Meta CTO says no big deal after Meta glasses malfunction during live demo

Meta Platforms’ chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, has cleared the air regarding some of the failures experienced during a demo of the company’s smart glasses. The company held Meta Connect, its developer conference, this week, where it showcased the new smart glasses. However, things didn’t go as planned at the event.

The Meta Connect event was held on Wednesday, with the company taking advantage of the conference to showcase three new pairs of smart glasses. The lineup included an upgraded version of its existing Ray-Ban Meta, the sports-focused Oakley Meta Vanguard, and the new Meta Ray-Ban Display that comes with a wristband controller.

However, at several points during the event, the live technology demos failed to work.

Meta CTO reveals why smart glasses demos failed

In one of the live demonstrations, cooking creator Jack Mancuso asked his Ray-Ban Meta glasses how to get started with a particular sauce recipe. After repeatedly asking the AI “What do I do first?”, it failed to come up with any response. The AI then skipped ahead in the recipe, forcing him to stop the demo. Mancuso then passed the device back to CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a complaint that he thinks the Wi-Fi may be messing up.

In another demonstration, the glasses failed to pick up a live WhatsApp video call between Zuckerberg and Bosworth, forcing Zuckerberg to eventually give up on the demonstrations. Bosworth eventually walked onstage, joking about the brutal Wi-Fi. “You practice these things like a hundred times, and then you never know what’s gonna happen,” Zuckerberg said at the time.

After the event, Bosworth took to his Instagram for a quick Q&A session about the new tech and the issues at the demo.

Bosworth says the products are great despite the glitches

Discussing the first issue, Bosworth claimed that it wasn’t the Wi-Fi that caused the issue with the chef’s glasses, noting that it was a mistake in resource management planning. When the chef said, “Hey, Meta, start Live AI,” it started every single Ray-Ban Meta’s Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building, Bosworth explained. “That obviously didn’t happen in rehearsal; we didn’t have as many things,” he said, referring to the number of glasses that were triggered.

The second part of the failure was due to the way Meta had chosen to route the Live AI traffic to its development server to isolate it during the demo. But when that happened, it happened to everyone in the building on the access points, including those with headsets. “So we DDoS’d ourselves, basically, with that demo,” Bosworth added.

A DDoS (distributed denial of service attack) happens when a flood of traffic overwhelms a service or server, slowing it down and making it unavailable. In this case, the dev server was not set up to handle the big traffic from the other glasses in the building, as Meta only planned for it to handle the demos alone.

With respect to the issue with the failed WhatsApp call, Bosworth said it was a result of a new bug. According to Bosworth, the display of the smart glasses had gone to sleep when the call came in. When Zuckerberg woke the display, it did not show the icon to answer the call. The CTO mentioned that it was a “race condition” bug, noting that it is a situation where the outcome depends on the unpredictable and uncoordinated timing of two or more different processes trying to use the same resource simultaneously.

“We’ve never run into that bug before,” Bosworth noted. “That’s the first time we’d ever seen it. It’s fixed now, and that’s a terrible, terrible place for that bug to show up, ” he added. 

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