Orion
Meta’s first true AR glasses, in a regular glasses form factor. Senior Design Manager across the multi-team scope behind the Day-1 use cases shown at the September 2024 unveil.
UNVEIL · SEPT 2024
The form factor breakthrough
Meta unveiled Orion in September 2024 — “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made,” and the first to look and feel like a regular pair of glasses. Transparent lenses, ~70° field of view, EMG wristband for input, holographic displays. The form-factor breakthrough is the headline.
I was Senior Design Manager across a large, deliberately ambiguous scope — multiple teams, multiple managers, multiple Day-1 use cases. The work was less “lead one thing” than “hold the through-line across many” toward the experiences Meta showed publicly: asking the glasses for a recipe based on what’s in the fridge, adjusting a family calendar while doing dishes, taking hands-free video calls.
The Day-0 launch slate · 2021 — 2022
AR Glasses · Experience Studios · seven verticals
Mobile groundwork · the location-anchored AR work that fed Day-1 use cases
DAY-1 APPS · PUBLIC DEMOS
The apps that earned the form factor
The Day-1 apps Meta showed publicly were chosen to make the case that AR glasses earn their place in everyday life only when they help with hands-busy moments — useful before spectacular.
Recipe assistance
Contextual visual recognition reads what’s in the fridge, surfaces a recipe you can actually make, and walks through the prep step-by-step on the lens — voice in, display out, hands stay on the food. The kitchen is the test bed because it’s the most hands-busy room in the house.
Multi-screen multitasking
Multiple floating screens arranged in physical space — mail beside calendar beside a video call — addressed at a glance while the wearer keeps doing something else. The display becomes a workspace, not a notification rail.
Hands-free video calls
Take and hold a video call without picking up a device. Presence travels with you. The phone moment of pulling out a screen is replaced by a glance and a tap.
Augments
Persistent objects pinned to the wearer’s space — clocks, weather, photos, calendars that live in physical locations across sessions. The glasses-and-headset shared layer that lets a room hold ambient information without becoming a screen.
FIG. 02 · Recipe assistance · Meta public demo
FIG. 03 · Multi-screen multitasking · Meta public demo
Bonus · Pong on Orion · the demo my team shipped
FIG. 04 · Orion Pong loop · holographic table-tennis on the lens
TEAMS · MULTIDISCIPLINARY
The teams I managed
Each Day-1 app had its own multidisciplinary team — product, design, prototyping, engineering, research — and the Senior Design Manager role meant holding direction across all of them at once. Direct teams covered Experience Design, Design Prototyping, Production Design, and UX Research. Partner teams spanned hardware engineering, software platform, and AI research.
Prototyping was where most of the questions actually got answered. AR glasses had no precedent UI, no muscle memory, no “use the iOS pattern.” Every Day-1 use case had to be built in code, worn on the head, lived with for a few weeks, and then redesigned. The Prototypers were the ones turning hypotheses into something a person could try and react to — and that loop drove almost every meaningful decision in the program.
The split looked roughly like this:
Experience Design
Use-case verticals — recipe, multi-screen, calls, augments. One design lead per vertical, dotted-line into the Senior Design Manager.
Design Prototyping
The team that actually built the experiences in code, on-device. Wearable prototypes, simulator builds, and end-to-end use-case integrations — most Day-1 design decisions came out of what worked when you put it on your head, not what looked right in Figma.
Production Design
The render-and-ship layer turning concept work into demoable, photographable, recordable experiences for the unveil.
UX Research
Field studies in real homes, ethnographic work on hands-busy moments, usability runs against the EMG wristband and voice loop.
Quest MR partnership
Cross-team work integrating MR Mode and the Augments system so the persistent-object language stayed consistent across glasses and headset.
Hardware + AI partners
Coordination with the optics, EMG, and Embodied-AI teams — translating speculative capabilities into shipping experiences.
05 / 09 · END OF CHAPTER
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