What’s new?

Meta Connect got weird, Microsoft Old Yellered the HoloLens, we try to make sense of Meta’s AR Glasses prototype, and I spoke at a conference.

Ready to dive in?

Zuck goes Founder Mode at Meta Connect

Mark Zuckerberg has changed over the years. Last week we caught a glimpse of a different Zuck wearing a shirt with a latin phrase that roughly translates to “My way or the highway”.

Founder Mode Zuck kept us waiting for 20 minutes before kicking off the event. With just 40 minutes remaining, He rushed through the product announcements, conducted all the demos, and made his people into props showing off the technology.

None of his senior leaders who made these products possible shared in the product announcements. Instead, Meta CTO, Andrew Bozworth (Boz), kicked off the second session with an apology to developers about their experience in the Meta ecosystem before going into detail on Mark’s announcements.

Perhaps all press events hosted by billionaires are doomed to be weird because Meta’s latest set of announcements sent Apple scrambling and made Microsoft shutter their AR headset, HoloLens.

Meta’s AR glasses aren’t for sale

Last week we got a look at Meta Reality Lab’s top secret AR Glasses code named “Orion”. This headset combines several leapfrog innovations that puts Meta ahead of Snap, Magic Leap, XReal, and Microsoft.

1. FOV (Field of View) - Orion’s 70 degree field of view is almost 2x what Microsoft, Magic Leap, and Snap have. Field of view is key to immersion. If the thing you are looking at is the size of a postage stamp and disappears when you turn your head, then you aren’t going to feel immersed.

2. Battery Life - The glasses battery lasts at least 2 hours.

3. Holograms with Depth - Waveguide displays are difficult enough to build. You shine a colored light at specific points along the edge of a lens and the light terminates in a single dot in front of your eye. This happens across many points to form a high resolution image across a grid. Meta built a waveguide display that has 3 separate depths (close, near, and infinitely far) so the virtual content appears roughly at the same depth as the physical content to reduce eye strain as your focusing muscles adjust.

This is not a product you can buy. This is a prototype. There’s a lot of hype right now, but it’s important to recognize these technology milestones and take in the larger context. For instance, Meta doesn’t know what materials this thing will even be made out of. The ones they are using are prohibitively expensive.

When Alex Heath took the glasses off after 2 hours, the engineers told him that was a new record for the glasses. Nobody had ever worn them that long without a critical error! A prototype is not a product. You see a prototype and imagine what it can do for you, but the fact is that it cannot do those things. There are too many gaps. Little things that have to be built to improve your quality of life. Then there is the lack of ecosystem and infrastructure for the right applications and connectivity to make it effective for most users most of the time.

Why would Mark choose to show the world something from their R&D lab?

1. Meta has been under investor pressure to rein in spending for Reality Labs. They are burning $3-5b a quarter despite the success of Ray-Ban Meta and the Meta Quest hardware and app lab.

   Since the announcement, Meta’s stock price has risen 2%. Not a lot, but enough to show the price is stable and investors have faith in Mark’s vision.

2. Meta is betting the competition won’t be able to catch up to them before launch. By announcing their progress and showing the public what to expect, Meta has set the bar for future competitors launching AR devices.

I bought my first standalone Meta Quest in 2019. At that time I was already using the Quest to pull up multiple screens for my computer and work together with other people as an avatar. Then the covid lockdowns happened. I thought to myself,

“This is it. This is VR’s moment. Everyone is going to buy a VR headset and we’ll continue work as usual.”

I didn’t understand that I was as an early adopter. The world was learning how to make a video call while I was in the metaverse with other early adopters (nerds.)

Orion is a tech demo on the road to becoming a product. When the product is released, the world will not change overnight. People will adapt slowly while the ecosystem and infrastructure matures.

If you’re like me and can’t get enough of Meta’s new AR glasses, then watch this video.

Quest 3S Internals

The $299 Quest 3S was not a well kept secret. It was announced last week, but I received a private demo last month where I noticed pixelation and the screen door effect in full force. In last month’s issue I said the Q3S had identical internals to the Quest 3 and the only difference was the housing and lens, but I was wrong. (Unbelievable! This never happens.) The Q3S display is the same 4 year-old Quest 2 display. Meta’s “AR” Schleicher says the eye buffer resolution is the same as the Quest 3 so there is very little image scaling happening if it all, but the large pixels are not pretty. Especially if you’re already accustomed to the Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro.

The Quest 3S is Meta’s best headset for hand tracking (yes, even better than the $500 Quest 3) thanks to Infrared lights mounted to the front so the camera can capture crisp IR illuminated images of your hands in any lighting conditions.

Interestingly, the Quest 3S lasts longer than the Quest 3 on a smaller battery. This is due to the Fresnel lenses which allow 80-90% of light from the display to pass through. The Quest 3’s sharp pancake lenses only allow 5-10% of light to pass meaning the Quest 3 display must be extremely bright and draw an enormous amount of power.

Other key differences include:

• No headphone jack - Meta’s Bluetooth lags so bad that it is unusable. It will be interesting to see if the promised Bluetooth updates make it usable.

• No depth sensor - Meta claims they can use the onboard cameras to infer depth information about your space. They’ve been saying this for years and I have yet to see this feature in Horizon OS. It will be interesting to see how this plays out given depth information is required for meaningful MR experiences.)

• Flicker sensor - Used to detect if LED lighting is blinking at 50 or 60 hertz to reduce headache inducing flicker in the passthrough video.

• Lower FOV (Field of View)

• Action Button - This would be nice to have on the Quest 3. I find myself constantly turning MR on and off in the quick settings panel.)

Some reporters are claiming the Quest 3S has a sharper color passthrough image than the Quest 3. I disagree. The experience was just as grainy as my Quest 3 and Schleicher says the RGB passthrough cameras are the same as the Quest 3. That said, I can see how repositioning the cameras and refactoring the onboard image processing could affect the final image enough to convince users the slightly different image is a better image.

Goodbye Spark AR

In last month’s issue, we covered the sudden shutdown of Meta Spark AR. I predicted we would see some sort of replacement for it at Meta Connect, but nothing was announced.

I was wrong. (I can’t believe I’m saying this twice in one issue. I guess this is what happens when you publish a newsletter with more opinions than facts.)

Spark AR’s FAQ says Meta is doing away with 3rd party AR filters. The only AR filters that will be available in Facebook and Instagram will be the ones our Meta overlords bestow upon us.

Tik Tok is still going strong with AR filters and Snap is making a grab for disenfranchised Spark AR creators.

Meta is an industry leader so it will be interesting to see if this spells the end of social, mobile, augmented reality.

In the meantime, it almost feels like we’re in a holding pattern as we wait for AR glasses to swoop in and make AR great again.

See you next week!

What did you think? Hit reply and let me know!

I can’t wait to show you next week’s issue. We’ll take a closer look at the Meta Connect developer announcements and Meta’s push for 2D apps with 3D content just like the Apple Vision Pro.

- Nate

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