Meta Orion AR glasses: Apple rethinks its AR strategy
It seems that Apple followed the launch of the new Meta Orion AR and the Quest 3S with great interest. According to Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman, so much so that the Californians subsequently began to rethink their spatial computing strategy. And it wasn’t the cheap Quest 3S that raised doubts within the walls of the Cupertino headquarters, but the Orion prototype.
Virtual reality replaces the normal world with a completely virtual one. Some glasses, like the Meta Quest 3 and 3S, use cameras with color passthrough to create an AR world – a mixture of virtual and real things. Apple’s Vision Pro does the same, but also has an external display. This allows you to display a virtual version of your face, so that the people around you feel like they can look you in the eyes.
The Meta Orion uses holographic, transparent displays instead. This means you see the real world and the real world sees you, rather than faking it with displays and cameras. There’s also a novel control method called electromyography. EMG detects even the smallest muscle movements, such as gestures the user makes with their fingers. This is much more advanced, tactile, and versatile than current hand-tracking techniques.
Meta also designed and built the “Wireless Compute Puck.” Instead of packing all the computing power into the glasses, like Apple, they moved it to the puck. And unlike the Apple Vision Pro’s battery pack, no wires are required.
Apple management considers several alternatives
Apple can simply continue with the previous strategy – working on a cheaper Vision Pro. However, the Meta Quest 3S costs less than a tenth of the Vision Pro ($300 versus $3,500) and handles gaming and video streaming just fine. A cheaper Vision Pro with inferior displays, but still costing five times as much as the Quest 3S, would be a tough sell.
Alternatively, Apple could try to control costs by using iPhones as the computing engines for the next Vision headset. This would make the headset lighter and cheaper, while making the iPhone a must-have accessory.
Apple could also develop something similar to the Ray-Ban Meta, which are smart glasses without AR. They have cameras for photos and videos and as input to Meta’s AI. Apple Intelligence could turn such glasses into an AI-powered version of the AirPods. This idea could be extended to real AirPods by adding tracking cameras and AI to a future version of the AirPods Pro.
The “holy grail” path is for Apple to build standalone AR glasses with everything built in (battery, processing, hand and eye tracking, etc.). This is reportedly CEO Tim Cook’s dream, but it’s a huge development challenge. As you can hear, no decision has been made yet. Gurman believes, however, that Meta has a head start on Apple in AR technology, even in the things the company is still keeping under wraps.
The Meta Orion AR was originally planned as a consumer product, but so far it hasn’t been able to reduce the cost to a consumer-friendly level. For now, the glasses will remain a prototype that internal and external developers can use for new AR apps.
