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Orion (Meta AR Glasses)

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Orion is an augmented reality glasses prototype built by Meta and revealed on 2024-09-25 at Meta Connect 2024. It was never sold. Meta built roughly 1,000 units for its own employees and for demonstrations to selected outside guests, at a reported cost to build of roughly $10,000 per unit, and describes it as a product prototype rather than a research experiment or a shipping device [1][4]. The glasses weigh 98 g, use silicon carbide diffractive waveguides fed by microLED projectors, and cover a display field of view of roughly 70 degrees diagonally, which Meta called the largest field of view in the smallest AR glasses form factor to date [2][5][6]. Compute is offloaded to a wireless puck, and the main input device is a wrist-worn surface electromyography (EMG) band whose shipping descendant is the Meta Neural Band [4][16]. Orion functions as a technology demonstration that defines Meta's stated AR roadmap rather than as a product. As of 2026-08-01 Meta has announced no consumer device based on it, and the display glasses the company actually sells are far more limited.

Name and status

Meta calls the device Orion. The company's newsroom post never uses the phrase "Project Orion", and the summary box at the top of that post states that Orion was "previously codenamed Project Nazare" [1]. Meta's language about what Orion is has been consistent and carefully bounded: "While Orion won't make its way into the hands of consumers, make no mistake: this is not a research prototype. It's one of the most polished product prototypes we've ever developed, and is truly representative of something that could ship to consumers" [1]. Meta's own product page for the device says that "While not available to the public, the breakthroughs from this internal product are rapidly ushering in the next generation of computing" [3].

Distribution was limited to Meta employees and "select external audiences" [1]. That places Orion alongside Project Aria, Meta's sensor-equipped research glasses, which are also not sold and go instead to internal researchers and more than 200 academic and corporate partners [21]. The difference is intent: Aria is instrumentation, Orion was meant to become a product and then was not.

Hardware

ComponentSpecificationSource type
Display field of viewApproximately 70 degrees diagonalMeta [2][3]; "diagonal" per Road to VR [6]
WaveguideSilicon carbide, diffractive, single plate per lensMeta [8]
Light sourceMicroLED projectors, "hundreds of thousands of nits" at sourceMeta via Road to VR [6]
Brightness at the eye300 to 400 nitsMeta via Road to VR [6]
Angular resolution13 pixels per degree in the main demo; a 26 PPD variant existed at lower brightnessMeta via Road to VR [6]; independent analysis [15]
Weight98 gMeta [6][4]
FrameMagnesiumMeta [2][4]
Cameras and sensorsSeven, in the frame rimsMeta [2][4]
Glasses batteryUp to 3 hours claimed; about 2 hours reported in useMeta [6]; The Verge [4]
Compute puckWireless, SoC plus a Meta-designed AI co-processor, "all day" batteryMeta [9]; Road to VR [6]
Puck link and rangeCustom Wi-Fi 6 protocol, roughly 10 to 12 feetRoad to VR [6]; The Verge [4]
InputEMG wristband, eye tracking, hand tracking, voiceMeta [2][3]
Prototype unitsAbout 1,000Meta [4][6]
Cost to build per prototypeAround $10,000Reported by The Verge [4] and Road to VR [6]

The glasses run hand tracking, eye tracking, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and AR graphics locally, using several custom Meta chips containing what the company calls "dozens of highly custom silicon IP blocks" [2][10]. Application logic and the heavier on-device AI and machine perception work move to the puck, a pocketable wireless unit that eliminates the tethering cable earlier AR designs needed [5]. Meta built it instead of offloading to a phone because, in the words of product management director Rahul Prasad, "A good AR experience demands really high performance: high frame rates, extremely low latency, fine-grained wireless and power management" [9]. Meta published a set of engineering blog posts in March 2025 covering the waveguides, the custom silicon and the puck in more detail than the launch announcement did [20].

Silicon carbide waveguides

The choice of silicon carbide is the most unusual thing about Orion and the main reason it stayed a prototype. A waveguide display can only carry as wide a field of view as its substrate's refractive index allows, and Meta's AR waveguides tech lead Giuseppe Calafiore put the relationship plainly: "The larger the refractive index of a material, the larger field of view the display can support" [8].

Meta's numbers: silicon carbide has a refractive index of 2.7, which the company describes as "the highest refractive index known for an optical application"; lithium niobate, the team's first candidate, is roughly 2.3; the highest-index glass available to the team was 1.8 [8]. Meta frames that as a 17.4% increase over lithium niobate and a 50% increase over glass [8]. The practical consequence is plate count. A glass design needed three stacked plates per lens, which Meta says was obviously unwearable; silicon carbide got the team to two plates and then to one [8].

Optical quality followed. Optical scientist Pasqual Rivera described wearing the glass version as feeling "like you were in a disco", with "rainbows everywhere", against a silicon carbide version that felt "like you were at the symphony listening to a quiet, classical piece" [8][11]. Meta says it ran an internal demo in 2019 and settled on silicon carbide in July 2020 [8].

The cost problem was the yield. Meta expected the material to become cheap as other industries adopted it, and it did not; CTO Andrew Bosworth said of the lenses, "You can't imagine how horrible the yields are" [4]. By 2025 the company was more optimistic, because electric-vehicle demand had produced a supply glut. Calafiore: "All of these silicon carbide manufacturers had cranked up the supply massively in response to the expected EV boom. Right now, there's an overcapacity that didn't exist when we were building Orion" [8]. Barry Silverstein, Reality Labs director of research science, said suppliers had moved "from four-inch to eight-inch wafers, and some are working on precursors to 12-inch wafers" [8][12].

Brightness and resolution

Orion's optical path is lossy enough that the gap between what the projectors emit and what reaches the eye is roughly three orders of magnitude. Meta puts the microLED source at hundreds of thousands of nits and the light arriving at the wearer's eye at 300 to 400 nits [6]. That is bright enough indoors and nowhere near enough outdoors, where roughly 3,000 nits would be needed [6]. Either a brighter source or a more efficient optical path is required before Orion-class glasses work in daylight.

Angular resolution is the other shortfall. The main Connect demo ran at 13 pixels per degree, spread across the full 70-degree field; Meta also showed a 26 PPD variant that traded brightness for sharpness, and told interviewers its target for a consumer device was 30 PPD [6]. Display industry analyst Karl Guttag called the combination a "Strange Mix of a Wide FOV and Low Resolution", noting that 13 PPD across 70 degrees works out to roughly a 720 by 540 image and that "Even 26PPD is a fairly low angular resolution" [15]. For comparison, Meta Quest 3 is around 25 PPD [6].

Input

Orion is controlled by a combination of eye tracking, hand tracking, voice, and the EMG wristband [2][3]. Eye tracking is implemented unusually: instead of a ring of infrared LEDs around the lens, Meta placed very small LEDs directly on the lens in the wearer's line of sight, with the powering wires laid out in a near-random pattern so they read as a stray hair rather than a grid [6].

The wristband reads electrical activity from forearm muscles and converts it into discrete inputs. In The Verge's hands-on, pinching index finger to thumb selected, pinching middle finger to thumb opened or hid the app launcher, and a thumb-against-palm coin-flip gesture scrolled, with haptic confirmation in the band; because the band does not need to be visible to the glasses' cameras, gestures worked with the hand in a pocket or behind the back [4]. Reviewer Alex Heath found gaze as pointer and pinch as click "more precise than controlling a Quest or Vision Pro with my hands", and judged the wristband "more polished than Orion itself" [4]. It was: Meta shipped a commercial sEMG wristband as the Meta Neural Band alongside Meta Ray-Ban Display a year later [16].

Why Orion was never sold

Orion was supposed to be a product. According to The Verge, the program graduated from Meta's research division in 2018 with a goal of shipping in the low tens of thousands, and Mark Zuckerberg shelved the release in 2022 during a period of company-wide cost cutting [4]. Meta then built about 1,000 units for internal development and demos instead [4].

Traces of the abandoned product survive in the hardware. The Verge reported that Orion carries front-facing cameras that can capture video but do not, a disabled GPS in the compute puck, and an inactive cellular modem, prompting a joke from Meta's VP of wearables Alex Himel: "We're saving $20 a month" [4]. The unit cost, driven mainly by silicon carbide lens yields, is the reason usually given for the decision [4].

Reality Labs, the division that built Orion, reported full-year 2025 revenue of $2.21 billion against an operating loss of $19.19 billion [19]. Bosworth framed the decision to show Orion publicly as a response to that criticism: "We're not just making this shit up here. We're not burning cash. The investments we're making are a real, tangible technology" [4].

What Meta has and has not committed to

Meta has committed to building consumer AR glasses, but not to a date, a price, a name, or the specifications Orion demonstrated. The most direct statement came from Bosworth in a September 2024 Instagram question-and-answer session. Asked whether there would be a consumer version of Orion by 2030, he said it "won't be Orion, because Orion is this particular prototype, but yeah" [7]. On price he said the glasses probably would not reach a Quest 3S or even necessarily a Quest 3 price point, but that Meta had "a goal of making them affordable and accessible at least in the space of phone, laptop territory" [7]. The widely repeated figure of about $1,500 before 2030 is Road to VR's own reading of that "phone, laptop" range, benchmarked against the $1,500 price of a specced-out MacBook Air. It is not a number Meta published, and Meta has committed to no price [6][7].

The design targets Meta named are a downgrade from Orion in some respects. The Verge reported that the first consumer device would not use silicon carbide lenses, would have a smaller field of view than Orion, would be higher resolution, and would use frames about half as thick [4]. Zuckerberg's own assessment: "We still want it to be a little smaller, a little brighter, a little bit higher resolution, and a lot more affordable before we put it out there as a product. And look, we have a line of sight to all those things" [4]. Orion product lead Rahul Prasad put the remaining work as a change of category: "It was a science problem to get to a large field of view. The next phase is an engineering problem to get to higher resolution, higher brightness, and lower cost" [4].

Meta's last first-party statement on the subject came in the Meta Ray-Ban Display announcement of 2025-09-17: "We're continuing to work on a consumer version of our Orion prototype that we showed at Connect last year, so stay tuned" [16]. Meta had announced nothing further about a consumer Orion device as of 2026-08-01.

What Meta shipped instead

Meta's own product taxonomy as of September 2025 has three tiers: camera AI glasses with no display, display glasses, and AR glasses "like our Orion prototype" [16]. Only the first two are on sale. The camera tier is the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta lines [16], joined on 2026-06-23 by the Meta-branded Meta Glasses at $299, again made with EssilorLuxottica [22]. The display tier is Meta Ray-Ban Display, announced 2025-09-17 and on sale in the United States from 2025-09-30 at $799 including the Neural Band [16]. The distance between prototype and product is best read off the display specifications.

Orion (2024, prototype)Meta Ray-Ban Display (2025, shipping)
StatusNever sold [1]On sale in the US from 2025-09-30, $799 [16]
DisplayBinocular, silicon carbide diffractive waveguide [8]Monocular, right eye only, LCoS with geometric reflective waveguide [17]
Field of viewAbout 70 degrees diagonal [2][6]14 by 14 degrees, 20 degrees diagonal [17]
Resolution13 PPD in the main demo [6]600 by 600, 42 PPD [17]
Brightness300 to 400 nits at the eye [6]5,000 nits peak, Meta specification [17]
Weight98 g [6]69 g [17]
World trackingSLAM, eye and hand tracking on-glasses [2]No positional tracking, no eye tracking [14]

Meta Ray-Ban Display is a heads-up display, not spatial AR: it does not anchor content to the world, and its display window is a small fraction of Orion's by solid angle. It is brighter and sharper within that window, which is the trade Meta made to get something manufacturable. Even that product has been supply constrained. Meta paused its planned expansion to the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada on 2026-01-07, citing "unprecedented demand and limited inventory" [18].

Reception

Hands-on coverage was positive about the form factor and skeptical about everything downstream of it. Alex Heath of The Verge wrote that "Orion isn't a mirage. It's also not a product. It's somewhere in between", and noted that the demo ran on guardrails, with Meta staff triggering experiences from computers at the side of the room [4]. Developer Alex Coulombe, writing for UploadVR, praised the optical see-through view as "the real world, seen clearly with zero lag or distortion" while granting that "the resolution could be higher" [13].

The sharpest criticism came from Karl Guttag, who argued that Orion fit the definition of an "escape from the lab", a demonstration of "If money was not an obstacle, what could we do?" rather than a path to production [15]. His specific technical objection was eye glow, the forward projection of display light out of the front of a diffractive waveguide, which he said was "evident in all the videos and many photos" but which the coverage he had read did not mention [15]. His conclusion: "I am concerned that the diffractive Silicon Carbide waveguides are not the right solution in the near or long term. They certainly can't have a volume/consumer product with a significant 'eye glow' problem" [15]. The Verge's report that the first consumer device will not use silicon carbide lenses [4] is at least consistent with that reading, though Meta has not attributed the change to eye glow.

By the time Meta Connect 2025 arrived, UploadVR's David Heaney observed that public expectations had drifted well ahead of the roadmap, with "many are expecting Meta to ship Orion as a product, not just souped up Ray-Ban glasses" [14]. That gap is the main thing Orion is now used to illustrate. In 2024 Meta was competing for attention with Apple Vision Pro on the virtual reality side and with Snap's developer-focused Spectacles on the AR side, and Orion was its answer to both [4].

References

  1. ^"Introducing Orion, Our First True Augmented Reality Glasses." Meta Newsroom, 2024-09-25. about.fb.com/...rst-true-augmented-reality-glasses
  2. ^"Introducing Orion, Our First True Augmented Reality Glasses." Meta Blog, 2024-09-25. meta.com/...orion-ar-glasses-augmented-reality
  3. ^"Orion AR Glasses." Meta Emerging Tech, accessed 2026-08-01. meta.com/...orion
  4. ^Alex Heath. "Hands-on with Orion, Meta's first pair of AR glasses." The Verge, 2024-09-25. theverge.com/...ses-demo-mark-zuckerberg-interview
  5. ^Ben Lang. "Meta Reveals 'Orion' Prototype AR Glasses with Impressive Field-of-view and Wireless Compute Unit." Road to VR, 2024-09-25. roadtovr.com/...rion-prototype-reveal-connect-2024
  6. ^Ben Lang. "Meta Orion Interview Dives Deep Into Details Like Resolution, Battery Life, & More." Road to VR, 2024-10-07. roadtovr.com/...dive-resolution-battery-life-specs
  7. ^Scott Hayden. "Meta Expects Orion-like AR Glasses to Launch Before 2030, Priced Between Phones and Laptops." Road to VR, 2024-09-26. roadtovr.com/...rion-ar-glasses-release-date-price
  8. ^"How Silicon Carbide Waveguides Gave Orion Its Large Field of View." Meta Blog, 2025-03-06. meta.com/...eguides-ar-glasses-large-field-of-view
  9. ^"The Orion Compute Puck." Meta Blog, 2025-03-04. meta.com/...k-reality-labs-next-computing-platform
  10. ^"Orion's Custom Silicon." Meta Blog, 2025-03-05. meta.com/...orithms-energy-efficiency-reality-labs
  11. ^"Meta Details Path to 'Significantly Reduced Costs' of Next-gen AR's Most Critical Component." Road to VR, 2025-03-10. roadtovr.com/...ant-cost-reduction-orion-ar-lenses
  12. ^David Heaney. "Meta: Suppliers 'Heavily Pursuing' Producing 'Wonder Material' Enabling Orion's Field Of View." UploadVR, 2025-03-07. uploadvr.com/...uing-optical-grade-silicon-carbide
  13. ^Alex Coulombe. "Meta Orion Glasses Hands-On: Viewing AR's Future As A VR Developer." UploadVR, 2024-09-27. uploadvr.com/alex-coulombe-orion-glasses-hands-on
  14. ^David Heaney. "The Shadow Of Orion Looms Over Meta Connect 2025." UploadVR, 2025-09-17. uploadvr.com/...orion-looms-over-meta-connect-2025
  15. ^Karl Guttag. "Meta Orion AR Glasses (Pt. 1 Waveguides)." KGOnTech, 2024-10-06. kguttag.com/...meta-orion-ar-glasses-pt-1-waveguides
  16. ^"Meta Ray-Ban Display: AI Glasses With an EMG Wristband." Meta Newsroom, 2025-09-17. about.fb.com/...n-display-ai-glasses-emg-wristband
  17. ^David Heaney. "Meta Ray-Ban Display Review: First Generation Heads-Up Mobile Computing." UploadVR, 2025-11-10. uploadvr.com/meta-ray-ban-display-review
  18. ^Scott Hayden. "Meta Pauses International Release of Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses." Road to VR, 2026-01-07. roadtovr.com/...-ban-display-international-release
  19. ^"Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results." Meta Investor Relations, 2026-01-28. investor.atmeta.com/...default
  20. ^Victoria Song. "A nerdy dive into Meta's Orion glasses." The Verge, 2025-03-07. theverge.com/...meta-orion-ar-glasses-components
  21. ^"Project Aria." Meta, accessed 2026-08-01. projectaria.com
  22. ^"We're Partnering With EssilorLuxottica to Launch Meta Glasses." Meta Newsroom, 2026-06-23. about.fb.com/...ottica-partner-launch-meta-glasses

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