A FUTURE without phones feels much more real now that I’ve donned Mark Zuckerberg’s latest pair of sci-fi specs.
I took a trip to Meta’s HQ to try on the Orion holographic smart glasses – letting you see a virtual world all around you, rather than through a .
First off: this is NOT a headset. You can see the real world through the lenses – with some overlaid holographically. You’re not looking at a simulation or video feed.
Orion looks like regular glasses, but a little thicker. It reminds me of the 3D glasses you’re handed at the cinema.
We first heard about Orion last year at Connect, when . That same day, I sat down with his second-in-command and VR boss Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth who told me the specs might not just in your home too.
Trying them on during a demo in London, this futuristic vision starts to make sense.
EYE LIKE IT
You spend a bit of time calibrating the eye-tracking (look up, look left, so on).
And you strap on a wristband that lets you make subtle hand gesture to control the specs.
So if you want to bring up the app menu, you’d just touch your middle finger into your palm facing up.
And to click something on screen, you just point your eyeballs at it and click your index finger and thumb together.
You don’t even have to raise your hand to be in view of cameras. It’s the wristband doing the work, so you can leave your hand resting by your side. Neat.
Scrolling works by balling your hand up into a fist and then rubbing your thumb against the edge of your finger.
It all feels very natural.
These apps float in front of you, and feel very familiar. It’s like a computer screen in the air.
You’ve got and (both owned by Meta, of course), which work well.
I did a video call where I saw the other person hovering before my very eyes.
I send a text with my voice using the built-in microphones, and browse the web too.
You can have multiple apps open at once, so you can text a pal while watching , for instance.
I’m also very impressed by the on the glasses.
I played a game of Pong with a Meta staffer. We use our hands to knock a virtual ball between us. She wins comfortably. I am emotionally crushed – but impressed nonetheless.
It won’t win any gaming awards mind, but it’s a nice demo of the potential of a device like this. The proper VR table tennis games on Meta’s virtual reality goggles are far more impressive, so you can imagine something more like that arriving on these specs one day too.
A more thrilling game let me control a spaceship to blast alien baddies out of the sky.
Moving my head controlled the motion of the spaceship, while eye-tracking let me aim at enemies – firing missiles with finger taps.
I could’ve played it for hours. Sadly my future as a starship pilot is once again locked behind closed doors at Meta HQ.
NO PHONEY
What strikes me during the session is that I’ve scrolled Instagram, taken a video call, watched a , sent a text message, and played a game – all without having to touch .
There’s a friction with having to .
The delay of having to pull it out when you want to navigate somewhere, or take a photo, or quickly search something adds a hundred micro-annoyances to your day. God only knows how people who live in skinny jeans must feel.
These specs basically resolve that problem completely. It’s hard to imagine much that they couldn’t do that only your phone can. Manually typing without voice? Playing a game that relies on touch? The list is thin.
It’s also worth noting that the visual quality of the glasses is pretty decent.
This isn’t crystal-clear in the way that the pricey is, but that’s .
But it’s easy to read text and watch videos without straining.
If you’re watching a beautiful movie, you’ll still want to stick to a regular TV. In the future though? Upgraded visuals might kill the telly completely.
AI AM HUNGRY
I also get to use the AI element of the glasses.
The , which is a chatbot you can control with your voice.
I look at some ingredients on a table, and ask for a recipe out loud.
Meta uses the built-in camera and correctly identifies the oats, bananas, cacao, chia seeds plus a few other bits – and tells me how to cook up a posh porridge.
The recipe appears in mid-air, and I can click through to follow along with it. I can even keep it up while I cook.
Cleverly, the floating window is placed above the table – and to the right of a lamp.
That way, it doesn’t block anything important.
I’m told this isn’t by chance, but a design choice. It’s smart.
In fact, these floating windows get even smarter, because they have “persistence”;;.
So if I put up a YouTube video on my kitchen wall, then pop out to the shop and come back, it will still be there in the same spot.
Of course there’s nothing actually on my wall. But in this virtual layer over the real world, anything goes.
All the computing is handled by a small pod (a little smaller than a Beats Pill speaker, or roughly the size of a glasses case).
You can move about 30 feet from the pod, so you’ll want to keep it on or near you.
This helps to keep the weight of the glasses themselves down, and it seems like a fair trade-off. You could imagine one day a phone (or phone-like object) serving this purpose.
COMING SOON(-ISH)
So when can you get a pair?
Well Meta tells me a proper consumer version is about four or five years away.
And I can’t imagine they’ll be cheap. Meta has chucked billions at developing these prototypes, and it will want a decent return.
The company has flogged VR headsets for hundreds and even thousands, so the pricing of these specs is anyone’s guess.
Ultimately, Meta will be hoping to make these glasses better, lighter, slimmer, and price-attractive for people with each version.
And once we start reaching version four or five of this product, it’s going to be be a serious contender for replacing a smartphone.
Even in their current state, I can think of many tasks (video calls, quick internet searches, texting, and checking social media) that would be much easier to do on the glasses versus dragging my giant mobile out of pocket.
I can’t give a proper verdict on Orion because it’s not a final product. It doesn’t have a release date or a price, and it’s still far from being complete.
But when I use Orion, I feel very deeply that it makes sense as a gadget. Accessing computers in this way feels a lot more free. Smartphones are limiting because you’re capped at one specific screen size and shape.
Orion basically turns your entire world into a computer.
And if that sounds terrifying, don’t worry: you can always just take them off.
