Will Meta’s Orion change the narrative on smart glasses?

With its latest product announcement, Meta is looking to buck the trend that has dogged the wearable device industry for years. The tech giant has announced Orion, a line of smart spectacles that Meta describes as the “first consumer full holographic AR glasses.”

Orion devices are designed to be more lightweight, less cumbersome, and more fashionable than previous attempts at smart glasses. The product’s augmented reality (AR) capabilities will allow users to add digital accents to their real-world field of vision. Orion will also be connected to Meta’s large language model Llama, letting users deliver prompts to AI based on the sights they’re seeing through their hi-tech eyewear.

Mark Zuckerberg and his lieutenants revealed Orion during Meta Connect, a presentation aimed at developers. The Meta boss noted that his company has been working on Orion for nearly a decade. He said that the new wearables are currently a developer-focused product, but he intends to eventually bring them to market in a consumer-facing package.

“I think that it’s pretty easy to wrap your head around [the idea that] there are already 1 to 2 billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Alex Heath of The Verge. “Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones, I think everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade.”

If Zuckerberg’s bold prediction comes to fruition, it would be a sharp reversal for an industry that has struggled to maintain reliable consumer interest. Wearables have been buzzy tech products for years, but the companies developing them haven’t always experienced success.

The first generation of Snap’s Spectacles was a notable flop that left thousands of unsold products in warehouses and led to significant layoffs in the app’s hardware department. Attempts to popularity wearables through VR headsets have been lackluster as well; Meta’s VR hub Horizon Worlds is a glitchy ghost town, and sales of Apple’s Vision Pro have fallen short of expectations.

But recent developments have suggested that wearables are due for a rebound. Snap has returned with a new, fifth generation of Spectacles, and Meta exceeded sales targets when it teamed up with eyewear brand Ray-Ban to launch a line of smart glasses.

Will Orion bring wearables into the future Zuckerberg envisions? Several media members who tuned into Meta Connect and tried the glasses for themselves have been impressed with the quality of the product and Meta’s enthusiasm for it. If the Orion revolution is coming, it won’t arrive for a few years. Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said that Orion will become a consumer product sometime in the next decade.