Meta's Orion AR glasses prototype: CNBC reviews

This is Orion, our first fully functioning prototype, and if I do say so, the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen. I have tested a wide range of virtual reality and mixed reality glasses, plus recently some augmented reality ones, and Met as Orion was the first time that I saw the potential for augmented reality glasses to become the next computing platform. What really distinguished Met as Orion prototype and the augmented reality category in general from the mixed reality headsets that Apple and Meta have in the market now is that unlike those where you're seeing the world around you through cameras, with Orion you're looking through a crystal display which looks as clear as glass, so it seems a lot more like glasses. Now the Orion glasses connect to a small computing device about this big that can slide into your pocket and a bracelet that looks like an Apple watch band. That's to read the electrical signals that pass through your wrist when you're moving your hand. Does that feel okay? Yeah. All right. So it's like a sensor? Yeah. Now they taught me the four hand movements to control the augmented reality. This is select, this is home screen, you have scroll up and scroll down, and I was really impressed by how sensitive the wristband was. It wasn't tight at all and it was very lightweight. It picked up all of my controls even when my hand was in my pocket. Now wearing the glasses, you select objects by looking at them and then you click on an object by pinching your fingers together. When you turn off the home screen, it looks like you're just looking at the room around you. The demos were pretty straightforward. I scanned a QR code with the glasses to set up a game. I then played Pong with an Orion developer. I used the glasses to scan a set of ingredients and to get a recipe for a smoothie and I could use the browser inside the glasses to pull up an interview that I did on cnbc.com. It looks like I'm looking at a phone screen with eight different buttons. As I demoed in Meta's kitchen setup asking for a recipe and I saw how you can multitask between Instagram and a phone call, I could imagine wearing these glasses while I was cooking dinner to look at a recipe and also talk to a friend at the same time all on this new type of computing device, all hands free. Now I'm curious to see how much lighter these devices get and how they will be priced. Meta told me it's aiming for Orion to be priced like a high-end smartphone.