You can’t buy Meta’s most impressive new product, the smart glasses codenamed Orion. You might be able to buy something sort of like them a few years from now, but most of us will never get to so much as wear them. That doesn’t necessarily make them less impressive, though, or less important. Orion is a statement of purpose from Meta: that AR glasses really are the future and that we’re eventually going to get there.

The occasion for all this news was Meta Connect, so we also go through all the other announcements from Connect. There are new smart glasses, new VR headsets, new celebrity AIs to replace the old celebrity AIs, voice modes, and more. But let’s be honest: we mostly talk about Orion. It’s either vaporware, a science project, a prototype, the unquestionable future, or somewhere in the center of the Venn diagram of all those things. And the fact that they exist at all says a lot about where we are in the evolution of technology.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Orion and Meta’s other new gadgets:

And in other Meta Connect news:

And in the lightning round: