Checking In On Space Glasses

It’s been a while since we checked in on Space Glasses here at the old ‘cano, and while we weren’t paying attention this happens: Meta Unveils 'Orion' Augmented Reality Glasses.

Most of the discussion—rightly—has focused on the fact that they’re a non-production internal prototype that reportedly costs 10 Gs a pop. And they’re a little, cough, “rubenesque”?

Alert readers will recall I spent several years working on Space Glasses professionally, trying to help make fetch happen as it were, and I looked at a lot of prototype or near-prototype space glasses. These Orion glasses were the first time I sat up and said “ooh, they might be on to something, there.”

My favorite piece about the Orions was Ben Thompson at Stratechery’s Interview with Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth About Orion and Reality Labs, which included this phenomenal sentence:

Orion makes every other VR or AR device I have tried feel like a mistake — including the Apple Vision Pro.

There are a lot of things that make Space Glasses hard, but the really properly hard part is the lenses. You need something optically clear and distortion-free enough to do regular tasks while looking through, while also being able to display high-enough resolution content to be readable without eyestrain, and do all that will being spectacle lens–sized, stay in sync with each other, and do it all while mounted in something roughly glasses-sized, and ideally without shooting lasers at anyone’s eyeballs or having a weird prism sidecar.

The rest of it: chunky bodies, battery life, software, those aren’t “Easy”, but making those better is a known quantity; it doesn’t require super-science, it’s “just work.”

I’m personally inclined to believe that a Steve Jobs–esque “one more thing” surprise reveal is more valuable than a John Sculley–style fantasy movie about Knowledge Navigators, but if I’d solved the core problem with space glasses while my main competitor was mired in a swamp full of Playthings for the Alone, I’d probably flex too.