Imagine a world where you don't need a mobile phone because
information just appears contextually in front of you
exactly when you need it. When language is automatically
translated as you speak to a person so you can just read them
as subtitles, and as you navigate cities, you can see
arrows appearing on the street, directing you to your ideal
destination. In a world like this, you
describe technology as ambient. Always there, always present,
but rarely in the way. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg
released the Ray Ban Meta glasses.
The technology itself actually flopped on stage.
But regardless of the failed demos, I think they represent
potentially a look into the future of human machine
interaction. In today's episode, I'm going to
investigate whether or not we're at one of those inflection
points. This is in the loop with Jack
Horn. I hope you enjoy the show.
So let's start with what actually happened in last week's
announcements. So on September 17th, last week,
the Meta Connect event, which is like Meta's biggest event of the
year, Mark Zuckerberg basically took the stage to announce the,
what he believes the ideal form of super intelligence because
they actually announced the Ray Barn glasses starting at about
$800 and coming out at the end of this month.
Every single pair comes with this Meta neural band, which is
this really innovative piece of technology that they themselves
have produced, which uses electromyography, which is this
technology that essentially reads the electrical signals in
your hand. So little movements with your
fingers or your wrist can obviously result in you taking
action in the glasses. And to be honest, the, the
product's actually quite impressive on paper.
We're looking at a full colour high resolution hood displays
your heads up display position just off the side of your field
of vision in the glasses. And this play covers about a 20°
field of view. What I found also really
impressive actually was the the fact that the display cranks out
about 5000 nits of brightness. And obviously nits is a word
that most people are not that familiar with.
But to put in perspective, most smartphone screens Max out about
800 to 1200 nits and even the brightest tablets rarely exceed
1600. So this means that you can
actually see the display very clearly in direction light,
which obviously being a pair of glasses is something really
important and previously has completely played all I guess
smart glasses projects. It's also got 12 megapixel
camera and can record at 1080P, which is kind of crazy.
It's also got microphone technology called beam forming,
which is essentially the microphone being able to focus
on sound that's coming from in front of you and focusing in on
that, as well as open ear speakers.
And it weighs about 69 grams, which is the weight of a chicken
egg, but still about 17g heavier than the previous generation
because it didn't have a screen in the previous generation.
So yeah, I think it's quite interesting.
And you know, though it's worth noting that obviously during the
demo it was a bit of a flop because there was 2 pro high
profile attempts to showcase some of the most innovative
features and it didn't work. I'm quite interested.
A little side note, I think it's interesting that the fail the
demos actually going wrong. The first attempt was a cooking
influencer on stage, obviously in front of this big audience
who tried to use the glasses for recipe help.
And he clearly said, you know, hey, meta start live AI.
Now what was meant to happen is that the glasses start speaking
out loud and having step by step instructions appear on the
screen. But instead the glasses kind of
lagged out for a few awkward seconds and then suddenly jumped
ahead and skipped the recipe. So obviously it didn't really
work very well and he had to kind of stop mid demo and blame
it on the Wi-Fi. And then it happened again with
Mark Zuckerberg. He actually tried to take a
WhatsApp call during the event for apparently the CTO and
basically, as you can imagine, it didn't connect.
Mark Zuckerberg was visibly fumbling and trying to press
different buttons to try and make this work and eventually
gave up. And I feel for them.
Now I do a lot of demos at Mindset.
You can literally have a product work a million times when you're
practising and then in front of a live group of people it it can
go wrong. It does happen now and again.
They released an update within kind of 48 hours and all the
bugs were fixed and and the problems were quite reasonable
as well. But either way, I thought it was
quite an interesting side note because gosh, that must have
been awkward. Anyway, let's dig into what the
glasses actually do. And I guess the use cases for
these that are they're quite interesting to me.
So first and foremost, you've got live captions and
translations. It feels like 2025 is the year
of live translation because I don't know if people have seen
it, but Apple Airpods just released this new feature in
there. I think it's their Gen. 3 or
Gen. 4 Airpods. But instead obviously just being
sound. And the reason it's worth noting
is because it's a stand out, I guess, capability that gets most
early adopters quite excited. I mean, I'm probably in that
category. I don't think I'd buy the Meta
Ray Ban glasses for just that feature, but it is really cool.
So the glasses can listen to anyone that's speaking to you
and display, I guess captions just as they're speaking.
And even more impressively, they can translate between languages
just on the fly. Just imagine, you know, going to
Spain or wherever else you're going, travelling in the world
and just speaking to anybody and having those subtitles appear
that that's really cool. And for accessibility, this
could be huge. You know, imagine someone that
might be hard of hearing or deaf or someone that's got that's
heart of sight and be able to have someone or the AI read out
what people are saying real time or have subtitles appear
underneath them. So yeah, it's a really great
feature for accessibility too. And early testers apparently
have reported that it works quite well in quiet
environments, though it can apparently struggle when there's
lots of noise going on. It can accidentally sort of pick
up stray words from nearby conversations.
And I guess it's probably probably quite a similar
experience to anyone that uses digital note taker UPS during
video calls. Sometimes it gets muddled up
between two people speaking and it labeling it as the same
person speaking. Still, even with some issues, I
think it's going to be a really exciting feature and has real
use case in the world. Second, you've got navigation of
maps. I'm actually just really, I've
always thought this is very cool, this idea where you can
just be walking around a street and seeing arrows appear or, you
know, just just general guidance that isn't in a map and you have
to have your, you know, head down inside a phone to see where
you're going. And at the moment, there's some
limitations to this. The glasses do provide a kind of
turn by turn walking directions with arrows and mini maps
appearing on the glasses themselves in your peripheral
vision. So yeah, I think although it's
still in a map and it's not placing arrows onto the street
as I was describing it, it'll probably get there eventually.
And I had the idea of not having to look at your phone as you're
kind of navigating environments, just having it in your glasses
instead. I think the way they've
implemented it is quite interesting as well.
You know, the display is positioned so it doesn't block
your entire central vision. It's more like kind of having
AGPS overlay, you know, in the corner of your eye.
And at 5000, it's a brightness, as I said, about four times
brighter than a mobile phone. You can therefore see it in
direct sunlight. And they're built in some
security and safety measures, such as if you're moving at high
speed, it's going to try and stop you using the feature.
Or if you're, you know, biking or driving, it's going to try
and stop you doing it. The only real big problem I see
right now is the fact that they don't support Google Maps or
others. And we just know that those
technology providers are so far ahead in the map space compared
to, let's say, Meta, because Google has so much traffic
information that's up to date and root updates and things like
that. So the third use case is quite
interesting to me is message triaging and general
communication. So the neuro band comes into
effect here because, you know, incoming texts or calls or app
notifications can just appear in your lens and you can just
respond without reacting or looking at your phone.
So you can use the neural band. You can kind of pinch your
fingers a little bit or make subtle wrist movements to select
an option or reply to a message and things like that.
And what's quite surprising here is Monkey's Brown.
So for those that don't know him, he's the biggest YouTube
tech reviewer in the world. He has the power to make or
break a product launch, really. And he actually said it works
really, really well. And he did a big in depth review
of that. I recommend go check that out.
So yeah, for a lot of people online are saying it's genuinely
useful and even people describing it as kind of magical
experiences here. Now for me personally, I would
never, ever, ever, ever in a million years allow
notifications and texts and things like that appear on my
screen in front of my eyesight. I have all notifications turned
off. I don't like it being super
intrusive and dragging me back to applications, but I know many
people will love that. Then we come into the last use
case that are really interesting, which is content
creation. Obviously you've met a a giant
network of creators. The incentive for those creators
to create content and be pushed by meta on their applications
also makes sense and they've upgraded it to enable that use
case really well. So they've got, as I said, 12
megapixel camera and 1080P filming.
The camera also shows you where on what is being filmed because
previous glasses actually you couldn't really tell if the
camera was focusing on one thing over another.
You can also zoom in just by rotating your wrist, like
turning a dial and start recording with kind of finger
movements, which I also think pretty cool.
There's also an LED light that kind of flicks up on the glasses
to activate when recording. So you actually are able to
notify people around you that you're recording.
Again, there's a lot of privacy fears and concerns with these
glasses and say, being at the gym or doing things and suddenly
you're being filmed without you knowing it.
And as you can imagine, you can film things like reels and stuff
straight to the application and do live streaming and stuff like
that. So that's all the things it can
do. But importantly, I guess the
question is, will this be successful or is it going to be
another flop? Well, I'm going to try and
attempt to answer that and give my my viewpoint.
So when this technology typically comes out, it's often
seen as a bit fanciful by many people.
Like people I roll, they don't think it'll ever catch on.
And I think the smartphone evolution over time officers
probably the clearest road map to understand whether or not the
smart glasses can actually catch on and importantly cross the
chasm from say early adopters that really like, you know, very
niche features to the mainstream.
So with that context in mind, in the early 2000s, mobile phones
like, you know, the BlackBerry 957, the Palm trio, very early
Nokia's were incredibly popular for e-mail and very basic web
access, but appealed mainly to business users and very early
adopters. And that's what they were often
marketed as. They're very clunky interfaces,
lots of big keyboards, very poor battery life.
And in general, the public saw them as a expensive tool for
business people or tech lovers. Now, obviously, as everybody
knows, the inflection point came around 2000 and seven, 2010 with
the iPhone and the Android, mainly the Android.
And obviously, several factors aligned into what became
literally a generational product.
You know, we had improved hardware, much faster chips so
things could run faster and the phone could be much more
lightweight. We had new touchscreens that
replace, you know, styluses and big keyboards.
And very famously, the BlackBerry CEO said no one will
ever want to use anything other than a keyboard.
And you could argue that the smart glasses right now are in
that BlackBerry era right now because Meta sold about 2
million Ray Ban glasses since about 2023, which is actually
quite respectable for what is actually a new category.
But it's very small compared to that $1.5 billion smartphone
user because that market is huge.
So it almost mirrors how maybe a few million people are using
PDAs and and things like that before the iPhone changed
everything. Zuckerberg himself actually
referenced this third generation rule, which is where
breakthrough consumer electronics typically hit their
stride in the third iteration, selling between 5 and 10 million
units if it's going to be destined for mass success.
And I think Ray Ban display represents Meta's third attempt.
They had stories in 2021. They had the Meta glasses
launched in 2023, and now the display glasses in 2025.
And so you could argue this is the iPhone 3GS moment where the
technology might finally mature and achieve somewhat broader
adoption. But there's also another
possibility, which is they're actually in the year 2000, not
2007. And maybe the core
infrastructure isn't here. Social barriers are too high.
You need many more iterations of hardware before it actually
makes sense for a regular consumer or it might never catch
on anyway. So with that in mind, let's go
through some of the things that I think are going to make or
break the smart glasses. So the first one, as you can
imagine, is the price. It's about $800, which is quite
actually respectable for an early adopter market.
You know, the first iPhone launched at about $600.00, which
is about $850 today after inflation.
And that very much positions it at the early adopter market.
So it's slightly a bit too expensive for the mass
consumers, but it's also not too expensive, which is where Apple
Vision Pros landed at three and a half, $1000.
But I put myself in broadly an early adopter.
I would never pay three and a half, $1000 for the Apple Vision
Pro even if I really wanted to try it.
And historical precedent suggests that this pricing could
work quite well. And importantly, Verizon is
exploring whether to stock these glasses, and they actually
announced that they will be. But whether or not they do what
they did with early mobile phones, which is, you know,
bundle it into packages that makes it a lot more affordable.
Or for example, giving you some smart glasses when you get a
specific type of contract. Because if they did that, that
pricing would massively expand the total potential market for
these glasses. The second factor I think is
going to be the input mechanism. And, and when I say input
mechanism, the way you interact with the smart glasses, because
obviously a lot of the smartphone innovations really
hinged on how people could engage and interact with the
phone. So you went from, you know, T9
keyboards to quality BlackBerry keyboards to then a touchscreen.
And every breakthrough led to huge numbers of new use cases
being possible. And I think the neuroband you
could argue is potentially equivalent as that touchscreen.
You know, Metro invested 4 years into building this out and
reviewers have described it as feeling quite magical.
You know, the ability to zoom in to cameras by rotating your
wrist or navigate interfaces through sort of like small
gestures is is really cool. And obviously the better it
gets, the more likely people use it.
But it's a really hard one to call.
Anyway, factor 3 I'll go into as the App Store.
You know, the, the iPhone was really powerful at launch, but
it became like breakout successful through the App
Store. You know, metas glasses launched
with essentially no third party ecosystem and no ability for
developers to build into it either.
So that's going to be a problem. Now, Meta obviously understand
intimately platform dynamics. It's literally their business
model. And they're building developer
interest gradually. So they've got partners like
Microsoft, Disney, and and many, many more #4 obviously is social
acceptance. You know, early mobile phone
users were seen as rude. Like people talking loudly in
public would get an eye roll. And over time, of course, as
we've seen in at Scale, these norms do shift.
Now everyone is very happy staring at their screen in
public. And I think smart glasses are
going to have to overcome something quite similar.
And there's going to be unique privacy fears and concerns to
deal with as well. You know, Meta learned quite
well from Google Glasses and the giant fairy that was Google
Glasses anyway. So they've gone for trying to
style their glasses in line with Ray Bans.
That's why the partnership exists, to provide that, I
guess, social legitimacy that pure tech companies just can't
match. And the glasses also include a
very bright LED screen when recording.
So again, trying to tell everyone around that these
cameras are now recording right now.
However, even with this LED system, if venues and important
public spaces start to ban these glasses, you know, like schools,
gyms, offices, hospitals, then it's just limiting all the
potential times and places that these glasses can be used.
And if all these areas become no glasses zone, then it's going to
be hard to become a mainstream product.
And then finally is competition. Obviously Apple is going to
develop something similar and they always launch something a
few years later as well. And obviously they've got
probably the most perfect position to produce something
good here because it's Apple. I think they've lost a bit of
that magic over the years, but I'm sure they can pull something
good out the bag. And Meta really need this giant
developer market share before Apple enters because, you know,
although Meta have that first mover advantage and it's
building its ecosystem, Apple already have that built ready
for them. It's going to be whether a Meta
can really hit that ambitious number of 10 million units sold
by 2026. And if it can do that, maybe it
can establish itself as a real player.
So yeah, Meta Ray Ban display represents either the dawn of, I
guess, AI computing or an expensive reminder that being
early and 1st to market often means being wrong on timing.
And I guess the technology obviously largely works.
The use cases make sense. The social barriers are probably
lower than ever before, especially with the partnership
with Ray Ban. But Meta do face huge challenges
like how are you going to build up a big enough developer
ecosystem? How are you going to bring in
the right big players like Apple and bringing iMessage in?
And the big question of whether people really want computers on
their face. So right now, I'd probably put
us in the BlackBerry era of smart glasses.
So it's finely functional enough for some utility amongst early
adopters, but probably still years away from an iPhone moment
that drives mass adoption. And the question really is
whether Meta can iterate fast enough to get there, or whether
they're really just building brand and awareness or a bridge
for Apple to walk over. My verdict then is I'm
cautiously optimistic. These might not change
everything, but they could prove that change is quite inevitable,
and sometimes being early to an inevitable change is enough.
Anyway, thank you for listening. I hope you found today's episode
interesting and I'll see you next week.