news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

author｜lijingya

on september 25, 2024, meta released orion glasses. in the history of technology product interaction, this date may have the same status in the history of ai development as the day gpt3 was released.

none of them are products that will be launched immediately, but for the first time, they have truly pointed out the direction for a long-anticipated and long-term "suspicious" technology, and made prototypes that you can use and feel. the next questions are from 1 to 100.

orion is the gpt3 moment of mankind's next generation intelligent interaction platform. the different emphasis on gpt3 at the beginning can be said to have directly affected the landscape of today's ai competition. similarly, for those who are ambitious about the next generation platform that can replace mobile phones, today is the time to study orion.

1

maximize lightness

glasses are among all the candidates for the “next generation interactive platform”, the one that requires the least effort to explain why this form is reasonable.

the problem it faces has always been whether it can be realized with the light and intelligent appearance that people can easily imagine and have seen countless times in various science fiction movies.

orion was seen and experienced for the first time.

orion is meta's first holographic augmented reality glasses. it achieves the capabilities of a miniature advanced computer with a weight of about 100 grams. its field of view reaches 70 degrees, which is the largest field of view among the smallest ar glasses to date. it can support gestures and eye tracking. , providing an immersive experience. it integrates holographic display technology and a personalized ai assistant. matched with the glasses is a revolutionary neural wristband that can interpret the user's brain waves. the "hands-on" experience seems to be achieving true "telepathy." this also allows orion to no longer have the long cables of various previous eyewear products.

everything looks like a regular pair of glasses. and this is the big breakthrough.

behind it are innovations in many aspects, from new materials and new processes to new technologies and new designs.

five years ago, when the meta technical team evaluated orion's idea, it believed that the success rate was only 10%. they attribute the core difficulty to the expansion of displays and viewing angles. meta ultimately built a new display architecture for orion, embedding micro-uled projectors within the glasses frame to accurately project light onto the waveguide structure on the lenses.

the nanoscale 3d structure in the lens refracts light and displays holograms of different depths and sizes in the environment. these are all due to breakthroughs brought about by material changes.

orion lenses abandon the glass used in conventional ar glasses and use controlled silicon carbide. silicon carbide has excellent optical properties. its high refractive index and durability allow the light coming from the projector to fill more areas. field of view is the key to achieving a large field of view and efficient photon utilization. silicon carbide helps orion achieve a large expansion of the 70° field of view of small glasses, and the 70-degree silicon carbide optical waveguide lens is the largest known field of view. angular light waveguide lenses are also hailed as the "holy grail" by the meta development team because they have greatly optimized the previous limitations of optical waveguides.

in addition, the silicon carbide etching process has considerable advantages in improving visual effects. it can make the optical waveguide optical device have a larger field of view, higher color reproduction and uniformity, and also significantly improve the rainbow pattern effect. at the same time, the lightness of silicon carbide makes the orion glasses body weigh only 98 grams, which is much lighter than the quest series and only one-sixth of the vision pro.

ar glasses are microcomputers worn on the face. solving the heat dissipation problem is also the key to product breakthroughs. orion's frame uses the same magnesium alloy material as the spacecraft, which ensures effective heat conduction and heat dissipation, and also improves the precision alignment of components, as well as the accuracy and stability of the optical system.

many other components of orion are also designed around heat dissipation, such as energy-saving micro-uleds in the projector, custom wireless components (which help orion eliminate cables), and professional custom silicon wafers that can help orion run artificial intelligence, energy-saving optimization is achieved in machine perception and graphics algorithms. it is reported that orion has customized more than ten chips around heat dissipation, which has helped it reduce power consumption from hundreds of milliwatts to tens of milliwatts when performing gesture interaction, eye tracking and slam algorithms.

1

meta’s special product line

these changes and breakthroughs make orion no longer limited to the stereotyped classification of "ar, vr". feedback from many developers and analysts who have experienced orion is that it is the next generation of smart terminal devices that humans need.

orion integrates multiple cameras and eye recognition cameras on the glasses, which can achieve fancy capabilities such as 6dof, image recognition, eye tracking, and depth tracking. this makes orion look like a mini version of vision pro in terms of these functions rather than another. an ar product. industry insiders pointed out that these are typical vr mr functions that most ar manufacturers cannot provide.

therefore, comparing meta's own products and existing products on the market, orion is a master of a whole. it is a more powerful hololens 2 and a vision pro that takes the ost (optical see-through) route.

behind orion is zuckerberg’s long-cherished wish for meta. for a long time, ar and vr have seemed to have the same origin, but they are distinct in terms of product design. companies in the two fields rarely cross each other's rivers. however, meta does not stick to the limitations of boundaries, and has repeatedly appeared in its metaverse territory. the routes between products intersect. in addition to being almost obsessed with the entire metaverse ecology, zuckerberg himself has invested more budget in the ar glasses project than vr and mr. the results of many years of self-research, coupled with the continuous acquisition and integration of technology and marketing, orion fully demonstrated the integration effect brought about by meta's rich technical reserves. zuckerberg himself called it full ar, which combines hardware and software. stronger in definition and more mobile in form.

in zuckerberg’s own words, “what you’re seeing with orion is exactly what i thought, and continue to think, is the quintessential vision of the next major computing platform for billions of people. and then all of these other things will be centered around it builds.” another thing that fills orion’s imagination is naturally ai. it can be seen from zuckerberg’s own interview about the ai ​​scene concept that part of meta’s route has been reflected in the quest ecosystem, while another part has been chosen to be dedicated to orion.

with the support of meta's large model liama 3.2, meta ai can identify surrounding environment objects on orion, and can perform virtual and real fusion displays. for example, the verge reporter used meta ai in orion to identify ingredients placed on the table and make ice cream. sha, on the content side, orion can be combined with meta ai in the demonstration to perform basic interactions, play simple ar games, implement hands-free video calls, and share multiple virtual screens on the same screen. although object recognition, virtual and real fusion, ar games, etc. are all capabilities that current head ar manufacturers have, judging from various ar+ai demonstration videos, orion has achieved more than 60 points, while most other companies have only achieved 6 points. .

in a recent interview, meta cto andrew bosworth described orion this way: "even five years ago, we evaluated ourselves and there was only a 10% chance of building one. because there are at least 10 technologies that no one has ever done. , and in the end we built not just one, but many.”

“the most important thing is that it is fully operational, has an operating system, can be connected to the internet, and allows you to develop software on it.

as you can imagine, if there was a problem in any of these links, we would not be able to get to where we are today. this is what we imagine the product that replaces the mobile phone will look like. we made it. "

1

greater future

from the perspective of meta's own meaning, it has been trapped by the lack of real hardware entrance and cannot escape the entanglement of google and apple. orion is likely to be the key. in the era of mobile internet, zuckerberg is subject to the double restrictions of the ios and android ecosystems. , he believes that meta could have made double profits in the previous era.

from a more macro perspective, it has been two years since chatgpt was launched. people at home and abroad are eagerly looking forward to super applications. however, the gap between current ai-native applications and super applications is still huge. even chatgpt itself cannot stand out from the crowd. a very important missing link is the appropriate hardware equipment to carry the new capabilities of ai.

andrew bosworth described in a recent interview that ai allows glasses to not only allow your virtual information to exist in the real world through holographic projection, but also allows people to make interactive requests for the real world. he revealed that orion’s previous focus has been on holographic capabilities, but ai has brought new possibilities in the past two years. let hardware development ideas move away from a world where mobile phones are still the core.

therefore, when orion waits for the new possibilities brought by ai, conversely, the new capabilities brought about by the progress of ai in the past two years also have the possibility of a powerful new carrier.

hardware is a natural window for collecting data, and xr, as a form of the next generation internet, is also a direction that can bring about tremendous changes in life and social interactions.

looking back at the logic of the traffic surge during the explosion of the previous generation of mobile internet, super applications did not appear in the era of large models. the essence is that the interactive sharing of apps is still not enough to form a network effect for user growth. currently, mr xr can naturally carry the needs of users for sharing. , backed by meta’s social media and rich game reserves, orion has the potential to incubate super applications.

in the past ten years since the us$3 billion acquisition of oculus, meta has invested a total of nearly us$50 billion in the metaverse business reality lab. during this period, there were high losses, thousands of layoffs, shareholder accountability, and apple and google eyeing the company. in the end orion was made. to a certain extent, this is also like the story of openai finally making gpt3 and the subsequent chatgpt because of its belief in agi.

if we look at the opportunities for chinese companies from this perspective, there are actually similarities and differences with gpt3. the similarity is that the right to define technical solutions may have been taken by meta, and it is inevitable to follow. the difference is that there are many chinese companies or companies founded by chinese that have been in the xr field for a long time. in the competition that will accelerate in the future, they are not starting from scratch in the construction of the entire ecosystem. after all, this is it is a hardware product. in the upstream and downstream fields, china's supply chain still has obvious advantages.

for example, in terms of 6dof capabilities, xreal can already do it. this ar company that has been pursuing lightweight should be able to get the most inspiration from this orion route; for example, rokid, which has already accumulated a lot of experience in the b-end market, is overseas. viture, which dominates the toc market sales rankings, has achieved scale effects in some single points. it is worth paying attention to what inspiration these companies can get from orion.

on the supply chain side, the supply chain behind orion’s diffractive optical waveguide + full-color micro-led solution is inseparable from chinese companies. information in the industry shows that orion’s screens come from the mirco-led company headquartered in shanghai. jbd and official u.s. statistics show that 90% of global investment in micro-display technology currently comes from china, and chinese companies also occupy a very important market position in providing technical solutions for optical waveguides.

these advantages have given chinese players the opportunity to respond quickly to orion's approach. just like zuckerberg is obsessed with the opportunities he missed in the mobile internet, companies today have the ambition to participate in defining the next generation platform and new interactive products in the ai ​​era. , in this another "gpt3 moment" we need to act quickly.