With so much going on in AI, investors seem to be looking past its Metaverse segment. That may seem odd, as the company once known as Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. With the company's Reality Labs segment continuing to lose billions of dollars every quarter, investors may have written off the effort.

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.

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 Zuckerberg announced new Quest headsets, updates to Meta’s Llama AI model,