Meta’s Orion is another nail in the coffin for mass-market AR/VR (for now)
A year ago, pretty much date to date, I was asking "the only question about virtual reality," which at the time was how long it would take to get AR/VR/XR glasses that don't look like a space helmet.
Yesterday, Meta started to disclose an internal prototype they've been using to advance this form factor. Meta's Orion glasses are "practical, wide-display AR glasses that people genuinely want to wear."
There are quite a few interesting aspects of this device, such as a connected wristband with haptic feedback that allows you to control it with your hand and fingers (no mouse in the metaverse!), whereas Apple's Vision Pro does this with multiple cameras trying to monitor and understand the same hand gestures. They have also been deported to a separate unit, where you need most of the computing power so that the glasses aren't too heavy and, even more importantly, don't overheat and burn your face (just like Apple, mind you).
If you go and watch the full video of The Verge reporting on this device no doubt, you'll find quite a few interesting to discuss:
What matters the most to me, though?
While Meta was fully expecting to launch this device as a commercial product they just had to stop in their tracks. Why? The manufacturing price point was, at best, several thousand dollars per unit. No real space to sell such a device to a mass market. And yes, Apple chose to go forward with a bulkier headset, which is still outrageously pricey (miniaturization costs grow exponentially), and we know how it went–horrifyingly bad.
My optimistic scenario for Apple is that they just decided to launch something no one will buy to poison the AR/VR market well.
But back to Meta's internal prototype, 'Orion.' If you watch the full video, you will see that the killer feature of the AR/VR market is that there is still nothing remarkable to do in it except play weird games of ping-pong, make AI-assisted cocktails, or video-chat with someone online.
So when I say 'killer feature,' I mean it in the literal way.
It KILLS this market.
In 2022, I foresaw no real problem to be solved for AR/VR, and we are still in this sad zone of nothing to do with it—at least, not at any significant scale.
