Mark Zuckerberg has a vision, and it’s not pretty
Mark Zuckerberg, attired in a t-shirt emblazoned with Aut Zuck, Aut Nihil (Zuck or nothing) was omnipresent at Meta Connect 2024, an event of little interest other than for the presentation of Orion, an augmented reality glasses prototype paired with a wrist band and a wireless compute puck that claims to combine the metaverse, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
However, this is a product which Meta says will not be available until at least 2027, given that at the moment, it costs the company about $10,000 a unit to make. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has modestly called them “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen” sending Meta’s share price up 3%.
Although thicker and heavier even than the RayBan Meta Smart Glasses launched in late 2022, weighing around 100 grams, they’re obviously much lighter than the Apple Vision Pro and can be used to see holograms, apps and movies thanks to the inclusion of micro-prisms in the lenses, for which the company’s engineers, and several billion dollars worth of acquisitions, should take credit.
