Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Orion glasses are the lenses, which are not made from glass or plastic. Instead, Meta is using a silicon carbide where tiny projections are beamed onto the lenses. This material is supposed to be more durable, lighter and features an ultrahigh index for refraction of the on-board projectors.

Instead Meta seems to be aiming at being affordable in terms of phones and laptops – which to me would be somewhere around $700 (around £700 / AU$1,350). Admittedly, this makes a lot of sense – $299 / £299 / AU$449 would be a surprisingly low price for smart specs that are being billed as an eventual smartphone replacement.

Rather, Meta's core social media ad business has recovered nicely from the 2022 slump, helped along by smarter artificial intelligence algorithms. Speaking of AI, Meta's open-source Llama large language models (LLMs) have also made headlines this year.

Meta's new Orion glasses may still be a prototype that costs thousands of dollars to produce, but when you put them on they feel like the future. Driving the news: These are glasses, not goggles, that can display information and even videos overlaid on top of the real world — like Apple's Vision Pro in many ways,

Meta Connect 2024 was this week, showcasing new hardware and software to support two of the company's big ambitions: AI and the metaverse. CEO Mark