Meta CTO explains why the Smart Glasses demos failed at Meta Connect and It was not the Wi-Fi | Techcrunch

Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth went to his Instagram to explain in more technical details why multiple demos of the new Smart Glasses technology from Meta failed at Meta Connect, the company’s developer conference, this week.

Meta introduced three new couples of smart glasses on Wednesday, including an improved version of its existing Ray-Ban Meta, a new Meta Ray-Ban display that is supplied with a wristband controller and the sports-oriented Oakley Meta Vanguard.

However, the live technological demos did not work at various points during the event.

In one early cooking content creator Jack Mancuso to his Ray-Ban metag glasses how he could get started with a certain sauce recipe. After repeating the question: “What should I do first?” Without a reaction, the AI ​​made ahead in the recipe and forced him to stop the demo. He then threw it back to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and said he thinks the WiFi might be confused.

In another demo, the glasses were unable to pick up a live WhatsApp video interview between Bosworth and Zuckerberg; Zuckerberg eventually had to give up. Bosworth ran on stage and jokes about the “brutal” WiFi.

“You practice these things like a hundred times, and then you never know what will happen,” said Zuckerberg at the time.

After the event, Bosworth went to his Instagram For a Q&A session about the new technology and the live demo -abnormalities.

On the latter he explained that it was not actually the WiFi that caused the problem with the chef’s glasses. Instead, it was a mistake in the planning of Resource Management.

“When the chef said,” Hey, Meta, Start Live Ai “, it started with every live AI of Ray-Ban Meta in the building. And there were many people in that building,” Bosworth explained. “That clearly did not happen in the rehearsal; we didn’t have so many things,” he said, referring to the number of glasses that was activated.

That alone was not enough to cause the disruption. The second part of the failure had to do with how Meta had chosen to route the live AI traffic to his development server to insulate it during the demo. But when it did, it did this for everyone in the building on the access points, including all headsets.

“So we actually made ourselves with that demo,” Bosworth added. (A DDOS attack, or a distributed refusal of service attack, there is a stream of traffic overwhelming a server or service, delaying it or not making it available. In this case the Meta dev -server was not set up to handle the flow of traffic from the other glasses in the building -Meta was only planning to handle the demos alone.)

The problem with the failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, was the result of a new bug.

The display of the smart glasses had went to sleep the moment the call came in, said Bosworth. When Zuckerberg woke up the display again, it did not show the answer report to him. The CTO said that this was a “racing condition” bug, or where the outcome depends on the unpredictable and uncoordinated timing of two or more different processes that try to use the same source at the same time.

“We have never encountered that bug before,” Bosworth noted. “That is the first time we have ever seen it. It has now been resolved, and that is a terrible, terrible place for that bug to appear.” He emphasized that Meta of course knows how to handle video calls and that the company was ‘Bummed’ about the bug that appeared here.

Despite the problems, Bosworth said that he is not worried about the results of the glitches.

“It is clear that I don’t like it, but I know the product works. I know it has the goods. So it was really just a demo failure and not, like a product failure,” he said.