Last year at Connect, we unveiled Orion—our first true pair of AR glasses. The culmination of our work at Reality Labs over the last decade, Orion combines the benefits of a large holographic display and personalized AI assistance in a comfortable, all-day wearable form factor. It got some attention for its industry-leading field of view, silicon carbide waveguides, uLED projectors, and more. But today, we’re turning our attention to an unsung hero of Orion: the compute puck.
Designed to easily slip into your pocket or bag so you can bring it just about anywhere as you go about your day, the puck offloads Orion’s processing power to run application logic and enable a more compelling, smaller form factor for the glasses. It connects wirelessly to the glasses and EMG wristband for a seamless experience.
Set it and forget it, right?
But the puck’s backstory—even as a prototype—is involved, with a dramatic arc you’d never guess at from its appearance.
“When you’re building something like this, you start getting into the limits of physics,” explains Director of Product Management Rahul Prasad. “For the last 50 years, Moore’s Law has made everything smaller, faster, and lower power. The problem is that now you’re starting to hit limits on how much heat you can dissipate, how much battery you can compress, and how much antenna performance you can fit into a particular sized object.”
While hindsight may be 20/20, the puck’s potential wasn’t immediately obvious. When you’re the first to build something, you need to explore every possibility—leaving no stone unturned. How do you build something that some might think of as an undesirable accessory rather than a critical part of the package?
“We knew the puck was an extra device we were asking people to carry,” notes Product Design Engineering Manager Jared Van Cleave, “so we explored how to turn the bug into a feature.”
Ultimately, that ethos paid off in spades as the puck squeezes a lot of compute (and even more Meta-designed custom silicon for AI and machine perception) into a small size. This was instrumental in helping Orion go from the realm of science fiction into reality.
“If you didn’t have the puck, you wouldn’t be able to have the experiences that Orion offers in its form factor—period,” says Prasad. “A good AR experience demands really high performance: high frame rates, extremely low latency, fine-grained wireless and power management, etc. The puck and the glasses need to be co-designed to work really closely together, not just at the app layer, but also at the operating system, firmware, and hardware layers. And even if one were to co-design a smartphone to work with AR glasses, the demanding performance requirements would drain the phone battery and suck away compute capacity from phone use cases. On the other hand, the puck has its own high-capacity battery, high-performance SoC, and a custom Meta-designed AI co-processor optimized for Orion.”
Of course, the puck wasn’t designed overnight. It required years of iterative work.
“We didn’t know how people would want to interact with Orion from an input perspective—there was nothing we could draft off of in-market,” says Product Manager Matt Resman. “If you look at our early glasses prototypes, they were these massive headsets that weighed three or four pounds. And when you’re trying to build a product, it’s really difficult to understand the user experience if you’re not in the right form factor. With the puck, we were able to prototype very quickly to start understanding how people would use it.”
Codenamed Omega in the early days, the puck was initially envisioned by what was then Oculus Research as an Ω-shaped band that would go around the user’s neck and be hard-wired to the glasses…
… until some new innovations by the Reality Labs wireless team, among other things, allowed them to cut the cord. That enabled a more handheld or pocketable / in-bag form factor, which opened up a lot of possibilities.
“At that point, augmented reality calling was still a primary use case,” Van Cleave explains. “The puck was where the holographic videos would be anchored. You’d put it down on the table with the sensor bench facing you, imaging you, and then projecting who you were speaking to from the puck’s surface for the call.”
“Orion is about connecting people and bringing us together,” says Resman. “One of the initial concepts for the puck was to help create this sense of presence with other people and enable this richer form of communication.”
“It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen—the device has the potential to create really fun and unique interactions,” adds Industrial Designer Emron Henry. “The user experience feels a bit like unleashing a genie from a bottle, where holograms seamlessly emerge from and dissolve back into the device.”
As you can probably tell by now, there’s more potential inside the puck than what ultimately got turned on as a feature. In addition to the sensors and cameras that would’ve been used for AR calling, the puck has haptics and 6DOF sensors that could enable it to be used as a tracked controller to select and manipulate virtual objects and play AR games. The team also explored capacitive and force touch input so the puck could serve as a gamepad when held in both portrait and landscape mode.
“We would talk about the need to carry this extra thing,” says Van Cleave. “How do we make it more useful? There was a whole workstream around it. And at one point, the hypothesis was that AR gaming was going to be this killer use case.”
Early on, we knew we needed to explore the possibilities of the puck doing things that phones cannot. Eventually, we landed on using eye gaze, EMG, and hand tracking for AR games, like Stargazer and Pong, but we prototyped various demos and games that used the puck as a controller in the early days of Orion.
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Rendered explorations of the puck as a 6DOF controller for AR games like Pong.
“Because it’s not a phone, that gave us a lot of design freedom,” adds Prasad. “It can be thicker, I can make it more rounded so it fits comfortably in your hand as a controller. It’s pretty incredible that the puck is actually smaller than the average phone, but it’s more powerful than a phone because it has a Meta-designed co-processor for AI and machine perception.”
The team dug into the question of how a quality AR game might differ from a MR or console game. That meant exploring different affordances for an AR game controller, including joysticks, physical button layouts, trigger buttons, and more.
“We didn’t end up actually building any of that stuff,” Van Cleave notes. “We prototyped it, but we didn’t ever go for a full build. We wanted to keep it simple. We wanted to do these soft interfaces but not make physical, mechanical buttons.”
And while the sensors and haptics weren’t turned on in the finished product prototype, they served an integral function during development, letting teams file bugs by simply tapping on the top of the device a few times to trigger a bug report.
As AI began to take center stage as a key use case, compute came into increasingly sharp focus. In the end, the puck is home to Orion’s wireless connectivity, computing power, and battery capacity—a huge technical feat in itself—all of which helps reduce the weight and form factor of the glasses while dissipating a lot more thermals by virtue of its surface area.
Throughout its evolution, one thing has remained the same: There’s more to the puck than meets the untrained eye. Embracing unconventional ideas allowed our teams to explore, push boundaries, and build the future.
“We’re defining a category that doesn’t quite exist yet,” notes Henry. “As you’d expect with R&D, there were starts and stops along the way. How will users expect to interact with holograms? Would they prefer to use an AR remote or is hand tracking, eye gaze, and EMG sufficient for input? What feels intuitive, low-friction, familiar, and useful?”
“Rather than looking at the puck as just a rock, we asked ourselves what else we could provide to further differentiate it from phones and justify why you’d want to carry it around,” acknowledges Resman. “Does its raw compute power and practical design—which helped unlock a glasses form factor that you can realistically wear around all day—ultimately offer enough value? It’s our job to help answer these questions.”
“Early on, we shifted gears to focus on what we can do that a phone can’t do,” Van Cleave adds. “Phones need to have the screen, they need to have the certain physical button layout that users expect. And we don’t have those constraints. Our compute puck can be whatever we want it to be.”
For more information on Orion, check out these blog posts:
