Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth took me to his Instagram this week to explain in more technical detail why multiple demonstrations of Meta’s new smart glasses technology broke down on MetaConnect.
On Wednesday, Meta introduced three new smart glasses, including an upgraded version of the existing Ray-Ban Meta, a new Metaray-Ban display that comes with the wristband controller, and a sports-centric Oakley Metavanguard.
However, at various points during the event, the live technology demos did not work.
For one thing, Jack Mannk’s fucking, a cooking content creator, asked Ray-Ban Meta Glass how to start a specific sauce recipe. After repeating the question, without a response, “What do you do first?”, the AI forced me to skip first with the recipe and stop the demo. He then threw it back to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and said he thinks Wi-Fi is a mess.
In another demo, the glasses were unable to pick up live WhatsApp video calls between Bosworth and Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg had to give up in the end. Bosworth walked on stage and joked about the “brutal” Wi-Fi.
“You practice these things like a hundred times and then you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Zuckerberg said.
After the event, Bosworth went to Instagram for a Q&A session on new technology and live demo failures.
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In the latter, he explained that it wasn’t Wi-Fi that actually caused problems with the chef’s glasses. Instead, it was a mistake in the resource management plan.
“When the chef said, ‘Hey, meta, I started live AI,’ it started all Ray-Ban Meta in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building,” Bosworth explained. “It obviously didn’t happen in rehearsals. We didn’t have that much,” he said.
But that wasn’t enough to cause confusion. The second part of the failure involved how live AI traffic was routed to route live AI traffic to the development server during the demo. But when doing so, it did this for everyone in the building on the access point, including all the headsets.
“So basically, with that demo, we ddded ourselves,” Bosworth added. (DDOS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, are things that make traffic floods overwhelming and slow or unavailable. In this case, Meta’s development servers were not configured to handle flooding from other glasses in the building.
Meanwhile, the problem with the whatsapp call failed was a result of a new bug.
The smart glasses display was asleep the moment the call came in, Bosworth said. When Zuckerberg woke up the display, it did not display a response notification to him. CTOs say if this is a “racial state” bug or if the outcome depends on the unpredictable and uncoordinated timing of two or more different processes attempting to use the same resource simultaneously,
“We’ve never come across that bug before,” Bosworth pointed out. “It’s the first time we’ve seen it. It’s now fixed. It’s a terrible, awful place for that bug to appear.” He, of course, Meta, knows how to handle video calls, and the company emphasized that he was “offended” about the bugs that appear here.
Despite the problems, Bosworth said he was not worried about the outcome of the glitch.
“Obviously, I don’t love it, but I know that the product works. I know it has a product. So it’s really a demo failure and it’s not like a product failure,” he said.
