Meta is starting to hype up its first true AR glasses
Meta's first true AR glasses prototype will go above and beyond the expectations set by existing products, says Meta's Caitlin Kalinowski.
Androidcentral spoke with Kalinowski, who leads the development of Meta's AR glasses hardware and "Project Nazare," Meta's first full-fledged AR glasses.
According to Kalinowski, the wearable surpasses the expectations of existing products and has a wow factor similar to that of the Oculus Rift a decade ago.
The hardware designer suggests that Project Nazare will have a larger field of view than comparable AR products, and that Meta's AI breakthroughs have allowed it to reduce the size of the cameras and compress the tracking data, reducing the power requirements of the AR glasses.
Meta's first AR glasses must impress
More than half of Meta's VR/AR investment has gone into developing AR glasses, and Meta could show the fruits of this labor this fall at the Connect 2024 conference.
According to a report by The Information, Meta's first true AR glasses, codenamed Orion, will be an internal demo device with a run of 1,000 units, not a product intended for sale. The reason is said to be the exorbitant manufacturing costs. The first commercial AR glasses product, codenamed Artemis, will reportedly follow in 2027 at the earliest.
Therefore, Meta seems to want to sell the vision of an upcoming AR glasses first. After a decade, this is urgently needed to justify the high development costs.
So far, there is little official information about Orion, and Kalinowski's comments could be the start of a PR campaign. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth stoked the hype in late 2023 when he described Meta's first AR glasses as possibly "the most advanced thing that we’ve ever produced as a species [in the domain of consumer electronics]."
Managing expectations
Meta needs to be careful about the expectations it raises. For more than a decade, the industry has been predicting true lightweight AR glasses, but that vision has not materialized. Meta can't solve all the immense technical challenges with Orion. At best, it can push the boundaries of what is possible today in some areas.
The real challenge will be to turn the prototype from Meta's labs into a reasonably affordable product, which will take many years.
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