Later today, Meta will unveil its first smart glasses with a display. But the shadow of Orion, and the expectations it set, looms over Meta Connect 2025.

At Connect 2024, Meta unveiled and demoed its Orion AR glasses prototype. Orion is a marvel of science and engineering. It delivers unparalleled AR field of view given its form factor of a thick pair of glasses, positioning virtual objects and interfaces in your undistorted physical space without the significant loss of object permanence of other attempts at transparent AR.

Orion received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Those who tried it were simply blown away.

But there was only one problem - Orion is unshippable, at least any time soon. Its field of view was achieved by using silicon carbide lenses, and there exists no commercial-scale supply chain for optical-grade silicon carbide. While there eventually will be, and Meta's partnership with Anduril may accelerate that, it will still take a lot of time. We won't see silicon carbide consumer AR glasses any time soon.

This year, Meta is set to launch a very different kind of smart glasses product with a display, as many reports and Monday's leak reveal. The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, as they will seemingly be called, are set to have a small fixed heads-up display (HUD) in the right eye only, with no positional tracking or eye tracking.

For those of us enthusiastically interested in XR, that this product will be vastly less ambitious than Orion may be obvious. But to those outside our bubble, the confusion has already set in. The response I've seen in the comment sections across the internet suggests that many are expecting Meta to ship Orion as a product, not just souped up Ray-Ban glasses.

To be fair to Meta, it was relatively open about Orion's status. The company admitted that Orion would cost over $10,000 to sell as a product, and described it as "a time machine that lets us live in the future". Orion's production run is just 1000 units, mainly used for demos, research, and internal development.

But there is simply no precedent in recent consumer electronics for showing such a polished, integrated, and advanced product-like prototype and demoing and marketing it so widely, only to note that it's not actually possible to manufacture at scale. It's as if Apple had publicly demoed the iPhone before releasing the iPod.

Orion may have allayed the concerns of Meta's investors as to why it's spending so many billions of dollars on AR research and development. But it also set deeply unrealistic expectations for the smart glasses with a display that can actually be shipped as a product anytime soon. And the shadow of those expectations looms over Meta Connect 2025.