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This week's Meta Connect smart glasses event was, let's admit it, a little cringeworthy. Or at least I cringed when two of Meta's live demos epically failed. (A third live demo took some time but eventually worked.)
During the event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed it on the Wi-Fi connection. Now we know what actually happened. Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth addressed each of the live demos in an Instagram AMA (ask me anything) session on Thursday.
Let's start with the first demo fail. Special guest chef Jack Mancuso, wearing the new Meta Ray-Bans Gen 2, was supposed to show off how the new Live AI feature could process the ingredients on the table, then give him a step-by-step guide to making a "Korean-inspired steak sauce" recipe.
Things went wrong immediately. The Live AI started listing the ingredients laid out, and Mancuso interrupted to ask what he should do first. With the feature clearly glitching on the sequence of tasks, Mancuso asked again, "What do I do first?" Confused, the AI-powered smart glasses told him he "already combined the base ingredients" as if the cooking process had started, even though the bowl was empty and the ingredients hadn't been touched.
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Bosworth said that when the video of Mancuso instructing his glasses to use Live AI was shown to the live audience, "It started every Meta Ray-Ban's Live AI in the building."
The Museum at MPK 21, where the in-person keynote address was given, can hold up to 2,000 people, so that's a lot of potential smart glasses. "That obviously didn't happen in rehearsal," he added.
The problem worsened because the Meta team had routed all Live AI traffic to dev servers, overloading the system. "We DDoS'ed ourselves, basically," Bosworth said. DDoS stands for distributed denial of service, a kind of attack on a server that brings down a system by overwhelming it with traffic.
The second live demo fail was when Zuckerberg tried to showcase the new integrated WhatsApp video calling and was unable to pick up a call from Bosworth.
Bosworth said this was the result of a previously undiscovered bug that's now fixed. Zuckerberg's glasses' display went dark to go to sleep right as the WhatsApp call came in, and it didn't properly display the answer option.
In a separate Instagram story, Bosworth added that he didn't see big risks in doing live demos. He said Meta's went "great" and that "live demos don't represent real-world scenarios."
While he's right that smart glasses users are unlikely to be in those exact situations again, it's not a great sales pitch for an expensive device if the people who created it can't properly demonstrate how tools should work.
CNET smart glasses expert Scott Stein has tested the new models and didn't encounter the same issues, which is a positive sign.
For more on Meta Connect, check out everything inside the new Meta Ray-Bans Gen 2 and Oakley Vanguard sports glasses and get hands-on with the new neural wristband.
