sources say, is to become a component vendor for other companies looking to build their own headsets.
New Magic Leap CEO Ross Rosenberg didn’t respond to my request for comment on the cuts, but a company spokesperson told Bloomberg they were done “to better align with market dynamics and emerging opportunities.”
I’m now convinced of that after adding one using the free Dock Pro app. Now, some of the Vision Pro apps I use most (along with time and battery percentage) are just right there, waiting. Adding third-party apps is tricky and involves finding app URL schemes, though.
Don’t get me wrong; I like the hand flourish to open apps in the visionOS 2 beta. But sometimes, a dock is just better.
The Verge’s Adi Robertson already wrote about her experience with Distance Technologies’ prototypical heads-up display at Augmented World Expo. It’s nowhere near road-ready — it’s too dim, and the eye-tracking-driven stereoscopic 3D effect can be buggy, laggy, and tiresome.
Yet, for purely aesthetic reasons, I love the sci-fi future feel of this video from her time with it.
