Szerző: Kristián Ivančo

0:00 / 0:00

Még 2019-ben a Orion csapat fontos bemutatót készített a Meta alapítója és vezérigazgatója, Mark Zuckerberg számára, bemutatva a lehetséges hullámvezetőket a kiterjesztett valóság szemüveg-a döntő pillanat, amikor a papíron lévő elméleti számítások életre keltek. És ez a bemutató mindent megváltoztatott.

"Az üveg alapú hullámvezetőkkel és több lemezzel ellátott szemüveg viselése olyan érzés volt, mintha egy diszkóban lennénk" - emlékszik vissza Pasqual Rivera optikus. "Mindenhol szivárványok voltak, és ez annyira elvonta a figyelmedet, hogy még csak nem is az AR-tartalmat nézted. Aztán felvetted a szemüveget a szilícium-karbid hullámvezetők, és olyan volt, mintha a szimfónián hallgatnánk egy csendes, klasszikus darabot. Tényleg odafigyelhettünk arra, hogy teljes mértékben átéljük azt, amit építünk. Ez teljesen megváltoztatta a játékot."

Bármennyire is egyértelműnek tűnik ma a szilícium-karbid mint szubsztrát választása, amikor először indultunk el a az AR szemüveghez vezető út egy évtizeddel ezelőtt, minden volt, csak nem az.

"A szilícium-karbid általában erősen nitrogénnel dúsított" - mondja Rivera. "Zöld színű, és ha elég vastag lesz, akkor feketének tűnik. Kizárt, hogy optikai lencsét lehetne belőle készíteni. Ez egy elektronikus anyag. Nem véletlenül ilyen a színe, mégpedig az elektronikus tulajdonságai miatt."

"A szilícium-karbid már régóta ismert anyag" - ért egyet Giuseppe Calafiore, az AR Waveguides műszaki vezetője. "Fő alkalmazási területe a nagy teljesítményű elektronika. Vegyük az elektromos járműveket: Minden elektromos járműnek szüksége van egy chipre - de ennek a chipnek nagyon nagy teljesítményre is képesnek kell lennie, mozgatnia kell a kerekeket, és meg kell hajtania ezt a dolgot. Kiderült, hogy a hagyományos szilícium hordozóval, amelyből a számítógépekben és az elektronikában használt chipek készülnek, ez nem lehetséges. Olyan platformra van szükséged, amely lehetővé teszi a nagy áramerősséget és a nagy teljesítményt, és ez az anyag a szilícium-karbid."

Amíg a megújuló energiaforrásokkal kapcsolatos viták nemrégiben fel nem pezsdültek, az ilyen nagy teljesítményű chipkészletek piaca meg sem közelítette a fogyasztói elektronikai chipek piacának méretét. A szilícium-karbid mindig is drága volt, és nem volt nagy ösztönzés a költségek csökkentésére, mivel az autóba szánt chipek méretéhez képest a hordozó ára elviselhető volt.

"De kiderült, hogy a szilícium-karbid is rendelkezik néhány olyan tulajdonsággal, amelyre a hullámvezetőkhöz és az optikához van szükségünk" - mondja Calafiore. "A törésmutató a legfontosabb tulajdonság, ami minket érdekel. A szilícium-karbidnak pedig magas a törésmutatója, ami azt jelenti, hogy képes nagy mennyiségű optikai adatot becsatornázni és kiadni. Ezt optikai sávszélességnek is nevezhetjük - hasonlóan az internet sávszélességéhez, amelyet elég nagynak kell lennie ahhoz, hogy nagy mennyiségű adatot tudjunk átküldeni a csatornán. Ugyanez vonatkozik az optikai eszközökre is."

Minél magasabb egy anyag törésmutatója, annál nagyobb a étendue, így több optikai adatot küldhet azon a csatornán keresztül.

"A mi esetünkben a csatorna a hullámvezetőnk, és a nagyobb étendue nagyobb látómezőt jelent" - magyarázza Calafiore. "Minél nagyobb egy anyag törésmutatója, annál nagyobb látómezőt tud támogatni a kijelző."

A megfelelő törésmutatóhoz vezető út

Amikor Calafiore 2016-ban először csatlakozott az akkori Oculus Researchhez, a csapat rendelkezésére álló legmagasabb törésmutatójú üveg 1,8 volt, ami több lemez egymásra helyezését tette szükségessé a kívánt látómező eléréséhez. A nemkívánatos optikai artefaktumoktól eltekintve az összeszerelési sor egyre bonyolultabbá vált, mivel az első két hullámvezetőt tökéletesen kellett összehangolni, majd ezt a halmazt egy harmadik hullámvezetővel kellett tökéletesen összehangolni.

"Nemcsak drága volt, hanem azonnal nyilvánvalóvá vált, hogy egy szemüvegben nem lehet lencsénként három darab üveg" - emlékszik vissza Calafiore. "Túl nehezek voltak, a vastagságuk pedig megfizethetetlenül nagy és csúnya volt - senki sem vette volna meg. Így hát visszatértünk a kiindulóponthoz: megpróbáltuk növelni a szubsztrát törésmutatóját, hogy csökkentsük a szükséges lemezek számát."

Az első anyag, amelyet a csapat megvizsgált, a következő volt lítium-niobát, amelynek törésmutatója nagyjából 2,3, ami valamivel magasabb, mint az 1,8-as üvegé.

"Rájöttünk, hogy csak két tányért kell egymásra raknunk, és talán még egy tányérral is beérjük, hogy még mindig lefedjük a látómezőt" - mondja Calafiore. "Szinte ezzel párhuzamosan elkezdtünk más anyagokat is megvizsgálni - így jöttünk rá a beszállítóinkkal együtt 2019-ben, hogy a szilícium-karbid a legtisztább formájában valójában nagyon is átlátszó. Történetesen ez rendelkezik a legmagasabb törésmutatóval is, amely optikai alkalmazásban ismert, ami 2,7."

Ez 17,4% növekedést jelent a lítium-niobáthoz képest, és 50% növekedést az üveghez képest, azok számára, akik otthon tartják a pontszámot.

"Néhány módosítással ugyanazon a berendezésen, amelyet az iparban már használtak, sikerült átlátszó szilíciumkarbidot előállítani" - mondja Calafiore. "Csak az eljárást kellett megváltoztatni, sokkal óvatosabbnak lenni, és az elektronikus tulajdonságok optimalizálása helyett az optikai tulajdonságokra optimalizálni: az átlátszóságra, a törésmutató egyenletességére stb.".

A kompromisszum lehetséges költségei

Akkoriban a Reality Labs csapata volt az első, amely egyáltalán megpróbált átlátszatlan szilíciumkarbid ostyákról áttérni az átlátszó ostyákra. És mivel a szilícium-karbid az egyik legkeményebb ismert anyag, a vágásához vagy csiszolásához alapvetően gyémánt szerszámokra van szükség. Ennek eredményeként az egyszeri mérnöki költségek nagyon magasak voltak, így az így kapott hordozó meglehetősen drága volt.

Bár léteznek költséghatékonyabb alternatívák, mint minden technológia esetében, mindegyiknek vannak kompromisszumai. És ahogy a látómező növekszik az Orion iparágvezető, körülbelül 70 fokos látómezeje felé, olyan új problémák merülnek fel, mint a szellemképek és a szivárványok.

"A széles látómezejű AR-kijelzők optimális megoldásának megtalálása a teljesítmény és a költségek közötti kompromisszumokkal jár" - magyarázza Barry Silverstein, a kutatási részleg tudományos igazgatója. "A költségeket gyakran le lehet szorítani, de ha a teljesítmény nem elég, a költségek végül nem számítanak."

A szellemképek olyanok, mint a kijelzőre vetített elsődleges kép vizuális visszhangjai. A szivárványok színes fénycsíkok, amelyek akkor jönnek létre, amikor a környezeti fény visszaverődik a hullámvezetőn. "Tegyük fel, hogy éjszaka vezetsz, és körülötted mozgó autófények vannak" - mondja Silverstein. "Szivárványok is lesznek, amelyek mozognak. Vagy ha a tengerparton röplabdázol, és süt a nap, akkor egy veled együtt mozgó szivárványcsíkot fogsz látni, és lemaradsz a lövésedről. A szilíciumkarbid egyik csodálatos tulajdonsága pedig az, hogy megszabadul ezektől a szivárványoktól."

"A szilíciumkarbid másik előnye, amellyel a többi anyag egyike sem rendelkezik, a hővezető képesség" - teszi hozzá Calafiore. "A műanyag szörnyű szigetelő. Az üveg, a lítium-niobát, ugyanez a helyzet. A szilícium-karbid átlátszó, úgy néz ki, mint az üveg, és képzeljük csak el: vezeti a hőt."

Így 2020 júliusában a csapat úgy döntött, hogy a szilíciumkarbid az optimális választás, három fő okból: Jobb optikai tulajdonságokkal rendelkezett, és könnyebb volt, mint a kétlemezes üveg.

A ferde metszés titka

Az anyagot szem előtt tartva a következő feladat a hullámvezetők gyártása volt - és különösen a ferde marás nevű, nem hagyományos rácsozási technika.

"A rács az a nanoszerkezet, amely be- és kikapcsolja a lencséből érkező fényt" - magyarázza Calafiore. "És ahhoz, hogy a szilíciumkarbid működjön, a rácsot ferdén kell marni. Ahelyett, hogy függőlegesen állna, a rács vonalainak átlósan kell ferdén állniuk"."

"Mi voltunk az elsők, akik közvetlenül az eszközökön végeztünk ferde maratást" - mondja Nihar Mohanty kutatási vezető. "Az egész iparág a nanoimprintre támaszkodott, ami nem működik az ilyen magas törésmutatójú szubsztrátumok esetében. Ezért nem gondolt senki más a világon arra, hogy szilícium-karbidot is készítsen."

Mivel azonban a ferde maratás még kiforratlan technológia, a legtöbb félvezetőchip-beszállító és -gyár nem rendelkezik a szükséges eszközökkel.

"2019-ben az akkori menedzseremmel, Matt Colburnnel létrehoztuk a saját üzemünket, mivel a világon nem volt semmi, ahol maratott szilícium-karbid hullámvezetőket tudtunk volna gyártani, és ahol a technológiát a laboratóriumi méreteken túl is kipróbálhattuk volna" - magyarázza Mohanty. "Hatalmas beruházás volt, és ott hoztuk létre az egész csővezetéket. A szerszámokat partnereink készítették számunkra, az eljárást pedig házon belül, a Metában fejlesztettük ki, bár a rendszereink kutatási minőségűek, mert nem voltak gyártási minőségű rendszerek. Egy gyártó partnerrel együttműködve fejlesztettük ki a gyártói minőségű ferde maratási szerszámokat és folyamatokat. És most, hogy megmutattuk, mi minden lehetséges a szilíciumkarbiddal, azt szeretnénk, ha az iparágban mások is elkezdenék a saját szerszámaik gyártását."

Minél több vállalat fektet be optikai minőségű szilícium-karbidba és fejleszt berendezéseket, annál erősebb lesz a fogyasztói AR-szemüvegek kategóriája.

Nem üldözzük tovább a szivárványt

Míg a a technológiai elkerülhetetlenség mítosz, úgy tűnik, hogy a csillagok a szilíciumkarbid javára állnak. És bár a csapat továbbra is vizsgálja az alternatívákat, az az érzésünk, hogy a megfelelő emberek a megfelelő időben és a megfelelő piaci körülmények között jöttek össze, hogy AR-szemüveget készítsenek ebből az anyagból.

"Az Orion bebizonyította, hogy a szilícium-karbid életképes lehetőség az AR-szemüvegek számára" - mondja Silverstein - "és most már három különböző kontinensen látjuk az érdeklődést az ellátási láncban, ahol erősen keresik ezt a lehetőséget. A szilícium-karbid lesz a befutó. Szerintem ez csak idő kérdése."

És ez idő alatt sok minden történhet - akárcsak az első tiszta szilícium-karbid kristályok növesztése óta, amikor is fordult a kocka.

"A szilíciumkarbid-gyártók mindegyike masszívan felpörgette a kínálatot a várható EV-boomra reagálva" - jegyzi meg Calafiore. "Jelenleg olyan túlkínálat van, amely nem létezett, amikor az Oriont építettük. Így most, hogy a kínálat magas, a kereslet pedig alacsony, a hordozó ára elkezdett csökkenni."

"A beszállítók nagyon izgatottak az optikai minőségű szilíciumkarbid gyártásának új lehetősége miatt - hiszen minden egyes hullámvezető lencse nagy mennyiségű anyagot jelent egy elektronikus chiphez képest, és minden meglévő képességük alkalmazható erre az új területre" - teszi hozzá Silverstein. "A gyár kitöltése alapvető fontosságú, a gyár méretnövelése pedig az álom. Az ostya mérete is számít: Minél nagyobb az ostya, annál alacsonyabb a költség - de a folyamat bonyolultsága is növekszik. Ennek ellenére láttuk, hogy a beszállítók a négy hüvelykes ostyákról áttértek a nyolc hüvelykes ostyákra, és néhányan már dolgoznak a 12 hüvelykes ostyák előfutárain, amelyek exponenciálisan több AR-szemüveget eredményeznének"."

Ezek a fejlesztések hozzájárulnak a költségek további csökkenéséhez. Még korai, de a jövő egyre inkább a figyelem középpontjába kerül.

"Minden új technológiai forradalom kezdetén egy csomó dolgot kipróbálunk" - mondja Calafiore. "Nézzük meg a televíziót: Katódsugárcsövekkel kezdtük, aztán jöttek a LED-es plazmatévék, most pedig a microLED-ek. Számos különböző technológián és architektúrán mentünk keresztül. Az útkeresés során sok út nem vezet sehova, de van néhány, amelyhez mindig visszatérünk, mint a legígéretesebbekhez. Nem vagyunk az út végén, és egyedül nem tudjuk megcsinálni, de a szilíciumkarbid egy olyan csodaanyag, amely megéri a befektetést."

"A világ felébredt" - teszi hozzá Silverstein. "Sikeresen megmutattuk, hogy a szilícium-karbid képes az elektronikában és a fotonikában rugalmasan használni. Ez egy olyan anyag, amely a jövőben a kvantumszámítástechnikában is alkalmazható lehet. És látjuk a jeleit annak, hogy jelentősen csökkenthető a költsége. Sok munka vár még ránk, de a potenciális előnyök óriásiak."

---

Tudjon meg többet a szilícium-karbidról a Fotonika spektrum.

Az Orionnal kapcsolatos további információkért tekintse meg ezeket a blogbejegyzéseket:

• Zéróról az egyre: Hogyan forradalmasítják egyedi szilícium és chipjeink az AR-t?
• Orion Compute Puck: Az eszköz története, amely lehetővé tette az AR-szemüvegeinket

TL;DR:

• Today at Csatlakozás, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion—our first pair of true AR glasses, previously codenamed Project Nazare.
• With an industry-leading field of view, silicon carbide lenses, intricate waveguides, uLED projectors, and more, Orion is our most advanced and most polished product prototype to date.
• Now, we’re continuing product optimizations and lowering costs as we drive toward a scalable consumer device that will revolutionize the way people interact with the world.

---

“We are building AR glasses.”

Five simple words, spoken five years ago. With them, we planted a flag on our vision of a future where we no longer have to make the false choice between a world of information at our fingertips and the physical world all around us.

And now, five years later, another five words that stand to once again change the game:

We have built AR glasses.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2CJsnyS8u3c%3Fsi%3DTr77gOKEq3PnA7-k%26controls%3D0%3Fautoplay%3D0%26color%3Dwhite%26cc_lang_pref%3Den%26cc_load_policy%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26frameborder%3D0%26hl%3Den%26rel%3D0%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.meta.com

At Meta, our mission is simple: give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. And at Reality Labs, we build tools that help people feel connected anytime, anywhere. That’s why we’re working to build the next computing platform that puts people at the center so they can be more present, connected, and empowered in the world.

Ray-Ban Meta szemüveg have demonstrated the power of giving people hands-free access to key parts of their digital lives from their physical ones. We can talk to a smart AI assistant, connect with friends, and capture the moments that matter—all without ever having to pull out a phone. These stylish glasses fit seamlessly into our everyday lives, and people absolutely love them.

Yet while Ray-Ban Meta opened up an entirely new category of display-less glasses super-charged by AI, the XR industry has long dreamt of true AR glasses—a product that combines the benefits of a large holographic display and personalized AI assistance in a comfortable, stylish, all-day wearable form factor.

And today, we’ve pushed that dream closer to reality with the unveiling of Orion, which we believe is the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made. In fact, it might be the most challenging consumer electronics device produced since the smartphone. Orion is the result of breakthrough inventions in virtually every field of modern computing—building on the work we’ve been doing at Reality Labs for the last decade. It’s packed with entirely new technologies, including the most advanced AR display ever assembled and custom silicon that enables powerful AR experiences to run on a pair of glasses using a fraction of the power and weight of an MR headset.

Orion’s input system seamlessly combines voice, eye gaze, and hand tracking with an EMG wristband that lets you swipe, click, and scroll while keeping your arm resting comfortably by your side, letting you stay present in the world and with the people around you as you interact with rich digital content.

Beginning today at Connect and continuing throughout the year, we’re opening up access to our Orion product prototype for Meta employees and select, external audiences so our development team can learn, iterate, and build towards our consumer AR glasses product line, which we plan to begin shipping in the near future.

Why AR Glasses?

There are three primary reasons why AR glasses are key to unlocking the next great leap in human-oriented computing.

1. They enable digital experiences that are unconstrained by the limits of a smartphone screen. With large holographic displays, you can use the physical world as your canvas, placing 2D and 3D content and experiences anywhere you want.
2. They seamlessly integrate contextual AI that can sense and understand the world around you in order to anticipate and proactively address your needs.
3. They’re lightweight and great for both indoor and outdoor use—and they let people see each other’s real face, real eyes, and real expressions.

That’s the north star our industry has been building towards: a product combining the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a large display, high-bandwidth input, and contextualized AI in a form factor that people feel comfortable wearing in their daily lives.

Compact Form Factor, Compounded Challenges

For years, we’ve faced a false choice—either virtual and mixed reality headsets that enable deep, immersive experiences in a bulky form factor or glasses that are ideal for all-day use but don’t offer rich visual apps and experiences given the lack of a large display and corresponding compute power.

But we want it all, without compromises. For years, we’ve been hard at work to take the incredible spatial experiences afforded by VR and MR headsets and miniaturizing the technology necessary to deliver those experiences into a pair of lightweight, stylish glasses. Nailing the form factor, delivering holographic displays, developing compelling AR experiences, and creating new human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms—and doing it all in one cohesive product—is one of the most difficult challenges our industry has ever faced. It was so challenging that we thought we had less than a 10 percent chance of pulling it off successfully.

Until now.

A Groundbreaking Display in an Unparalleled Form Factor

At approximately 70 degrees, Orion has the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form factor to date. That field of view unlocks truly immersive use cases for Orion, from multitasking windows and big-screen entertainment to lifesize holograms of people—all digital content that can seamlessly blend with your view of the physical world.

For Orion, field of view was our holy grail. We were bumping up against the laws of physics and had to bend beams of light in ways they don’t naturally bend—and we had to do it in a power envelope measured in milliwatts.

Instead of glass, we made the lenses from silicon carbide—a novel application for AR glasses. Silicon carbide is incredibly lightweight, it doesn’t result in optical artifacts or stray light, and it has a high refractive index—all optical properties that are key to a large field of view. The waveguides themselves have really intricate and complex nano-scale 3D structures to diffract or spread light in the ways necessary to achieve this field of view. And the projectors are uLEDs—a new type of display technology that’s super small and extremely power efficient.

Orion is unmistakably a pair of glasses in both look and feel—complete with transparent lenses. Unlike MR headsets or other AR glasses today, you can still see each other’s real eyes and expressions, so you can be present and share the experience with the people around you. Dozens of innovations were required to get the industrial design down to a contemporary glasses form factor that you’d be comfortable wearing every day. Orion is a feat of miniaturization—the components are packed down to a fraction of a millimeter. And we managed to embed seven tiny cameras and sensors in the frame rims.

We had to maintain optical precision at one-tenth the thickness of a strand of human hair. And the system can detect tiny amounts of movement—like the frames expanding or contracting in various room temperatures—and then digitally correct for the necessary optical alignment, all within milliseconds. We made the frames out of magnesium—the same material used in F1 race cars and spacecraft—because it’s lightweight yet rigid, so it keeps the optical elements in alignment and efficiently conducts away heat.

Heating and Cooling

Once we cracked the display (no pun intended) and overcame the physics problems, we had to navigate the challenge of really powerful compute alongside really low power consumption and the need for heat dissipation. Unlike today’s MR headsets, you can’t stuff a fan into a pair of glasses. So we had to get creative. A lot of the materials used to cool Orion are similar to those used by NASA to cool satellites in outer space.

We built highly specialized custom silicon that’s extremely power efficient and optimized for our AI, machine perception, and graphics algorithms. We built multiple custom chips and dozens of highly custom silicon IP blocks inside those chips. That lets us take the algorithms necessary for hand and eye tracking as well as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology that normally takes hundreds of milliwatts of power—and thus generates a corresponding amount of heat—and shrink it down to just a few dozen milliwatts.

And yes, custom silicon continues to play a critical role in product development at Reality Labs, despite what you may have read elsewhere. 😎

Effortless EMG

Every new computing platform brings with it a paradigm shift in the way we interact with our devices. The invention of the mouse helped pave the way for the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that dominate our world today, and smartphones didn’t start to really gain traction until the advent of the touch screen. And the same rule holds true for wearables.

We’ve spoken about our work with electromyography, or EMG, for years, driven by our belief that input for AR glasses needs to be fast, convenient, reliable, subtle, and socially acceptable. And now, that work is ready for prime time.

Orion’s input and interaction system seamlessly combines voice, eye gaze, and hand tracking with an EMG wristband that lets you swipe, click, and scroll with ease.

It works—and feels—like magic. Imagine taking a photo on your morning jog with a simple tap of your fingertips or navigating menus with barely perceptible movements of your hands. Our wristband combines a high-performance textile with embedded EMG sensors to detect the electrical signals generated by even the tiniest muscle movements. An on-device ML processor then interprets those EMG signals to produce input events that are transmitted wirelessly to the glasses. The system adapts to you, so it gets better and more capable at recognizing the most subtle gestures over time. And today, we’re sharing more about our support for external research focused on expanding the equity and accessibility potential of EMG wristbands.

Meet the Wireless Compute Puck

True AR glasses must be wireless, and they must also be small.So we built a wireless compute puck for Orion. It takes some of the load off of the glasses, enabling longer battery life and a better form factor complete with low latency.

The glasses run all of the hand tracking, eye tracking, SLAM, and specialized AR world locking graphics algorithms while the app logic runs on the puck to keep the glasses as lightweight and compact as possible.

The puck has dual processors, including one custom designed right here at Meta, and it provides the compute power necessary for low-latency graphics rendering, AI, and some additional machine perception.

And since it’s small and sleek, you can comfortably toss the puck in a bag or your pocket and go about your business—no strings attached.

AR Experiences

Of course, as with any piece of hardware, it’s only as good as the things you can do with it. And while it’s still early days, the experiences afforded by Orion are an exciting glimpse of what’s to come.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HkdSv3QPhNw%3F%26controls%3D0%3Fautoplay%3D0%26color%3Dwhite%26cc_lang_pref%3Den%26cc_load_policy%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26frameborder%3D0%26hl%3Den%26rel%3D0%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.meta.com

We’ve got our smart assistant, Meta AI, running on Orion. It understands what you’re looking at in the physical world and can help you with useful visualizations. Orion uses the same Llama model that powers AI experiences running on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses today, plus custom research models to demonstrate potential use cases for future wearables development.

You can take a hands-free video call on the go to catch up with friends and family in real time, and you can stay connected on WhatsApp and Messenger to view and send messages. No need to pull out your phone, unlock it, find the right app, and let your friend know you’re running late for dinner—you can do it all through your glasses.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=el7lUVvu8Bo%3F%26controls%3D0%3Fautoplay%3D0%26color%3Dwhite%26cc_lang_pref%3Den%26cc_load_policy%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26frameborder%3D0%26hl%3Den%26rel%3D0%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.meta.com

You can play shared AR games with family on the other side of the country or with your friend on the other side of the couch. And Orion’s large display lets you multitask with multiple windows to get stuff done without having to lug around your laptop.

The experiences available on Orion today will help chart the roadmap for our consumer AR glasses line in the future. Our teams will continue to iterate and build new immersive social experiences, alongside our developer partners, and we can’t wait to share what comes next.

A Purposeful Product Prototype

While Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: This is not a research prototype. It’s the most polished product prototype we’ve ever developed—and it’s truly representative of something that could ship to consumers. Rather than rushing to put it on shelves, we decided to focus on internal development first, which means we can keep building quickly and continue to push the boundaries of the technology and experiences.

And that means we’ll arrive at an even better consumer product faster.

What Comes Next

Two major obstacles have long stood in the way of mainstream consumer-grade AR glasses: the technological breakthroughs necessary to deliver a large display in a compact glasses form factor and the necessity of useful and compelling AR experiences that can run on those glasses. Orion is a huge milestone, delivering true AR experiences running on reasonably stylish hardware for the very first time.

Now that we’ve shared Orion with the world, we’re focused on a few things:

• Tuning the AR display quality to make the visuals even sharper
• Optimizing wherever we can to make the form factor even smaller
• Building at scale to make them more affordable

In the next few years, you can expect to see new devices from us that build on our R&D efforts. And a number of Orion’s innovations have been extended to our current consumer products today as well as our future product roadmap. We’ve optimized some of our spatial perception algorithms, which are running on both Meta Quest 3S and Orion. While the eye gaze and subtle gestural input system was originally designed for Orion, we plan to use it in future products. And we’re exploring the use of EMG wristbands across future consumer products as well.

Orion isn’t just a window into the future—it’s a look at the very real possibilities within reach today. We built it in our pursuit of what we do best: helping people connect. From Ray-Ban Meta glasses to Orion, we’ve seen the good that can come from letting people stay more present and empowered in the physical world, even while tapping into all the added richness the digital world has to offer.

We believe you shouldn’t have to choose between the two. And with the next computing platform, you won’t have to.

---

Az Orionnal kapcsolatos további információkért tekintse meg ezeket a blogbejegyzéseket:

• Orion Compute Puck: Az eszköz története, amely lehetővé tette az AR-szemüvegeinket
• Zéróról az egyre: Hogyan forradalmasítják egyedi szilícium és chipjeink az AR-t?
• Kristálytiszta: Szilícium-karbid hullámvezetőink és az Orion nagy FoV-je felé vezető út

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.

0:00 / 0:00

0:00 / 0:00

0:00 / 0:00

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.”

---

Az Orionnal kapcsolatos további információkért tekintse meg ezeket a blogbejegyzéseket:

• Kristálytiszta: Szilícium-karbid hullámvezetőink és az Orion nagy FoV-je felé vezető út
• Zéróról az egyre: Hogyan forradalmasítják egyedi szilícium és chipjeink az AR-t?

TL;DR:

• Today at Csatlakozás, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion—our first pair of true AR glasses, previously codenamed Project Nazare.
• With an industry-leading field of view, silicon carbide lenses, intricate waveguides, uLED projectors, and more, Orion is our most advanced and most polished product prototype to date.
• Now, we’re continuing product optimizations and lowering costs as we drive toward a scalable consumer device that will revolutionize the way people interact with the world.

---

“We are building AR glasses.”

Five simple words, spoken five years ago. With them, we planted a flag on our vision of a future where we no longer have to make the false choice between a world of information at our fingertips and the physical world all around us.

And now, five years later, another five words that stand to once again change the game:

We have built AR glasses.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2CJsnyS8u3c%3Fsi%3DTr77gOKEq3PnA7-k%26controls%3D0%3Fautoplay%3D0%26color%3Dwhite%26cc_lang_pref%3Den%26cc_load_policy%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26frameborder%3D0%26hl%3Den%26rel%3D0%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.meta.com

At Meta, our mission is simple: give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. And at Reality Labs, we build tools that help people feel connected anytime, anywhere. That’s why we’re working to build the next computing platform that puts people at the center so they can be more present, connected, and empowered in the world.

Ray-Ban Meta szemüveg have demonstrated the power of giving people hands-free access to key parts of their digital lives from their physical ones. We can talk to a smart AI assistant, connect with friends, and capture the moments that matter—all without ever having to pull out a phone. These stylish glasses fit seamlessly into our everyday lives, and people absolutely love them.

Yet while Ray-Ban Meta opened up an entirely new category of display-less glasses super-charged by AI, the XR industry has long dreamt of true AR glasses—a product that combines the benefits of a large holographic display and personalized AI assistance in a comfortable, stylish, all-day wearable form factor.

And today, we’ve pushed that dream closer to reality with the unveiling of Orion, which we believe is the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made. In fact, it might be the most challenging consumer electronics device produced since the smartphone. Orion is the result of breakthrough inventions in virtually every field of modern computing—building on the work we’ve been doing at Reality Labs for the last decade. It’s packed with entirely new technologies, including the most advanced AR display ever assembled and custom silicon that enables powerful AR experiences to run on a pair of glasses using a fraction of the power and weight of an MR headset.

Orion’s input system seamlessly combines voice, eye gaze, and hand tracking with an EMG wristband that lets you swipe, click, and scroll while keeping your arm resting comfortably by your side, letting you stay present in the world and with the people around you as you interact with rich digital content.

Beginning today at Connect and continuing throughout the year, we’re opening up access to our Orion product prototype for Meta employees and select, external audiences so our development team can learn, iterate, and build towards our consumer AR glasses product line, which we plan to begin shipping in the near future.

Why AR Glasses?

There are three primary reasons why AR glasses are key to unlocking the next great leap in human-oriented computing.

1. They enable digital experiences that are unconstrained by the limits of a smartphone screen. With large holographic displays, you can use the physical world as your canvas, placing 2D and 3D content and experiences anywhere you want.
2. They seamlessly integrate contextual AI that can sense and understand the world around you in order to anticipate and proactively address your needs.
3. They’re lightweight and great for both indoor and outdoor use—and they let people see each other’s real face, real eyes, and real expressions.

That’s the north star our industry has been building towards: a product combining the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a large display, high-bandwidth input, and contextualized AI in a form factor that people feel comfortable wearing in their daily lives.

Compact Form Factor, Compounded Challenges

For years, we’ve faced a false choice—either virtual and mixed reality headsets that enable deep, immersive experiences in a bulky form factor or glasses that are ideal for all-day use but don’t offer rich visual apps and experiences given the lack of a large display and corresponding compute power.

But we want it all, without compromises. For years, we’ve been hard at work to take the incredible spatial experiences afforded by VR and MR headsets and miniaturizing the technology necessary to deliver those experiences into a pair of lightweight, stylish glasses. Nailing the form factor, delivering holographic displays, developing compelling AR experiences, and creating new human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms—and doing it all in one cohesive product—is one of the most difficult challenges our industry has ever faced. It was so challenging that we thought we had less than a 10 percent chance of pulling it off successfully.

Until now.

A Groundbreaking Display in an Unparalleled Form Factor

At approximately 70 degrees, Orion has the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form factor to date. That field of view unlocks truly immersive use cases for Orion, from multitasking windows and big-screen entertainment to lifesize holograms of people—all digital content that can seamlessly blend with your view of the physical world.

For Orion, field of view was our holy grail. We were bumping up against the laws of physics and had to bend beams of light in ways they don’t naturally bend—and we had to do it in a power envelope measured in milliwatts.

Instead of glass, we made the lenses from silicon carbide—a novel application for AR glasses. Silicon carbide is incredibly lightweight, it doesn’t result in optical artifacts or stray light, and it has a high refractive index—all optical properties that are key to a large field of view. The waveguides themselves have really intricate and complex nano-scale 3D structures to diffract or spread light in the ways necessary to achieve this field of view. And the projectors are uLEDs—a new type of display technology that’s super small and extremely power efficient.

Orion is unmistakably a pair of glasses in both look and feel—complete with transparent lenses. Unlike MR headsets or other AR glasses today, you can still see each other’s real eyes and expressions, so you can be present and share the experience with the people around you. Dozens of innovations were required to get the industrial design down to a contemporary glasses form factor that you’d be comfortable wearing every day. Orion is a feat of miniaturization—the components are packed down to a fraction of a millimeter. And we managed to embed seven tiny cameras and sensors in the frame rims.

We had to maintain optical precision at one-tenth the thickness of a strand of human hair. And the system can detect tiny amounts of movement—like the frames expanding or contracting in various room temperatures—and then digitally correct for the necessary optical alignment, all within milliseconds. We made the frames out of magnesium—the same material used in F1 race cars and spacecraft—because it’s lightweight yet rigid, so it keeps the optical elements in alignment and efficiently conducts away heat.

Heating and Cooling

Once we cracked the display (no pun intended) and overcame the physics problems, we had to navigate the challenge of really powerful compute alongside really low power consumption and the need for heat dissipation. Unlike today’s MR headsets, you can’t stuff a fan into a pair of glasses. So we had to get creative. A lot of the materials used to cool Orion are similar to those used by NASA to cool satellites in outer space.

We built highly specialized custom silicon that’s extremely power efficient and optimized for our AI, machine perception, and graphics algorithms. We built multiple custom chips and dozens of highly custom silicon IP blocks inside those chips. That lets us take the algorithms necessary for hand and eye tracking as well as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology that normally takes hundreds of milliwatts of power—and thus generates a corresponding amount of heat—and shrink it down to just a few dozen milliwatts.

And yes, custom silicon continues to play a critical role in product development at Reality Labs, despite what you may have read elsewhere. 😎

Effortless EMG

Every new computing platform brings with it a paradigm shift in the way we interact with our devices. The invention of the mouse helped pave the way for the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that dominate our world today, and smartphones didn’t start to really gain traction until the advent of the touch screen. And the same rule holds true for wearables.

We’ve spoken about our work with electromyography, or EMG, for years, driven by our belief that input for AR glasses needs to be fast, convenient, reliable, subtle, and socially acceptable. And now, that work is ready for prime time.

Orion’s input and interaction system seamlessly combines voice, eye gaze, and hand tracking with an EMG wristband that lets you swipe, click, and scroll with ease.

It works—and feels—like magic. Imagine taking a photo on your morning jog with a simple tap of your fingertips or navigating menus with barely perceptible movements of your hands. Our wristband combines a high-performance textile with embedded EMG sensors to detect the electrical signals generated by even the tiniest muscle movements. An on-device ML processor then interprets those EMG signals to produce input events that are transmitted wirelessly to the glasses. The system adapts to you, so it gets better and more capable at recognizing the most subtle gestures over time. And today, we’re sharing more about our support for external research focused on expanding the equity and accessibility potential of EMG wristbands.

Meet the Wireless Compute Puck

True AR glasses must be wireless, and they must also be small.So we built a wireless compute puck for Orion. It takes some of the load off of the glasses, enabling longer battery life and a better form factor complete with low latency.

The glasses run all of the hand tracking, eye tracking, SLAM, and specialized AR world locking graphics algorithms while the app logic runs on the puck to keep the glasses as lightweight and compact as possible.

The puck has dual processors, including one custom designed right here at Meta, and it provides the compute power necessary for low-latency graphics rendering, AI, and some additional machine perception.

And since it’s small and sleek, you can comfortably toss the puck in a bag or your pocket and go about your business—no strings attached.

AR Experiences

Of course, as with any piece of hardware, it’s only as good as the things you can do with it. And while it’s still early days, the experiences afforded by Orion are an exciting glimpse of what’s to come.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HkdSv3QPhNw%3F%26controls%3D0%3Fautoplay%3D0%26color%3Dwhite%26cc_lang_pref%3Den%26cc_load_policy%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26frameborder%3D0%26hl%3Den%26rel%3D0%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.meta.com

We’ve got our smart assistant, Meta AI, running on Orion. It understands what you’re looking at in the physical world and can help you with useful visualizations. Orion uses the same Llama model that powers AI experiences running on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses today, plus custom research models to demonstrate potential use cases for future wearables development.

You can take a hands-free video call on the go to catch up with friends and family in real time, and you can stay connected on WhatsApp and Messenger to view and send messages. No need to pull out your phone, unlock it, find the right app, and let your friend know you’re running late for dinner—you can do it all through your glasses.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=el7lUVvu8Bo%3F%26controls%3D0%3Fautoplay%3D0%26color%3Dwhite%26cc_lang_pref%3Den%26cc_load_policy%3D0%26enablejsapi%3D1%26frameborder%3D0%26hl%3Den%26rel%3D0%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.meta.com

You can play shared AR games with family on the other side of the country or with your friend on the other side of the couch. And Orion’s large display lets you multitask with multiple windows to get stuff done without having to lug around your laptop.

The experiences available on Orion today will help chart the roadmap for our consumer AR glasses line in the future. Our teams will continue to iterate and build new immersive social experiences, alongside our developer partners, and we can’t wait to share what comes next.

A Purposeful Product Prototype

While Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: This is not a research prototype. It’s the most polished product prototype we’ve ever developed—and it’s truly representative of something that could ship to consumers. Rather than rushing to put it on shelves, we decided to focus on internal development first, which means we can keep building quickly and continue to push the boundaries of the technology and experiences.

And that means we’ll arrive at an even better consumer product faster.

What Comes Next

Two major obstacles have long stood in the way of mainstream consumer-grade AR glasses: the technological breakthroughs necessary to deliver a large display in a compact glasses form factor and the necessity of useful and compelling AR experiences that can run on those glasses. Orion is a huge milestone, delivering true AR experiences running on reasonably stylish hardware for the very first time.

Now that we’ve shared Orion with the world, we’re focused on a few things:

• Tuning the AR display quality to make the visuals even sharper
• Optimizing wherever we can to make the form factor even smaller
• Building at scale to make them more affordable

In the next few years, you can expect to see new devices from us that build on our R&D efforts. And a number of Orion’s innovations have been extended to our current consumer products today as well as our future product roadmap. We’ve optimized some of our spatial perception algorithms, which are running on both Meta Quest 3S and Orion. While the eye gaze and subtle gestural input system was originally designed for Orion, we plan to use it in future products. And we’re exploring the use of EMG wristbands across future consumer products as well.

Orion isn’t just a window into the future—it’s a look at the very real possibilities within reach today. We built it in our pursuit of what we do best: helping people connect. From Ray-Ban Meta glasses to Orion, we’ve seen the good that can come from letting people stay more present and empowered in the physical world, even while tapping into all the added richness the digital world has to offer.

We believe you shouldn’t have to choose between the two. And with the next computing platform, you won’t have to.

---

Az Orionnal kapcsolatos további információkért tekintse meg ezeket a blogbejegyzéseket:

• Orion Compute Puck: Az eszköz története, amely lehetővé tette az AR-szemüvegeinket
• Zéróról az egyre: Hogyan forradalmasítják egyedi szilícium és chipjeink az AR-t?
• Kristálytiszta: Szilícium-karbid hullámvezetőink és az Orion nagy FoV-je felé vezető út