Watch: Meta virtual reality conference bloopers
Meta Connect was tough to watch.
Meta unveiled a host of seemingly innovative products and features at its annual virtual reality conference, Meta Connect, but what stood out were all the mess-ups.
Tech product events usually aren’t perfect, but they’re highly rehearsed and controlled environments, so they’re rarely this bad — especially for a company as big and as practiced as Meta.
While the prerecorded videos of the products in use were slick and highly produced, some of the live demos simply failed.
“Glasses are the ideal form factor for personal superintelligence because they let you stay present in the moment while getting access to all of these AI capabilities to make you smarter, help you communicate better, improve your memory, improve your senses,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated at the start of the event, but the ensuing bloopers certainly didn’t make it feel that way.
In the very first demo of Live AI, Chef Jack Mancuso tried to get a recipe for steak sauce only to have the AI ignore his repeated requests and skip steps:
Perhaps the most painful example of the night was when Zuckerberg attempted to take a video call from CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who’s recently been spending time in his new role as an Army officer. They tried five times and eventually Boz had to come onstage.
“We’re going to have Boz come out here and we’re just going to go to the next thing that I wanted to show and hope that will work,” Zuckerberg said, visibly stressed.
Throughout the event, Zuckerberg fumbled words and blamed the Wi-Fi for the glitches. It was uncomfortable, strange, and distracted from the product lineup, which included new Ray-Bans with a built-in display that’s controlled by a wristband and Hyperscape Capture, tech that allows Quest users to quickly scan a room to create a virtual version of it.
“This isn’t a prototype,” Zuckerberg said of the Ray-Ban Display glasses with the wristband earlier in the event. “This is here. This is ready to go and you’re going to be able to buy them in a couple of weeks.”
But if the tech doesn’t work for Zuckerberg, who’s so practiced with the wristband he can type 30 words per minute, what are the rest of us who aren’t the CEO of the company to expect in real-life, day-to-day use cases?
Fortunately for Meta, analysts seem to have looked past the bloopers, with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Cantor Fitzgerald reiterating “buy” ratings after the event. Meta stock is up 0.5% premarket.
