{"id":168092,"date":"2025-09-19T17:58:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T17:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/168092\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T17:58:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T17:58:08","slug":"meta-cto-explains-why-the-smart-glasses-demos-failed-at-meta-connect-and-it-wasnt-the-wi-fi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/168092\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta CTO explains why the smart glasses demos failed at Meta Connect \u2014 and it wasn’t the Wi-Fi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth took to his Instagram to explain, in more technical detail, why multiple demos of Meta\u2019s new smart glasses technology failed at Meta Connect, the company\u2019s developer conference, this week.<\/p>\n

Meta on Wednesday introduced<\/a> three new pairs of smart glasses, including an upgraded version of its existing Ray-Ban Meta, a new Meta Ray-Ban Display<\/a> that comes with a wristband controller, and the sports-focused Oakley Meta Vanguard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, at different points during the event, the live technology demos failed to work. <\/p>\n

In one, cooking content creator Jack Mancuso asked his Ray-Ban Meta glasses how to get started with a particular sauce recipe. After repeating the question, \u201cWhat do I do first?\u201d with no response, the AI skipped ahead in the recipe, forcing him to stop the demo. He then tossed it back to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that he thinks the Wi-Fi may be messed up.<\/p>\n

\"\"Jack Mancuso at Meta Connect.Image Credits:Meta<\/p>\n

In another demo, the glasses failed to pick up a live WhatsApp video call between Bosworth and Zuckerberg; Zuckerberg eventually had to give up. Bosworth walked onstage, joking about the \u201cbrutal\u201d Wi-Fi.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou practice these things like a hundred times, and then you never know what\u2019s gonna happen,\u201d Zuckerberg said at the time.<\/p>\n

After the event, Bosworth took to his Instagram<\/a> for a Q&A session about the new tech and the live demo failures.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

On the latter, he explained that it wasn\u2019t actually the Wi-Fi that caused the issue with the chef\u2019s glasses. Instead, it was a mistake in resource management planning. <\/p>\n

\"\"Image Credits:Instagram (screenshot)<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the chef said, \u2018Hey, Meta, start Live AI,\u2019 it started every single Ray-Ban Meta\u2019s Live AI in the building. And there were a lot of people in that building,\u201d Bosworth explained. \u201cThat obviously didn\u2019t happen in rehearsal; we didn\u2019t have as many things,\u201d he said, referring to the number of glasses that were triggered.<\/p>\n

That alone wasn\u2019t enough to cause the disruption, though. The second part of the failure had to do with how Meta had chosen to route the Live AI traffic to its development server to isolate it during the demo. But when it did so, it did this for everyone in the building on the access points, which included all the headsets. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo we DDoS\u2019d ourselves, basically, with that demo,\u201d Bosworth added. (A DDoS attack, or a distributed denial of service attack, is one where a flood of traffic overwhelms a server or service, slowing it down or making it unavailable. In this case, Meta\u2019s dev server wasn\u2019t set up to handle the flood of traffic from the other glasses in the building \u2014 Meta was only planning for it to handle the demos alone.)<\/p>\n

The issue with the failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, was the result of a new bug.<\/p>\n

The smart glasses\u2019 display had gone to sleep at the exact moment the call came in, Bosworth said. When Zuckerberg woke the display back up, it didn\u2019t show the answer notification to him. The CTO said this was a \u201crace condition\u201d bug, or where the outcome depends on the unpredictable and uncoordinated timing of two or more different processes trying to use the same resource simultaneously.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve never run into that bug before,\u201d Bosworth noted. \u201cThat\u2019s the first time we\u2019d ever seen it. It\u2019s fixed now, and that\u2019s a terrible, terrible place for that bug to show up.\u201d He stressed that, of course, Meta knows how to handle video calls, and the company was \u201cbummed\u201d about the bug showing up here. <\/p>\n

Despite the issues, Bosworth said he\u2019s not worried about the results of the glitches. <\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, I don\u2019t love it, but I know the product works. I know it has the goods. So it really was just a demo fail and not, like, a product failure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n