The Next Big Thing Is Still … Smart Glasses
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg stood on a stage in California holding what appeared to be a pair of thick black eyeglasses. His baggy T-shirt displayed Latin text that seemed to compare him to Julius Caesar—aut Zuck aut nihil—and he offered a bold declaration: These are Orion, “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen.”
Those glasses, just a prototype for now, allow users to take video calls, watch movies, and play games in so-called augmented reality, where digital imagery is overlaid on the real world. Demo videos at Meta Connect, the company’s annual conference, showed people playing Pong on the glasses, their hands functioning as paddles, as well as using the glasses to project a TV screen onto an otherwise blank wall. “A lot of people have said that this is the craziest technology they’ve ever seen,” Zuckerberg said. And although you will not be able to buy the glasses anytime soon, Meta is hawking much simpler products in the meantime: a new Quest headset and a new round of software updates to the company’s smart Ray-Bans, which have cameras and an AI audio assistant on board, but no screen in the lenses.
Orion seems like an attempt to fuse those two devices, bringing a fully immersive computerized experience into a technology that people might actually be comfortable putting on their face. And it is not, you may have noticed, the only smart-glasses product to have emerged in recent months. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Snap are all either officially working on some version of the technology or rumored to be doing so. Their implementations are each slightly different, but they point to a single idea: that the future is about integrating computing more seamlessly into everyday life.
