Meta revealed its Orion prototype last year to show the progress it has made toward compact AR glasses. Today the company talked more about the prototyping process, especially regarding the ‘compute puck’ that offloads much of the heavy processing into a device that goes in the user’s pocket.
One of the major reasons that today’s XR headsets are so big is because they need room for a lot of processing power, battery volume, and heat dissipation. But with Meta and the rest of the industry aiming to eventually make all-day wearable AR glasses, size becomes a serious challenge.
A ‘compute puck’ is a companion device for AR glasses that moves some of the processing and battery off of the user’s head and into a pocketable device.
Meta used the compute puck approach for its prototype Orion AR glasses. While companies like Magic Leap have used similar approaches in the past, Orion’s approach is somewhat novel because the compute puck is completely wireless. But it didn’t start out that way.
Today Meta revealed more about the prototyping process for Orion. In the post, the company says the compute puck was originally envisioned as a tethered, neck-worn device, codenamed Omega.
But this concept apparently didn’t last very long after the team decided it would cut the tether and make a pocketable puck that was completely wireless.
After becoming untethered, the Orion team realized that it opened new possibilities for what could be done with the device.
One clever idea involved using the puck as an anchor for content, such as projecting a video call above the puck. Not only would this serve as a tangible place for users to move their content from one place to another, it would also mean encouraging them to pull the puck out of their pocket, resulting in better performance thanks to improved cooling.
“It’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen—the device has the potential to create really fun and unique interactions,” said Emron Henry, Industrial Designer at Meta. “The user experience feels a bit like unleashing a genie from a bottle, where holograms seamlessly emerge from and dissolve back into the device.”
The team also considered using the puck as a controller, which could be tracked using inside-out tracking thanks to on-board cameras.
In the end, the version of Orion that has been seen publicly leans away from using the controller as a significant part of the input modality. Instead the glasses use a combination of eye-tracking and neural inputs thanks to the company’s prototype EMG wristband.
But there’s no telling what the final version of Orion will look like. For the team, this was a valuable time for design exploration.
“We’re defining a category that doesn’t quite exist yet,” notes Henry. “As you’d expect with R&D, there were starts and stops along the way. How will users expect to interact with holograms? Would they prefer to use an AR remote or is hand tracking, eye gaze, and EMG sufficient for input? What feels intuitive, low friction, familiar, and useful?
Although Meta says that Orion will eventually lead to its first pair of consumer AR glasses, for now the company has only a rough idea of when its first AR glasses will launch and what it will cost.
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