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Wearables have been trying to thread a particularly tricky needle as of late. Though funky chunky hardware will always have its appeal, you ideally want kit that sits on your body to be both reasonably powerful and lightweight. Some smart glasses bulk up their frames in order to stash impressive lenses alongside computational power, while others delegate the technical heavy-lifting to a separate box hooked up via a tangle of wires. Neither are especially elegant solutions.
Then there’s Orion, Meta’s in-development AR glasses. In a recent blog post, Meta claimed, “Orion combines the benefits of a large holographic display and personalized AI assistance in a comfortable, all-day wearable form factor.” How will the frames achieve this? With a wireless ‘Compute Puck’ containing “Meta-designed custom silicon for AI and machine perception.”
The elongated, plastic patty “offloads Orion’s processing power to run application logic”—so, it’s like a mouse and a CPU in one. This keeps the glasses lightweight, while also achieving a pocketable form factor for the puck itself. According to Meta, the road to achieving this design was neither easy nor straightforward, with some very early concepts incorporating headsets weighing almost four pounds.
Meta’s director of Product Management, Rahul Prasad, explains: “When you’re building something like this, you start getting into the limits of physics. For the last 50 years, Moore’s Law has made everything smaller, faster, and lower power. The problem is that now you’re starting to hit limits on how much heat you can dissipate, how much battery you can compress, and how much antenna performance you can fit into a particular sized object.”
Orion and its “wrist-based neural interface” was last seen during the Meta Connect 2024 keynote. The puck isn’t replacing the wrist band though; the three components that make up Orion—the puck, glasses, and wristband—will interact wirelessly.
Previously, the Orion frames were seen sporting a decidedly chunky form factor, making the comparatively svelte Halliday AI glasses particularly attention-grabbing back in January. It’s notable too that those unrelated AI frames also sport a separate remote control device.
Instead of looking down at your phone, big tech may be moving towards putting the screen both on your face and in the palm of your hand as at least two separate devices. Along those lines, Meta claims that Orion’s compute puck offers a few advantages over, say, hooking up your AR glasses to an app on your phone.
“If you didn’t have the puck, you wouldn’t be able to have the experiences that Orion offers in its form factor—period,” Prasad begins, later going on to say, “Even if one were to co-design a smartphone to work with AR glasses, the demanding performance requirements would drain the phone battery and suck away compute capacity from phone use cases. On the other hand, the puck has its own high-capacity battery, high-performance [System-on-Chip], and a custom Meta-designed AI co-processor optimized for Orion.”
Despite all of that power, there is still the matter of convincing a userbase to carry around yet another lump of tech. The form factor and wireless functionality makes this doable, but this isn’t necessarily going to get folks in the door—so what will?
Product Design Engineering Manager Jared Van Cleave shares, “At one point, the hypothesis was that AR gaming was going to be this killer use case.”
With haptics and 6DOF sensors in the puck, plus eye gaze and hand tracking via the glasses, you can see the vision. There was a point in time when the development team prototyped a few AR game demos, and even looked into beefing up the puck with more traditional gamepad features like trigger buttons.
Van Cleave explains that the team “didn’t end up actually building any of that stuff. We prototyped it, but we didn’t ever go for a full build. We wanted to keep it simple. We wanted to do these soft interfaces but not make physical, mechanical buttons.”
Ultimately, this question of AR gaming is left open-ended as the developers behind Orion and its puck are still figuring out how to pitch it to a consumer base. Meta’s blog post tries to frame this as a positive, with Industrial Designer, Emron Henry, saying: “We’re defining a category that doesn’t quite exist yet.” Van Cleave echoes this sentiment, explaining that while a traditional smartphone has certain design constraints, the “compute puck can be whatever we want it to be.”
Personally, I’m not sure I buy it. I already have a very fraught relationship with my phone, in no small part due to the screaming hellmouth that the social media platforms I willingly choose to hang out on have become. Strapping a similar device more directly to my face does not fill me with excitement. Meta’s splitting of that device into three parts, with little clear idea of what exactly will be the ecosystem’s ‘killer use case’ does not fill me with confidence either.
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Kurt Indovina
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