Developing Meta's Orion AR Glasses

"Starting with VR, virtual reality. Many of you may have played VR games. You may be staying in a corridor shooting aliens. You may be in a submarine. When you play VR games, you actually do not want to see the physical environment, you want to be fully immersed in the virtual world. A VR device, by design, will block your senses from the physical environment. That's VR."

"MR, mixed reality, is one step further from VR, so the device still blocks the light, but sometimes you want to see what's going on in the environment. What you do is basically put a couple cameras in front of the device, then the information just goes through the camera, goes through the electronics, goes on the display, and so that's a passthrough. You'll see the environment, but it's actually going through the camera to the display. The physical device is still blocking the light."

"AR, augmented reality, is something completely different. We're talking about glasses. You actually see your physical environment without any electronics, the lenses are transparent, and you put augments on the display as well. Imagine you have a physical wall in your room, you can put a virtual TV there, or you have a physical sofa and you put a virtual pad on the sofa. That's augmented reality. That's what we're talking about here."

Virtual reality fully immerses users by blocking the physical environment and senses, enabling experiences such as corridor shooters or submarine simulations. Mixed reality retains light-blocking hardware but uses cameras to capture the environment and display a passthrough image on the device. Augmented reality uses transparent-lens glasses that let users see the physical environment directly while overlaying virtual objects onto real surfaces, allowing virtual TVs on walls or virtual pads on sofas. Meta's Orion is presented as an AR glasses product and a product introduction is shown via video.

Read at InfoQ