Why Meta's smart glasses demos failed
What's the story
Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, has clarified the reasons behind the failure of several demos of the company's new smart glasses technology at Meta Connect, its developer conference. The event saw the launch of three new pairs of smart glasses: an upgraded version of the existing Ray-Ban Meta, the new Meta Ray-Ban Display with a wristband controller, and a sports-focused model called Oakley Meta Vanguard. However, live tech demos during the event didn't go as planned.
Demo disruption
'Meta, start Live AI' triggered every single AI
In one of the demos, a cooking content creator asked his Ray-Ban Meta glasses for help with a sauce recipe. After repeating the question multiple times without getting an answer, the AI assistant jumped ahead in the recipe. Bosworth clarified that this wasn't due to Wi-Fi issues but rather a resource management planning error. When the chef said, "Hey, Meta, start Live AI," it triggered every single Ray-Ban Meta's Live AI in attendance at the event.
Server overload
Meta unintentionally overwhelmed its own system
The second part of the demo failure was due to Meta's decision to route Live AI traffic to its development server for isolation during the demo. This move inadvertently led to an overload on the server as it wasn't designed to handle traffic from multiple glasses in attendance. "So we DDoS'd ourselves, basically, with that demo," Bosworth said, explaining how they unintentionally overwhelmed their own system.
Bug revelation
A bug in the display caused WhatsApp call failure
The failure of a WhatsApp call was attributed to a new bug in the smart glasses' display. Bosworth explained that the display had gone to sleep just as the call came in and didn't show an answer notification when Zuckerberg woke it up. He described this as a "race condition" bug, where the outcome depends on the unpredictable timing of different processes trying to use the same resource simultaneously.
Product assurance
Bosworth confident about product's performance
Despite the glitches, Bosworth is confident about the product's performance. "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," he said in an Instagram Q&A session about the new launches and the live demo failures. Bosworth emphasized that these were just demo failures and not indicative of any underlying issues with the actual product itself.