During the recent Meta Connect developer conference, Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, took to Instagram to address the technical setbacks experienced during multiple demonstrations of the company's latest smart glasses technology. On Wednesday, Meta unveiled three innovative pairs of smart glasses, including an enhanced version of the existing Ray-Ban Meta, a new Meta Ray-Ban Display equipped with a wristband controller, and the sports-oriented Oakley Meta Vanguard.
Despite the excitement surrounding the new products, the live demonstrations encountered several issues. In one notable instance, cooking content creator Jack Mancuso attempted to use his Ray-Ban Meta glasses to follow a sauce recipe. After repeating his question, “What do I do first?” without receiving a response, the AI unexpectedly advanced in the recipe, prompting Mancuso to halt the demo. He humorously suggested to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the Wi-Fi connection might be problematic.
In another demo, the smart glasses failed to initiate a live WhatsApp video call between Bosworth and Zuckerberg, leading to a frustrated Zuckerberg having to abandon the attempt. Bosworth later joked about the "brutal" Wi-Fi conditions affecting the event. “You practice these things like a hundred times, and then you never know what’s gonna happen,” Zuckerberg commented during the event.
After the event, Bosworth engaged in a Q&A session on Instagram to clarify the reasons behind the demo failures. He revealed that the issues were not due to Wi-Fi problems, as initially speculated, but rather a miscalculation in resource management planning. When Mancuso instructed the Meta glasses to start the Live AI feature, it inadvertently activated every Ray-Ban Meta device in the vicinity. “That obviously didn’t happen in rehearsal; we didn’t have as many things,” Bosworth explained, emphasizing the unexpected scale of the response.
Furthermore, the way Meta routed the Live AI traffic to its development server inadvertently caused a self-inflicted denial of service (DDoS) scenario. Bosworth elaborated, explaining that the server was not equipped to handle the influx of traffic from the numerous smart glasses present in the building, as Meta had only anticipated managing the demo devices.
The failure of the WhatsApp call was attributed to a new bug that caused the smart glasses’ display to fall asleep just as the call was incoming. Bosworth indicated that when Zuckerberg woke the display, the notification for the incoming call did not appear. He referred to this issue as a “race condition” bug, which occurs when the timing of multiple processes leads to unpredictable outcomes. “We’ve never run into that bug before,” Bosworth acknowledged, noting that it was the first instance of its kind they had encountered. He assured viewers that the bug has since been resolved, expressing disappointment that it occurred during a high-profile demo.
Despite the glitches, Bosworth conveyed his confidence in the functionality of the smart glasses. “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 stated, reinforcing the message that the technology remains robust and reliable. As Meta continues to innovate in the realm of smart glasses technology, the company is committed to addressing and overcoming these technical challenges as they arise.
