Key Takeaways
- Meta’s first true AR glasses will reportedly debut at its Connect conference in 2024.
- They’ll display some kind of hologram-based chat and feature wristband controls.
- Meta’s AR glasses aren’t expected to be available for purchase anytime soon, though.
Meta has been trying to push virtual and augmented reality forward since before the company changed its name from Facebook in 2021. It has a well-made VR headset in the Quest 3, plans for a new, cheaper headset, and even a surprisingly popular pair of smart glasses in the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. What’s missing is AR, and Meta has plans to change that.
The Verge reports that Meta is planning to build on the excitement around its smart glasses by demoing its first pair of true AR glasses at its Connect conference on Sept. 25-26th, 2024. While the company’s current glasses have a built-in camera, microphones, and stereo speakers, they don’t really augment anything other than what you hear, thanks to a Bluetooth connection to your phone and Meta AI for basic questions and commands. These new glasses are expected to go further by projecting visible digital interfaces and holograms into the world around you.
Meta’s been working on this project, and other, less powerful headsets and glasses for years at this point, but a glimpse of proper AR should prove to be a big moment for the company. The full details of Meta’s first AR glasses haven’t leaked, but a picture is already forming of what they’ll look like and be able to do.
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Expect expensive, impractical hardware components
There’s a good reason AR glasses haven’t been able to catch on, and instead we’ve seen tons of adjacent gadgets that gesture at some of the same ideas of floating, holographic interfaces with compromised fidelity or performance. It’s just really hard to create the AR experiences depicted in science fiction with present day technology. We’re not there yet, but Meta is apparently inching closer.
According to The Verge, Meta’s first pass at AR glasses, called “Project Nazarre” in research and “Orion” as an internal project, is designed to work independently of a smartphone (unlike the company’s current smart glasses) but rely on a wireless connection to a smartphone-shaped coprocessor to help create AR images and keep the glasses wearable. The frames also reportedly look like the chunky glasses Clark Kent wears, and weigh around 100 grams, not really discrete or lightweight.
The flagship feature of Meta’s AR glasses will be the ability to see and talk with holograms of friends and family, a bit like a FaceTime call in Apple’s Vision Pro, but without the bulky headset, and presumably, a more convincing illusion that these digital representations are really in the room with you. The glasses’ software is built on Android, after a failed attempt to create something more custom, The Information reports, and that software is projected before your eyes via “costly custom waveguides and microLED projectors,” according to The Verge.
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The company is relying on differential electromyography
The current Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are controlled using voice commands and taps or swipes on the side of the frames’ temples, but Meta has plans for an even more high-tech and hands-free method of controlling its first AR glasses. The company hopes to use a wristband that can detect your electrical pulses in your arm’s neurons to let you control things just by thinking. That includes navigating interfaces and even typing. The concept was originally created by a company Meta acquired in 2019 called CTRL-Labs, and uses a technique called EMG or differential electromyography to make it happen, The Verge writes in the same report.
Assuming the wristbands can be mass-produced, Meta hopes to also use them in its next pair of smart glasses. These glasses, codenamed “Hypernova” are a premium sucessor to the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and will reportedly include a small heads-up display for notifications.
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The company reportedly faces some design pushback
A key part of the success of Meta’s smart glasses is that, save for a few differences in colors, and slightly wider temples, they look just like normal Ray-Bans. Meta forged a partnership with Ray-Ban’s owner, EssilorLuxottica, to make it happen, but that partnership might only go so far. The Information reports that the company’s “Hypernova” smart glasses won’t bear the Ray-Ban branding when they launch in 2025 because EssilorLuxottica disagreed with the design of the glasses. Considering the extra space and power necessary to accomodate any kind of display, it’s possible what Meta has in mind is too clunky to really look like a pair of Ray-Bans.
The company’s first AR glasses are still likely too much of a prototype to get any kind of official branding, but I can’t imagine they’ll be sleek enough for EssilorLuxottica to be involved either. Meta is reportedly considering investing in the eyeglasses company to have more of a say, but we’ll have to wait and see whether that makes a difference when these products actually launch.
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Owning the next big platform
Having to rely on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store burned Meta both in terms of its advertising business and how much money it could make from users directly. Heavily investing in AR and VR is a bet that Meta can own and run the iPhone and iOS of the future.
That it can be the place people go to for apps and that it can get money for every transaction. It remains to be seen whether a pair of AR glasses will replace the smartphone, but Meta is designing it’s first pair of AR glasses to be standalone in the hopes they will.
Based on what’s been reported about the design of these glasses and their wireless coprocessor, achieving that independence has come with serious drawbacks, not unlike the Vision Pro’s external battery pack, but it’s what Meta needed to do to make it happen.
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They’re too expensive to produce at scale
The reveal of Meta’s first AR glasses is being talked about as a demo for a reason — the glasses won’t be available as a product anytime soon. The difficulty of producing these glasses in a way that’s affordable and able to be done at scale isn’t possible yet.
“These things were built on a prohibitively expensive technology path,” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told The Verge in December 2023. “For us to return to this capability in a consumer electronics price point and form factor is the real work that we have ahead of us.”
In that same interview, Bosworth suggested the changes the company needed to make proper AR glasses feasible would lead to “a setback of a year or two from our original schedules,” but he also didn’t rule out a demo for 2024. “I think there’s a pretty good chance that people will get a chance to play with it in 2024.”
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Meta’s inching closer to its moonshot
If there’s anything the last few years have proven, it’s that Meta went public with its metaverse concept way too early. The company continues to make great VR hardware, but there are some ideas that just aren’t technologically ready, let alone culturally acceptable. We’ll have to wait until September to see if the company does end up demoing AR glasses, but at the very least, they sound interesting. Anything is better than strapping another heavy headset to your head to get a taste of the future.
Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses
The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are Meta’s best case for why it’s capable of making truly great AR glasses thanks to their sleek design and helpful Meta AI features.
