Exclusive: We tried Meta's AR glasses with Mark Zuckerberg

[Music] this is Orion meta's first pair of AR glasses up top I want to be clear Orion was supposed to be a product you could buy but it's not instead it's a Peak at what meta has coming for Hardware it's releasing over the next few years and in a bigger way it's a marker of where the smart glasses of today are eventually headed I was one of the first people outside of meta to try ran for about 2 hours I Ed the glasses to browse the web play games and video call with people through Messenger

oh and Mark Zuckerberg beat me in pong this is going to be the whole interview it's just an hour of us we can't it's like we were going to ask questions but instead I just you say you're undefeated no no no okay absolutely not i' never won a game before this week okay oh okay i' had only been defeated good game good game you you have un Fair Advantage but that's all right I a few more Aion exists in three parts the glasses themselves a neural wristband for controlling them with finger movements and a wireless

compute Puck that offloads app logic from the glasses to help improve battery and reduce heat the way you navigate the interface is through eye and hand tracking voice and most importantly the neural wristband it's hard to compare this experience to a laptop or phone but in the simplest of terms ter your eyes or hands act as the mouse and you click by pinching your fingers together if you've ever used the Vision Pro you'll get how the eye tracking works pretty quickly I want to focus on the wristband for a second because it's truly one of

the most magical experiences I've had with a piece of new technology and I think the world will be seeing it in the wild even before the commercial successor to Orion is released it's about the size of a Fitbit and uses electromyography to interpret neural signals and translate them into the input for the glasses the main gestures it recognizes are pinching your index finger with your thumb to select pinching your middle finger and thumb to invoke the main menu and swiping up or down with your thumb against your closed Palm to scroll there's haptic feedback on

the band to let you know when it recognizes a gesture which is a helpful signal that made me quickly comfortable with using it do you like using hand tracking at all with this or do you mostly just do the band it depends on what the app is I mean for some of the things I think it is still pretty natural to like Reach Out And Touch It and all that but but I don't know I mean the band is just going to keep getting better and better right now you have to do these these little

subtle gestures but I mean the plan is over the next few years to make it set and just pick up almost motionless gestures that you that you make so I think that'll be pretty wild once you get there the first thing you notice when you put Orion on is it's 70° field of view which is much wider than any pair of Air glasses I've tried to date a narrow field of view means that a graphics don't feel much of what you're seeing but with Orion I had to get up pretty close to something before its

edges started to disappear this made a huge difference for the overall experience U LED projectors inside the frame of Orion beam Graphics in front of your vision via wave guides in the lenses which are made of silicon carbide and not glass seven cameras and sensors in the frames sense the world around you to Anchor virtual objects in space you can leave a window open turn your head and walk away come back and it's still there the quality of the graphics isn't at the level that I'd want to watch a movie in the glasses but I

had no problem reading text on a web page that was several feet away my demo consisted of experiences designed to simulate how one may use AR glasses throughout the day in the future it's clear meta has an idea for how people will use glasses like these but the software is early My Demo was very much on Rails and guided by meta employees in the room though I was able to navigate the glasses on my own a little bit and jump in and out of apps the coolest part of the demo was using meta AI to

identify ingredients for a smoothie that we're out on a table and then have the glasses show me a recipe to make them with instructions it was a Peak at how generative AI can intersect with a form factor like this in pretty powerful ways did you guys know that I make smoothies like every morning like this is kind of getting creepy good to see man yeah give me a smoothie recipe sure let me take a look at what ingredients you already have then I can put a recipe together for you I found several ingredients let me

make a recipe that's all right it missed the pineapple but that's okay you don't really want that deep down okay here we gotch ban matcha banana boost incorporates most of your ingredients I would do that I've never done Macha in smothie we also chatted with our editor-in chief Nei Patel can you see me at all what do you see I see nothing I see a gray gray screen that's what Alex looks like on the I see you but I've got Verge pulled up on a pain here and then you're just like a video hanging out

in the middle do you see like a whole Square am I just like floating is just my head yeah you're floating it's like a square window you're floating and I can like come up to you what's the resolution like I just came off the vergecast I got like a very French headphone hair going on here can you see that look good um it's about good it's something good I mean it's like it's you know it's not like you're going to like watch Avatar but it's like it's good like I can see well you sound great

I have to say I can't tell if that is the microphone on the glasses or the speakers on the iPhone but you sound great it's the glasses yeah it's weird that I can't see you are they going to add avatars to this thing yeah so they the glasses have inward facing cameras so they will scan my face and represent me as a codc avatar when I'm calling you and they're not but they're not selling this thing yeah they're not they didn't make many they cost a lot of money so like yeah amazing well tell them

to send me one yeah yeah Nei wants one [Music] Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about air glasses for a long long time he's called them the Holy Grail device that will eventually replace smartphones and Orion is the first pair of Air glasses I've tried that made me feel like that future isn't so far away that it feels like a pipe dream but there was a moment in my demo that showed me just how much work meta still has to do to get this right at one point I had multiple windows open to to the side

while sitting across from someone at a table and an incoming video call then pushed one of the windows directly over the person I was sitting across and at that point it felt like the glasses weren't augmenting reality but breaking [Music] it Orion was going to be a product meta sold to the world until a couple of years ago when it realized it couldn't manufacture them in a way that would even make sense at an ultra high-end price point so instead it's made about a thousand of for internal prototyping and demos like the one I received

so why is meta showing Orion to the world if you can't buy a pair it's impressive even for a prototype and it's not an exaggeration to say these glasses are the instate of Zuckerberg's big bet on the metaverse after all these years and the billions of dollars poured into making them I think the company wants to have something to show off even if air glasses still aren't quite ready for prime time I do like the visual of this looking like myores it's like yeah well this is like one of the oldest video games ever right

so I guess it's appropriate we're doing it on here but we got some more dimensionals