Meta Smart Glasses Demo Failures at Connect Conference Explained: Wi-Fi Mishap and Resource Management Error Cited for Live AI Disruption, DDoS Self-Attack, and New Bug in WhatsApp Call
In an attempt to provide a more technical explanation for the glitches experienced during live demonstrations of its new smart glasses technology at the recent developer conference, Meta’s Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, has taken to Instagram.
On the eventful day, Meta unveiled three novel pairs of smart glasses: an updated version of Ray-Ban Meta, a new Meta Ray-Ban Display equipped with a wristband controller, and the sports-oriented Oakley Meta Vanguard. However, the live demonstrations encountered various setbacks throughout the event.
In one instance, cooking content creator Jack Mancuso queried his Ray-Ban Meta glasses for instructions on starting a specific sauce recipe. Repeating the question “What do I do first?” resulted in no response from the AI system, causing it to advance ahead in the recipe, necessitating a halt of the demonstration. Mancuso subsequently attributed the issue to potential Wi-Fi problems.
Another demonstration showcased the smart glasses’ failure to connect to a live WhatsApp video call between Bosworth and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Eventually, Zuckerberg abandoned the attempt, prompting Bosworth’s joking comment about the “brutal” Wi-Fi.
Explaining the mishaps during an Instagram Q&A session, Bosworth revealed that it wasn’t actually the Wi-Fi causing the issue with Mancuso’s chef glasses. Instead, there was an oversight in resource management planning: when the chef asked Meta to initiate Live AI, every single Ray-Ban Meta’s Live AI in the building was activated due to a large crowd present. This error did not occur during rehearsals as fewer devices were involved.
However, this alone wasn’t enough to cause the disruption. The second part of the failure stemmed from how Meta had decided to route Live AI traffic to its development server for isolation during the demo. This routing affected all access points, including headsets, effectively overwhelming the system with traffic, causing what Bosworth termed as “a self-inflicted DDoS attack.” (A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack overwhelms a server or service with traffic, slowing it down or making it unavailable. In this case, Meta’s development server was not optimized to handle the increased traffic from other glasses in the building.)
The failed WhatsApp call, on the other hand, resulted from a new bug. According to Bosworth, the smart glasses’ display had gone into sleep mode at the exact moment the call arrived, and when Zuckerberg reawakened it, the answer notification did not appear to him. This was described as a “race condition” bug—a situation where the outcome depends on the unpredictable and uncoordinated timing of two or more different processes competing for the same resource simultaneously.
“We’ve never encountered this bug before,” Bosworth stated, adding that it was the first time they had witnessed it and expressing disappointment that it manifested during this instance. Despite the technical glitches, Bosworth remained optimistic about the smart glasses’ capabilities, stating, “I know the product works; I know it has what it takes. So it really was just a demo fail and not a product failure.”
