On September 25th, during the Meta Connect event, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Project Orion to the world, a groundbreaking innovation that has been a decade in the making. At the heart of this project is a revolutionary pair of smart glasses that weigh less than 100 grams, offer a 70-degree field of view, are fully wireless, and boast a sleek design. This marks a monumental leap forward in spatial computing, with Zuckerberg himself referring to them as a “time machine” that brings the future of augmented reality closer than ever.
In recent years, we’ve seen several iterations of smart glasses, from Microsoft’s HoloLens to Magic Leap and, more recently, SNAP’s smart glasses launched just a week prior. Yet, none of these devices achieved a form factor that made everyday, mass-market usage feasible. Apple’s Vision Pro headset, with its impressive passthrough capabilities, further demonstrated the power and potential of spatial computing, positioning it as the next computing paradigm for interacting with information. However, as remarkable as the Vision Pro is, it’s not practical for all-day wear.
That’s where Meta’s Orion Smart Glasses stand apart; they’re designed to be worn all day, potentially replacing our smartphones and constantly augmenting our visual experience. These glasses are not just an accessory; they’re an evolution of how we interact with the world around us.
Over the Reality: Shaping the Future of Spatial Computing
Over the Reality is an end-to-end spatial computing platform that has been building towards this future since 2019. Its core mission is to connect 3D content and information to physical locations. OVER utilises a proprietary Visual Positioning System (VPS) that allows for precise anchoring of content to real-world environments. Today, users can experience this content through smartphones and pass-through devices like the Vision Pro or Oculus III. In the near future, platforms like OVER will leverage smart glasses like Orion to make this content even more immersive.
This is where a perfect synergy between hardware and content creation emerges. While Meta and other companies are focused on developing the devices we use to browse augmented reality, they won’t necessarily be creating all the content that will populate this new frontier. Think of it like the web: one thing is to build the browsers and devices we use to navigate, but another is to create the content that fills the web itself. In the spatial computing paradigm, instead of traditional web domains tied to 2D content on screens, we have spatial domains—physical locations that host contextualised AR experiences.
OVER provides the infrastructure that links 3D assets to real-world spaces, while companies like Meta will provide the hardware interfaces that make accessing this content possible.
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Meta’s Hardware Ambitions and The Competitive Landscape
Meta has long dominated social media but missed out on capitalising on the smartphone market explosion. This leap into virtual and augmented reality hardware could position Meta as a major player in the hardware market, especially in AR. However, the competition is fierce. Apple is expected to announce its own smart glasses soon, and smartphone giants like Samsung are unlikely to remain passive. A commanding presence in the smartphone industry provides these competitors with a significant advantage when it comes to developing the next wave of AR glasses.
It’s worth noting that Meta’s Orion Smart Glasses rely on an external wireless computing device, which offloads some of the hardware and battery weight from the glasses themselves. This design could easily be adapted to use a smartphone as the computing hub, which is an area where companies already entrenched in the smartphone market have a huge edge.
The race is on, and that’s good news for consumers. Increased competition will not only drive prices down but also accelerate advancements in these revolutionary brain-computer interfaces. As the market heats up, the future of augmented reality and how we experience the world will become even more exciting.
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