I enjoyed attending Meta Connect in person this year at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Meta Connect inherits its name from the previous Oculus Connect conference, where Meta would announce its latest VR headsets from the Oculus brand, which has now been absorbed into the Meta brand. This year’s event was a healthy mixture of the company’s many efforts in VR, AR, AI and wearables. Since Meta has so many ambitious projects happening in parallel, it was a great year to attend in person. I’ll start by reviewing the updates to existing products, then turn to the real star of the show: Meta’s Orion AR glasses.

Ray-Ban Meta Success And The New Model

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have been a runaway hit for the company, selling more than 700,000 pairs in the year since the second-generation glasses were launched. These figures surpassed virtually everyone’s expectations, and I believe this success is a big reason why Meta joined Ray-Ban’s parent company EssilorLuxottica to sign a 10-year partnership deal in September. We may yet see the brands kick their partnership into higher gear with more aggressive marketing campaigns beyond what’s been seen at Ray-Ban, Sunglasses Hut and Lenscrafters stores. I’ve had the pleasure of using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses for the last year and have written an in-depth review of them, which talks about why this second-generation model is much more successful than the first-generation Ray-Ban Stories product.

At Meta Connect, the company also announced a new limited-edition clear frame design for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses with all the visible electronics plus new UltraTransitions GEN S lenses, which transition from clear to tinted in about 15 to 20 seconds. Meta made a limited run of 7,500 pairs, which sold out within a few days of the announcement, and gave away a good number of those pairs to press, analysts and influencers in attendance at Meta Connect. I got to try them out and now use them as my primary pair of glasses because I can use them indoors (although I don’t think the transition lenses get dark enough for prolonged outdoor use).

Meta also announced new capabilities for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including live translation, new AI-enhanced vision capabilities and accessibility for blind people with Be My Eyes. Meta also added new audio partners Audible and iHeartRadio for added listening capabilities, plus it expanded existing integrations with Spotify and Amazon Music.

Quest 3S And AAA Games

At Meta Connect, Meta announced a new entry-level VR headset to replace the Quest 2. The new headset is a cost-down version of the Quest 3 with cheaper lenses, displays and design. It lowers the price of entry for mixed reality while simultaneously broadening the market and enabling Meta developers to access one bigger, more cohesive pool of devices. The Quest 3S becomes the $299 entry point, and then as you increase storage, you end up with Quest 3 with 512GB at $499.

The big deal with the Quest 3S is that it sells for $299 but still features the same processor as the Quest 3. This will make things easier for developers to target one performance profile for their games. Meanwhile, the Quest 2 can be phased out as the “budget” headset. This move also establishes mixed reality at a $299 price point, enabling developers to build MR apps that can reach way more customers and work across both Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

I think this headset will be very popular this holiday season as people shy away from the overpriced PlayStation 5 Pro console and look for a gaming alternative with substance. Thankfully, the Quest 3S will also be getting a ton of new features such as Hyperscape, which uses Gaussian splats to create 3-D scans of places. There are also a bunch of AAA VR titles including Just Dance VR, Batman: Arkham Shadow, the Group Watch feature on the YouTube app, Metro Awakening, Behemoth and Alien: Rogue Incursion. These are in addition to the tons of other compelling indie titles coming out this month. Android Central has a great roundup of all the new titles.

Meta AI — Llama 3.2 And More

Meta AI is at the heart of much of what Meta does today; for example, it’s embedded inside Messenger and Instagram. It also drives many of the Ray-Ban Meta capabilities, which allows the smart glasses to improve and expand what they can do. Those capabilities such as live translation are powered by the new Llama 3.2 model, which brings multimodal capabilities to Meta AI and enhances vision and voice. This is also the model for which Meta has both 11B and 90B parameter versions that it designates as “medium-sized,” while it also offers text-only 3B and 1B versions for mobile devices. These smaller text-only versions are already optimized for Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware and optimized for Arm processors. Meta says that the 11B and 90B models are drop-in replacements for their text-only predecessors, improving capability without needing more resources or a larger memory footprint.

Orion Reaches For The Stars

The star of Meta Connect was the Orion AR glasses. These glasses come as a three-part platform that combines a pair of advanced AR glasses with a compute puck and an EMG wristband. Mark Zuckerberg showed off Orion on stage and talked about the company’s aspirations in the AR space, while demonstrating the many things Orion can already do. While the Orion AR glasses are a demonstration device—not a consumer product or even a developer device—Orion has helped Meta realize where it should invest for the next generation of AR. I believe that Meta wanted this product to be at least a developer device, but the $10,000 cost made that untenable. A lot of that cost comes from the custom-made silicon carbide waveguides, which were created specifically for this headset.

I had the opportunity to try Orion for myself, and the biggest thing that impressed me was how encompassing the 70-degree field of view was. While the form factor wasn’t perfect, it was extremely sleek, and could be considered acceptable compared to most AR glasses in the market today. The EMG wristband also created a new way for users to interact with AR experiences without needing a controller. My favorite game to try out on Orion was a 3-D Space Invaders-like game that took advantage of hand-tracking, eye-tracking, the EMG wristband and spatial audio to create some of the best AR gaming I’ve ever encountered.

While the demos were done indoors, I don’t believe these glasses are ready for prime time for outdoor use. Additionally, when I tried them, they had only 13 pixels-per-degree resolution, which was noticeable when watching videos. That said, the company has already upgraded the display tech to 26 pixels per degree since the event and is targeting 30 for its final spec. Powering that much resolution requires a lot of compute, but too much compute will destroy battery life, weight and thermals, which is why Meta opted for a compute puck. I believe compute will become more commoditized and distributed. Split rendering is the future, it’s just that we don’t yet have enough GPUs in the cloud; that said, Nvidia might change that with its new AI-RAN offering that it recently announced with T-Mobile. (More on that in my analysis of T-Mobile Capital Markets Day from earlier this week.)

The EMG wristband felt like the most polished part of the experience. It was extremely comfortable and accurate to use, and I believe it serves a dual purpose for improved hand-tracking when your hands might be out of the cameras’ field of view. That said, I’m not sure if we’ll see the EMG wristband anywhere else within Meta’s products, though it could be helpful for MR applications where hand-tracking could use an assist.

Overall, Orion was an enlightening experience that reinvigorated my hope in the future of AR glasses, even if that future is likely years away. I think it also helped Meta’s partners and investors better understand the company’s vision for AR and how they can contribute to accomplishing that future. Standalone AR glasses are the holy grail of XR and will likely represent the closest thing we have to a smartphone replacement, even though I do believe we’ll likely use future AR glasses in conjunction with smartphones, PCs and the cloud.