A Few More Thoughts on Orion and the New Frontier

Just appended the following to my piece from yesterday on Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype:

  1. Facebook ships VR headsets and a software platform with an emphasis so strong on “the metaverse” that they rename the company Meta.
  2. Apple announces, and then 7 months later ships, Vision Pro with a two-fold message in comparison: (a) the “metaverse” thing is so stupid they won’t even use the term; (b) overwhelmingly superior resolution and experiential quality. Consumer response, however, is underwhelming.
  3. Meta drops the “metaverse” thing and previews Orion, effectively declaring that they think VR headsets are the wrong thing to build to create the product that defines the next breakthrough step change in personal computing. AR glasses, not VR headsets, are the goal.

It’s a lot of back-and-forth volleying, which is what makes the early years of a new device frontier exciting and highly uncertain. Big bold ideas get tried out, and most of them wind up as dead ends to abandon. Compare and contrast to where we’ve been with laptops for the last 20 years, or the pinnacle we appear to have reached in recent years with phones.

★ Thursday, 26 September 2024