Yesterday, I had the opportunity to try a private demo by Lumus, the company producing waveguides for smartglasses and AR glasses. And they finally showed me the path to 70° FOV AR glasses.
Lumus
Lumus is a company focused on creating waveguides for glasses (AR glasses or smartglasses). They don’t produce the glasses themselves, but they are just focused on being the supplier of waveguides for the glass manufacturers.
They are pretty good at their job, and when I visited them last year at AWE, I came out pretty impressed by what they were able to do: creating waveguides with good colors, white uniformity, high brightness, and the privacy feature that doesn’t let an external person see what you’re seeing from the outside. That’s why I wasn’t surprised at all when it was found that Meta chose Lumus for its Meta Ray-Ban Display: they’re definitely one of the best companies out there for what concerns waveguides (and no, unluckily, they don’t pay me for writing this).
When I met them last year and tried their 30° and 50° waveguides, they said they were aiming at showing a 70° product for 2026. And well, they kept their promise.
Hands-on Lumus 70° FOV waveguide
In the demo room, there were a pair of prototypical AR glasses connected via a wire to a laptop. The glasses were not smartglasses by a brand, but were literally just a duct-taped prototype to try the waveguide. Again, this company does not produce glasses, and the only purpose of the demo was to let me try the waveguides.
When I put the glasses on, the first thing I noticed was that the field of view was much larger than I was used to having in AR. I was shown images, videos, and rotating 3D models, and they all felt good. For the first time, wearing thin glasses powered by waveguides (so, no birdbath optics), I was able to have a field of view that felt decent. It is true that you don’t need a huge field of view for every application (Meta Ray-Ban Display has like 20°), but in some cases (e.g. productivity), the field of view becomes crucial to have a great experience. And in my opinion, after having tried XREAL Project Aura and this Lumus prototype, 70° is the threshold after which glasses start to truly become usable. When wearing these prototypical glasses, I didn’t have the sensation of looking through a small window like in HoloLens, but I finally had the impression of just looking at content that was in front of me. Of course, the more the better, but 70° already felt good enough.
Unluckily, I can’t share with you a through-the-lens picture because the ones I’ve taken do not reflect the experience I had with my eyes. But I will try to explain you how it was. The images had a good definition, decent colors, and good brightness. The aspect ratio was maybe slightly taller than 16:9. They had some minor problems, though: the definition was good but not great, the colors were more washed out than the 50° version, and there was especially a very visible pincushion distortion. When I reported these problems to Lumus, they replied that the problems are not caused by the waveguide, but by the display. The prototype I was shown was still using the same display as the 50° version, because currently on the market there are no displays that are suitable for being used with a 70° waveguide. When these displays are finally put on the market, Lumus can finally update its prototype, and all these problems of colors, resolutions, and distortion should go away.
There was one last problem: there was no privacy feature on these glasses, and from the outside, it was clearly visible that I was wearing smartglasses. There was a lot of light leakage. The company explained to me that this is a problem only for the current generation of this waveguide, but the next one will have a privacy feature almost identical to the one in the Meta Ray-Ban Display, so people from the outside should just see normal transparent lenses.
The cool thing about this prototype is that Lumus was able to create the waveguides for 70° FOV, the same as Meta Orion, without the need to use exotic materials like silicon carbide. The lenses were just made out of glass. If the new generation of displays arrives, and Lumus creates the next upgrade of its waveguide with the privacy feature, we can obtain something like the Ray-Ban Meta Display, but with 70° FOV field of view.
Of course, there will be other problems that should be sorted out, like the battery consumption to handle the computation and visualization of this wider FOV. But on the waveguide side, things are starting to get there. This is huge, in my opinion.
And I also appreciated that the company kept its promise of showing a 70° FOV in 2026, which confirms that Lumus is a reliable company with great expertise, and that’s why I’m always happy to meet them at AWE. And I’m pretty sure we will see their products in even more smartglasses in the future.
The thin lenses
But there was one more thing the company wanted to show me. The waveguides they showed me this year and last year belong to series “Z” (e.g. the Z-30 enables 30° FOV). The company is now working on a new series, the series “A”, which is a new generation that is thinner and enables glasses with thinner lenses. And the difference is striking: a lens with a waveguide of the series Z is 1.6mm thick, while with the series A it is just 0.8mm. The whole thickness has been cut in half.
This is huge because it allows for glasses that are thinner and lighter. Every gram counts when talking about smartglasses and AR glasses, because even 5g more may be the difference between glasses you can wear all day vs glasses you just wear for a couple of hours, and then your nose hurts. So the fact that Lumus is working towards making lenses thinner is super important.
Unluckily, I couldn’t go hands-on with these lenses. But at least I could see them and touch them, so I could confirm they’re real. And the difference in the thickness is also visible with the naked eye. The first prototypes of this new generation of waveguides should come in Q4 of this year.
A little fun fact: when David from Lumus showed me these waveguides and said, “this is our new innovative product”, I took it in my hand, and then it slipped and fell to the floor. In the moment it slipped from my fingers, my brain thought “oh fuck, this is glass, it is going to the floor, shatter in dozens of pieces, and then you have to sell a kidney to repay Lumus for its super experimental prototype”. But luckily, the lens survived because the moquette saved the day, and potentially my life, too. But now I can say I verified that even if they are just 0.8mm thick, these things don’t break super easily. So let’s say it was a test I made on purpose, and that was passed…
Final impressions
As I’ve already said, this hands-on session confirmed for me that Lumus is definitely an interesting company when it comes to waveguides. The waveguides it showed me are clearly a hint towards the future of smartglasses and AR glasses, which can have a decent FOV and still be lightweight. But we have to remember that glasses are complex systems, and we don’t just need good waveguides, but we need all components to create a coherent system. The fact that the 70° waveguides could not be demoed properly because there is no display to power them yet it is a proof of that. And even if there were, we should still verify if that display has a battery consumption compatible with smart glasses. And so on.
So I think that we still need some time before we can have the full Orion experience in a commercial product. But it is nice that some companies are already building the parts that will allow us to get there…