Inside Meta’s long-term vision to make its Orion glasses the Airpods of augmented reality

Meta’s heads of design for wearables tell the exclusive design story behind their upcoming Orion AR glasses.

Meta knows exactly what it doesn’t want to do.

Back in 2016, five years before Mark Zuckerberg would rebrand Facebook as Meta, a designer named Keiichi Matsuda released a short film called Hyper Reality. The plot is simple enough: A young gig economy worker rides a bus to the store to buy some groceries. But as the story is told through the lens of augmented reality glasses from the future, this simple task becomes graphic horror.