Halfway through the keynote speech during the Meta (META) Connect event on Wednesday, vice president of augmented reality, Alex Himel, walked on stage with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

"This is Orion," CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced next to him, pulling out Meta's augmented reality glasses. "Our first fully functioning prototype — and, if I do say so, the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen."

Investors finally got a sneak peek of a moonshot from the money-losing Reality Labs division inside Meta. The project has been shrouded in secrecy after nearly a decade of development and billions of dollars in research and build. It also arrives as Wall Street increasingly questions the spending at the division, as it has burned through over $50 billion since 2020.

Zuckerberg hopes Orion can bridge the gap between the digital and real world and eventually replace smartphones. But its debut may be further away than Meta bulls think.

Meta has previously said it's targeting 2027 to begin shipping its long-awaited AR glasses. Yet several insiders who worked on the teams building Orion exclusively told Yahoo Finance that despite the product being "magical" and "precious," it may never hit consumers' hands or give a return to Meta's investment.

According to two former engineers with knowledge of the project, the initial goal was to build approximately 1,000 units, which quickly turned into only a few hundred. Out of those, people familiar with the project estimate fewer than twenty units actually turn on and show a quality image — taking the average cost of just the working prototypes into the "hundreds of thousands" of dollars.

Zuckerberg's expectation was for some of the materials used to build Orion to drop in price over the last few years. That didn't happen as hoped (partly due to trade restrictions), meaning some of the materials will have to be changed for future versions to be financially sustainable.

"They don’t know whether the technology will work and whether it’ll ever work at the price point anyone can afford," said a former lead engineer who asked not to be identified. "Right now, they don't have material that they can make this with at a reasonable cost."

Orion is made up of three main parts: the glasses, a wristband, and a puck that powers the device's graphics and connectivity. The puck is referred to as the "central compute," people familiar with the project said.

Its chief materials are a silicon carbide wave-guide sandwiched between two protective lenses, seven cameras, two micro-LED projectors, and custom silicon — one of the more expensive parts of the product.