Meta Pushes Forward with Project Orion

Events continue to roll through in quick succession in the so-called “Tech-tember” window taking place at the end of summer, and last week saw Meta Connect take the spotlight, and the headlines.

Connect is a high-stakes event for Meta; it’s the shop front for the products in which it invests so heavily, much to the chagrin of investors. The company is hauled over the coals each quarter for the amounts it spends on AI and its Reality Labs division, and Connect is its best chance to convince investors — and the market at large — that this money is well spent.

Developments in AI were the most important news to come from Connect given how high the stakes are in this constant arms race (see Meta Refines AI and Devices Strategy at Connect 2024). We heard about the ways in which users will be able to speak to Meta AI in the future, including the addition of celebrity voices like Dame Judi Dench and Kristen Bell. This is an area Meta seems strangely fixated on as it tries to humanize its AI tools. I’m not convinced this makes AI any more useful to the average user, but perhaps Meta believes it’s a good way to break down barriers for newcomers.

An important new capability is Meta AI being able to interact with and edit photos shared with it in chat across Meta’s platforms including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. This delivers many of the features currently offered by rivals including Apple, Google and Samsung, such as removing unwanted objects, adding AI-generated content and allowing people to reimagine elements of their images.

This has quickly become table stakes for consumer AI tools, but Meta is on the back foot because it has to offer these features through its apps and chat services rather than built into the platform layer of the smartphone itself. This remains one of Meta’s most frustrating limitations as a business given its limited ability to truly influence what’s happening beyond its own applications.

There’s a whole host of implications to this, including operating at the mercy of the policies of the App Store and Google Play store, and it’s become increasingly clear that rectifying this is one of Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest goals as CEO of Meta. In multiple interviews over the past few years, he’s articulated the problems that stem from the lack of positioning as a platform player, and crucially, how the company might turn to smart glasses to correct this.

This leads us to the most exciting segment of Meta Connect for anyone of a gadget-focused persuasion: Project Orion. This is the name for the augmented reality (AR) product that Meta’s been working on behind the scenes for several years and felt confident enough to lift the lid on at Connect this year. The glasses are based on a breakthrough material for lens design — silicon carbide — offering a visual experience that far surpasses that of other AR smart glasses with a similar size and shape, according to early testing.

We learned more about the design architecture of the glasses too, in that they’ll be worn alongside a wristband that acts as a neural tracking unit for user input, together with a compute “puck” designed to go in your pocket. The most logical solution for this would be to use a connected smartphone (much like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 platform design), but Meta appears to be taking its own design route as it seeks to control its own destiny. Again, this comes back to its reluctance to let other tech companies affect its ability to gatekeep where and when its technology works.

As ever, the fascinating question is: when will this product become a reality? Meta is keen to stress that Orion glasses aren’t just a proof of concept but a product that the company wants to bring to the consumer market as soon as possible. The word consumer is critical here; Meta doesn’t want this to end up in the pile of devices that started life aimed at consumers before being repurposed as enterprise headsets as a result of prohibitively high prices.

It’s an admirable commitment to a product that Meta believes can be real and is spending billions of dollars developing. As a spatial computing enthusiast, I’d love to see it come to fruition sooner rather than later. But as an analyst, who has seen so many AR devices struggle to achieve their promise — usually because of a whole host of challenges with compute power, battery life, thermal management and wearability — I’m inclined to be sceptical.

Orion could yet be many years away from seeing the light of day as a consumer product, even with generous funding and extensive engineering. It’s another example of a spatial computing concept with tremendous potential, but one that’s going to take a very long time to materialize. Arguably, Apple’s Vision Pro falls into a similar bucket, although Apple does offer the headset as an extremely expensive commercial offering.

Despite my scepticism, it’s still an interesting area to follow and Meta should be applauded for its tenacity. The company continues to develop its apps and AI capabilities for the here and now, but it’s increasingly clear that Meta believes its best next move in spatial computing is to take greater control as a platform player in the next generation of computing experiences. This in the hope that it can also position itself better to revive its faltering metaverse vision.

Whether it will succeed boils down to dozens of factors, both internal and external, and it’s still far from clear that glasses like Orion will be commercially viable. But Meta, and more importantly Mark Zuckerberg, have shown no sign of deviating from the strategic focus on this area and I’m excited to see how it evolves.

For a glimpse into CCS Insight’s expectations for the spatial computing market over the next few years, tune in to our Predictions for 2025 and Beyond event next Tuesday at 10 AM (BST). Click the link to register.