At Meta’s Connect event on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was one of several celebrities to try out Meta’s new “Orion” prototype glasses, and appears to be a fan.
To demonstrate the positive reaction of those who tried the glasses, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a video of reactions from people who tried them, featuring Silicon Valley geniuses, media personalities, and Olympians.
The CEO of Nvidia, one of the test participants, called the glasses’ 100-gram weight a “big thing” and praised various aspects of the technology.
“The tracking performance is good, the brightness is good, the color contrast is good, and the field of view is great,” Huang said in a video released at the event.
The “Orion” glasses are the first prototype of fully holographic augmented reality, and Zuckerberg called them “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen.”
Zuckerberg began assembling a team of “the best people in the world” to make the glasses about 10 years ago, and said the technical challenges of making them were “enormous.”
“It’s a physical world overlaid with holograms,” Zuckerberg said.
The Meta CEO cited several challenges in making the glasses, including the need for them to be lightweight yet have a wide field of view. Zuckerberg also said that you need to be able to see through them.
Zuckerberg said the glasses are built with a new type of display architecture that uses tiny projectors that bend light to create holograms of different depths and sizes, and are powered by a wrist-mounted battery made from customized silicon and sensors.
Zuckerberg said the “Orion” holographic glasses aren’t yet available to consumers as Meta is working on fine-tuning the details and lowering the retail price, but they will be available to some outside developers.
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Huang’s tribute carries some weight: Nvidia is one of the world’s most valuable companies, its GPU chips are powering the AI revolution. The company has a cult following and Huang’s words carry great influence in the tech industry and on the stock market.
But it’s also worth noting that Zuckerberg is a big Nvidia customer, with the Meta CEO bragging that he’s stockpiling GPUs to build out “a massive amount of infrastructure” to further the company’s AI efforts.
In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said that including Meta’s Nvidia components and other AI chips, Meta will have nearly 600,000 GPUs by the end of 2024.
Nvidia declined Business Insider’s request for comment.
