Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype is dear to make—like $10,000 per pair, costly. Orion’s most expensive part is undoubtedly its customized silicon carbide waveguide lenses, though Meta says it sees a pathway to “considerably scale back the associated fee” of that key part sooner or later.
Silicon carbide has been round for some time, having principally been used as a substrate for high-power chips, owing to its higher energy effectively and decrease warmth output. In contrast to silicon, silicon carbide is way more troublesome to fabricate although, with challenges stemming from its materials properties, crystal progress course of, and fabrication complexity.
Electrical autos are main the way in which in lowering prices, nevertheless it’s nonetheless removed from reaching price-parity with a budget and plentiful silicon-based equivalents. One other use case may contain quantum computing, though that comes with its personal distinctive challenges separate from what Meta hopes to do with the next-gen materials.
It’s not silicon carbide’s higher energy effectivity and decrease warmth output that Meta is after although. It’s the fabric’s excessive refractive index, making it ideally suited to offer clear, huge field-of-view (FOV) waveguides appropriate for AR glasses, just like the class-leading 70-degree FOV seen in Orion. And the distinction between standard multi-layered glass waveguides and Orion’s silicon carbide-base waveguides is—for the few which have tried it—night time and day.
“Carrying the glasses with glass-based waveguides and a number of plates, it felt such as you have been in a disco,” says Optical Scientist Pasqual Rivera in a weblog put up. “There have been rainbows in all places, and it was so distracting—you weren’t even wanting on the AR content material. Then, you placed on the glasses with silicon carbide waveguides, and it was such as you have been on the symphony listening to a quiet, classical piece. You may really take note of the total expertise of what we have been constructing. It was a complete recreation changer.”
Lots of the world’s high electrical automobile manufactures have adopted chips primarily based on silicon carbide in recent times, which has helped drive the worth down. Giuseppe Calafiore, Actuality Lab’s AR Waveguides Tech Lead, notes “there’s an overcapacity [thanks to EVs] that didn’t exist once we have been constructing Orion. So now, as a result of provide is excessive and demand is low, the price of the substrate has began to return down.”
Notably, silicon carbide wafers utilized in EVs aren’t optical-grade, as they prioritize electrical efficiency over optical readability, so coopting any EV chip surplus is out of the query. Nonetheless, Actuality Labs’ Director of Analysis Science Barry Silverstein sees a path ahead:
“Suppliers are very excited by the brand new alternative of producing optical-grade silicon carbide—in spite of everything, every waveguide lens represents a considerable amount of materials relative to an digital chip, and all of their current capabilities apply to this new house. Filling your manufacturing facility is crucial, and scaling your manufacturing facility is the dream. The scale of the wafer issues, too: The larger the wafer, the decrease the associated fee—however the complexity of the method additionally goes up. That mentioned, we’ve seen suppliers transfer from four-inch to eight-inch wafers, and a few are engaged on precursors to 12-inch wafers, which might yield exponentially extra pairs of AR glasses.”
“The world is awake now,” provides Silverstein. “We’ve efficiently proven that silicon carbide can flex throughout electronics and photonics. It’s a cloth that might have future functions in quantum computing. And we’re seeing indicators that it’s attainable to considerably scale back the associated fee. There’s numerous work left to be accomplished, however the potential upside right here is large.”
This wouldn’t be the primary time XR headsets have instantly benefitted from bigger, extra consumer-oriented industries taking the lead. Within the early 2010s, small, low-cost shows developed for smartphones have been a key driver in kickstarting the patron VR headset revolution. For instance, in case you’ve ever cracked open an Oculus Rift DK2, launched in 2014, you’ll discover a Galaxy Be aware 3 show panel at its core—Samsung branding and all.
That’s to not point out a number of different elements which have been lifted from the smartphone components bin over time, together with inertial measurement models (IMUs), digicam sensors, and battery expertise. The parallels are there, though it appears leveraging the silicon carbide wins spurred by the EV increase nonetheless gained’t be almost as straight ahead in AR glasses.
Whereas suppliers are eyeballing photonics-grade silicon carbide, it’s nonetheless a distinct segment inside a distinct segment that may take years to scale up. It’s successfully one of many primary causes Meta can’t productize Orion at the moment. That mentioned, Meta is utilizing Orion as an “inside developer package” of kinds as its hopes to supply a pair of shopper AR glasses someday earlier than 2030, priced someplace close to “cellphone, laptop computer territory,” Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed in September.
Nonetheless, with such huge potential for shopper attraction, these puzzle items will match collectively someway. Firms like Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm all hope to personal their very own slices of the following dominant cellular computing platform, which goals to switch smartphones completely.
