Meanwhile, at the recent annual Meta Connect event, Meta announced a new line of smart glasses. This Smart Collection includes the recently upgraded version of the immensely popular Ray-Ban Meta. The firm shared development of three unique, new models designed to connect technology to practical real-world, day-to-day activities. The showcase didn’t pan out exactly as envisioned, with some unexpected technical hiccups throwing the demo off course during the live presentation.
Learn more about their newest product drop—the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Display! It’s available with a wristband controller for even more enhanced user experience. Further complimenting this program, Meta recently released the Oakley Meta Vanguard, aimed at high-performance athletes in need of specialty equipment. Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth was at the helm of the announcement. He wanted to highlight some of the coolest stuff happening in the smart eyewear space.
In a demo live-streamed from the floor, Bosworth tried to get in touch with Mark Zuckerberg through a WhatsApp video call. Sadly, the multipurpose smart glasses were unable to make the leap. What ensued was an unexpected demonstration gone wrong as Zuckerberg was forced to scrap the Facebook demo, leaving audiences stunned.
Bosworth would go on to elaborate the cause of the failure as a race condition bug. Further explaining this technical hiccup, he said the problem came when multiple subscription processes tried to use the same resource at the same time. Unfortunately, the display on the smart glasses went to sleep right when the call was coming in. Yet when Zuckerberg attempted to wake them up, he was met with no response alert.
“You practice these things like a hundred times, and then you never know what’s gonna happen,” – Mark Zuckerberg
This bug was completely out of the norm for Meta. Bosworth pointed out that the company had never encountered this problem in rehearsal. He commented on the unexpected nature of live demos, mentioning that the technical issues were not observed during practice runs.
The demo also ran into other challenges not connected to the Wi-Fi connection. Among those, Bosworth pointed to a particularly intriguing episode. When one chef asked his Ray-Ban Meta glasses to launch Live AI, it triggered ALL Live AI functions on multiple devices throughout the venue. The bombardment of surprise commands threw the flow of the demonstration way off.
“When the chef said, ‘Hey, Meta, start Live AI,’ it started every single Ray-Ban Meta’s Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building,” – Andrew Bosworth
Bosworth admitted that he was heartbroken by the failures and promised stakeholders that they were not a reflection of what the product could do. He recognized that the technology works but pointed out that you can’t account for the technology with live demonstrations, since technology can be unpredictable.
“Obviously, I don’t love it, but I know the product works. I know it has the goods. So it really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure,” – Andrew Bosworth