As everyone from Tim Cook to Bill Gates will attest, live demos of new features at a launch event are fraught with potential pitfalls. Those little goblins made themselves known at Meta Connect, when Mark Zuckerberg tried to demonstrate two features of the new Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, only to have both fail.
While Zuckerberg blamed the issue at the time on the building's Wi-Fi, the reason was something else entirely. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, took to an Instagram Story the day after to explain the reason.
The first problem occurred when Zuckerberg had a chef use Meta AI and the Ray-Ban Display's camera to look at the ingredients and suggest a recipe. Meta AI first failed to respond, and then jumped around, seemingly ignoring the chef's commands.
“When the chef said ‘hey Meta, start Live AI,’ it started every single Meta Ray-Ban’s Live AI in the building, and there was a lot of people in the building” Bosworth said in the Instagram AMA. “Obviously, in rehearsal, we didn't have as many people in the building."
"The second thing is, we had routed Live AI traffic to our dev server in theory to isolate it, but we had done it for everyone in that building on those access points, which included all of those headsets. We DDoS’d ourselves, basically.”
"And, it didn't happen in rehearsal because we hadn't had as many people with the glasses in the building."
The second error came when Zuckerberg tried to take a WhatsApp video call from Bosworth. Despite Bosworth repeatedly calling Zuckerberg on the Ray-Ban Displays — the incoming call tone was clearly heard by everyone in attendance — Zuckerberg could not answer the call.
"The video call issue was quite a bit more obscure," Bosworth said in the AMA. "A never-before-seen bug. The display had gone to sleep at the very instant the notification had come in that a call was coming in."
Even when Mark woke the display back up, we didn't show the answer notification to him. We never ran into that bug before. That was the first time we'd ever seen it; it's fixed now, and that's a terrible place for that bug to show up."
To his credit, Zuckerberg was able to quickly pivot and make light of both errors, but it serves as a reminder that when you're trying something new on stage for the first time, anything can happen.
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