13 interesting facts about Meta's Orion AR glasses

In three blog posts, Meta explores the technology behind the Orion AR glasses. Here are some of the most interesting findings.

Orion are full-fledged AR glasses and the first product prototype in this device category that Meta has presented to the public. It offers a field of view of about 70 degrees in a glasses-like form factor, making it unique in the world.

The company made it clear at the presentation last fall that Orion is not intended for commercialization. The manufacturing costs of around $10,000 are simply too high. However, a first, more affordable product in this category is planned for the next few years.

The AR glasses were presented together with an external compute puck, and an EMG wristband that captures neural signals on the wrist and translates them into control input for the AR glasses.

Developing all of these technologies required a lot of innovation, which Meta covered in a three-part blog series last week. The articles cover the compute puck, the custom silicon, the microLED projectors, and the silicon carbide waveguides. The interesting EMG wristband is not part of the blog series.

I have read the 6,000-word article series and compiled some interesting facts and findings from it.

The compute puck

Fact 1

The external unit contains a high-capacity battery and a Meta-designed SoC that performs most of the processing for the AR glasses. It also provides a wireless connection to Orion and the EMG wristband. Without the puck, AR glasses would not be possible in this form factor.

Fact 2

The Puck is said to be smaller than an average smartphone, but more powerful thanks to a custom-designed co-processor.

Fact 3

In the early days of Meta's AR research, the puck was a band worn around the neck and connected to the AR glasses via a cable. The research team's innovations in wireless communication made it possible to eliminate the wired connection.

Fact 4

The Puck can be placed on a table and has built-in sensors and cameras that can film the user for AR video calling. The person you are talking to appears as a hologram above the Puck. "The user experience feels a bit like unleashing a genie from a bottle, where holograms seamlessly emerge from and dissolve back into the device," says industrial designer Emron Henry.

Fact 5

The team also experimented with haptics and 6DoF sensors that allow the puck to be used as a spatially tracked controller, for example to play AR games.

Custom silicon

Fact 6

Meta (then still Facebook) has been developing custom silicon for AR glasses since 2017, and Orion uses several of these high-efficiency processors. The goal was to reduce power consumption by a factor of 100. To achieve this, many aspects of the hardware and software had to be optimized for each other during development. “Building the ship as it sails out of the harbor—that was exactly what we were doing,” says Advanced Technologies Strategy Director Jeremy Snodgrass.

Fact 7

Meta's silicon team was also responsible for the AR display's two microLED projectors, which use a silicon substrate. The development of these projectors was extremely complicated because the design and fabrication process were customized. The blog post describes: "The microLEDs have a global footprint, originating in one spot and then transferred to another site where they were put onto a wafer. The wafers were then shipped off to be cut into a particular shape, followed by a trip to the US to be bonded together with another wafer, then shipped back across the globe for the actual module to be built and tested. It was an enormously complicated process, and the silicon team developed test vehicles to prove out each step."

Fact 8

Orion doesn’t allow the user to take photos with its RGB cameras, but the silicon is capable of supporting it, as well as codec avatars.

The waveguide display

Fact 9

Orion uses silicon carbide instead of glass or plastic for the waveguides. The advantage of silicon carbide is its high refractive index of 2.7 (compared to a maximum of 1.8 for glass), the highest refractive index known for optical applications. This allows a field of view of about 70 degrees without the need to stack multiple waveguides.

Fact 10

Other advantages of silicon carbide over glass-based optical systems are that it virtually eliminates rainbow artifacts and has excellent thermal conductivity. Both are essential for AR glasses.

Fact 11

Silicon carbide is best known for its electrical properties and is used in electric vehicles and other applications. It is green and can even be black and completely opaque in a particularly thick form. According to Meta, the Reality Labs team was the first to even attempt moving from opaque silicon carbide wafers to transparent ones. And because silicon carbide is one of the hardest materials known, diamond tools are needed to cut or polish it, increasing manufacturing costs.

Fact 12

Meta developed a proprietary etching technique to fabricate the waveguides. "We were the first ones to do slant etch directly on the devices,” says Research Manager Nihar Mohanty. “The whole industry used to rely on nano imprint, which doesn’t work for substrates with such a high refractive index. That’s why no one else in the world had thought about doing silicon carbide." Meta set up its own facility and production pipeline to manufacture silicon carbide-based waveguides.

Fact 13

Orion costs about $10,000 to make, and the silicon carbide waveguides are by far the most expensive component. Meta hopes to reduce costs over the next decade as more manufacturers produce the optical material.

"Orion proved that silicon carbide is a viable option for AR glasses, and we’re now seeing interest across the supply chain on three different continents where they’re heavily pursuing this as an opportunity," says Director of Research Science Barry Silverstein. "Suppliers are very excited by the new opportunity of manufacturing optical-grade silicon carbide—after all, each waveguide lens represents a large amount of material relative to an electronic chip, and all of their existing capabilities apply to this new space."

Want to find out more? Here are links to the three blog articles

• Zero to One: How Our Custom Silicon & Chips Are Revolutionizing AR
• Orion's Compute Puck: The Story Behind the Device that Helped Make Our AR Glasses Possible
• Crystal Clear: Our Silicon Carbide Waveguides & the Path to Orion's Large FoV

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