Meta CTO explains why the smart glasses demos failed at Meta Connect — and it wasn’t the Wi-Fi

During Meta Connect, the company’s recent developer conference, CTO Andrew Bosworth took to social media to clarify the reasons behind the technical failures experienced during live demonstrations of their new smart glasses. Meta unveiled three innovative models, including an enhanced Ray-Ban Meta, a new Meta Ray-Ban Display featuring a wristband controller, and the sporty Oakley Meta Vanguard. However, the event was marked by several unexpected glitches. Cooking influencer Jack Mancuso faced a hiccup while trying to access a recipe on his Ray-Ban Meta glasses. After multiple attempts to engage the AI, the device abruptly skipped ahead in the instructions, prompting Mancuso to halt the demonstration and suggest to CEO Mark Zuckerberg that there might be an issue with the Wi-Fi. In a separate instance, a live WhatsApp video call between Bosworth and Zuckerberg failed to connect, leading Zuckerberg to abandon the demo. Joking about the technical difficulties, Bosworth later addressed the audience, highlighting the challenges of real-time technology demonstrations. In a follow-up Q&A on Instagram, Bosworth attributed the failures not to Wi-Fi issues but to a flaw in resource management. When Mancuso commanded, "Hey, Meta, start Live AI," the system accidentally activated every Ray-Ban Meta in the vicinity, overwhelming the network with traffic. Bosworth explained that the rehearsals did not account for the number of devices in use, causing what he described as a self-inflicted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on their development server. The WhatsApp call failure was attributed to a different problem: a bug that caused the smart glasses' display to enter sleep mode just as the call arrived. When the display was reactivated, it failed to show the incoming call notification. Bosworth termed this a "race condition" bug, which arises from competing processes trying to access the same resource simultaneously. He acknowledged that this was an unforeseen issue, although it has since been resolved. Despite these setbacks, Bosworth expressed confidence in the product's functionality. He emphasized that the glitches were merely presentation failures and not indicative of the product's capabilities. "I know the product works. I know it has the goods," he reassured viewers, underscoring that the team remains optimistic about the future of their smart glasses technology.