Meta Shows Off Orion’s AR Operating System Interface

Meta shared a brief video displaying off the working system interface of its Orion AR glasses prototype.

The Orion AR glasses prototype was offered at Meta Connect 2024 in September. Whereas Orion itself will not turn out to be a product, as the corporate admits it will probably’t be virtually mass produced, Meta does plan to finally launch AR glasses that “construct on our R&D efforts with Orion”, although with a narrower field of view.

As a part of the Orion effort, Meta mentioned it put collectively a prototype working system, together with person interface and key apps, within the months main as much as the Join reveal. The brand new video reveals off this interface, in addition to a few of these apps.

To Meta’s credit score, the video seems to point out the field of view chopping off realistically and most digital interfaces and objects as translucent, reflecting the constraints of the show system.

Developer Alex Coulombe, who published his Orion demo impressions on UploadVR, confirmed that the video is just not an idea. “For these questioning, no this isn’t an idea video, that is truly what it seems to be and seems like in there”, Alex mentioned on 𝕏.

It is attention-grabbing to notice, nevertheless, that regardless of being lower than 20 seconds, Meta’s new video appears to point out a minimum of six separate app launcher principal menu interfaces. This might counsel that some are ideas, or simply that the corporate is experimenting with a number of approaches.

It’s possible you’ll be questioning why Orion would not simply use Horizon OS, Meta’s working system for its Quest headsets. There are two doubtless causes for that, and so they each stem from the truth that AR glasses are a separate product class to combined actuality headsets, not a replacement.

The primary is that Horizon OS is designed for (comparatively) extensive discipline of view headsets able to full opacity, with a large hand monitoring quantity, which are used principally indoors, and principally stationary. This ends in fairly completely different design issues and constraints than AR glasses you’d need to use whereas outside and on the go.

The second is the efficiency envelope. Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth recently said of Orion that “the compute envelope is 10x smaller” than Quest, and a former worker mentioned he instructed workers to consider Orion as “extra in keeping with a Gameboy Advance or a DS, not a PS3 or perhaps a PS2 or PS1”. Meaning a simplified interface with a distinct structure and simplified, less ambitious apps.

Meta Explains Why Porting From Quest To Orion Won’t Be Easy

Meta’s CTO explained why porting games from Quest to AR glasses like Orion won’t be easy, and revealed that it has 10x lower performance.

It is a scenario considerably akin to why iPhone did not run macOS and Apple Watch did not run iOS. Whereas these platforms do share core tech, as Meta has mentioned Orion’s OS does with Horizon OS, the app structure and interface are fairly completely different, owing to the completely different kind issue. With the primary shopper product reportedly slated for 2027, Meta shall be spending the following three years determining what interfaces and approaches swimsuit the distinctive kind issue of AR glasses, shifting what’s seen within the video above from a tough prototype to what the corporate seemingly hopes would be the dominant platform for the way forward for computing.