Orion: Meta’s AR Breakthrough

Meta Connect 2024 served up a feast of exciting new developments from the Californian tech giant, but perhaps the most intriguing and inspiring of all is Orion.

Meta has long been working on bringing augmented reality to a wide audience via a modestly sized wearable device that could be used not in an isolated, individual way (like most VR headsets) but during regular daily life. Although it remains only a prototype, if a very impressive and professional one, Orion is that device.

Orion Unleashed

Meta calls Orion its “first true augmented reality glasses,” and that is certainly true. In its collaboration with Ray-Ban, Meta brought some admittedly slight AR features to stylish eyewear items that tended underwhelm tech savvy supporters. Recent headsets in the Meta Quest line have featured AR passthrough capabilities alongside their VR features but Orion delivers AR in a way previously only imagined.

Orion consists not just of a pair of eyeglasses but a wristband and compute puck, all operating in a wireless ecosystem on the user’s person. Featuring a lightweight magnesium frame, miniaturized sensors and cameras, a Micro LED projection system, and a tracking system that includes inputs from eyes, voice, and hands. The wristband also allows for gestural inputs and haptic feedback.

The Complete Package

The wireless compute puck solves the processing limitations posed by the glasses’ small form factor, offloading the more demanding computational tasks to a dedicated unit. This arrangement allows Orion to deliver multi-screen AR displays, advanced AI-guided analysis of real-world items and environments, and 3D holographic interactivity.

Meta Orion weighs 100 grams and is only slightly larger than a pair of Ray-Ban and Meta’s smart glasses. Orion brings users a ~70° FOV and its sensors include eye-tracking cameras embedded into the inside edge of the lens frames, outer cameras integrated into the frame’s upper edge, as well as side hand-tracking and room-tracking cameras. The resolution is 13 pixels per degree, giving users visuals that fall short of what Quest 3 can deliver, but that’s hardly surprising. Improving visual fidelity is one challenge Meta admits to requiring more development.

As predicted, Orion’s wristband features electromyographic sensors to detect and measure physical actions, translating them into control inputs. Other uses for this tech will surely be revealed further down the line, but for AR porn fans, the benefits of a wrist-mounted input system should be blindingly obvious.

Polished Porn Product Prototype

As exciting as the reveal of Orion is, it does come with an obstacle built in. Meta has called Orion in its current state a “polished production prototype.” In other words: it is not available to consumers. Meta plans on continuing to develop and refine Orion’s technology and manufacture it at a scalable level at a price affordable to consumers.

That said, even as a prototype, Orion bodes extremely well for the future of AR porn. Passthrough AR is already doing wonders for virtual sex experiences. Reducing the size of the hardware and increasingly relying on a user’s physical body for input, control, and direction brings us closer and closer to completely immersive, fully entwined virtual and actual states. For VR and AR porn viewers, that is, quite simply, the dream.