Meta vs Snap’s AR Vision for the Future!

40:01So it's 46 degree field of view on the Snapchat spectacles and 70 on the meta Orion glasses. Jeez. That seems like a significant number and it feels significantly different wearing both of them. like the Orion glasses if you really got to the edge of your view it would happen for sure this feels like I'm fighting to keep things in my view and especially if it's close um I did like the Lego experience which just puts like some Legos on a block and just by like turning my head to look down I would just like saw off half of the Legos that I was looking at yeah I agree um and it's not that they weren't pinned well on the table it actually did like a really impressive job at that but just anything i tried to do i was cutting part of it off yeah this is a significant amount of the time okay so i didn't get to try the eye tracking part of the orion glasses which these do not do oh yeah um i did find both the spatial pinning to be better on orion and i found the and i think this is kind of the same technology the hand tracking to also be way better on Orion.

41:08Not that these were unusable, like totally usable, but I definitely felt myself trying to do things to make them work better whereas the metaglasses felt pretty indistinguishable from the hand tracking on a quest where you can just do all the same. I have a question for both of you. A lot of people that have tried Orion have been like, this is our best look at the future yet and they seem very excited about it but people have tried this and they're not really saying that and i tried these and it felt like they took hololens which to be fair hololens was pretty big and they shrunk it down into these which is kind of impressive even though i just don't really think the technology is incredible incredible so what would you say about orion is significantly more like jaw-dropping than these i think like if anything there no no there are plenty of things and i think we'll we might as well just start pitting them against each other at this point because i think it starts answering a lot of those questions category by category yeah i um first thing i wanted to ask though just to really pin on the field of view we all played the golf game on this okay that was the sorry that was the one that most made me realize like that it's important yeah you like look at this hole ahead of you and it like zooms you back and then it shows a line to the ball and you kind of have to follow the line because you're shooting into this window where the golf and then the ball is actually on the environment that you're in but just like every time you would look you just would see all these ways it's cut off and i i think what's kind of weird about this is because it's smaller and it's such a perfect rectangle you don't realize when you move your head you start chopping things at an angle and that just feels even more weird when it's chopping stuff off where the the metaglass is because the field of view is larger it was generally on the outskirts of your eyes and when you're turning that much it's it's very hard to hit an edge of something you might be projecting i don't this like really we keep saying marquez and i realized this when we're talking the other day like kills the immersion but ar glasses shouldn't really be immersive but they kind of are i just don't know the way that it's tricking your brain into thinking it's like really yeah yeah it kills that pretty hard i think to answer your question david which is a really good question is that i personally did not come away after trying both these glasses thinking like the orion ones are noticeably more inspiring or like noticeably better than the spectacles uh i think they both have strengths in different areas overall though i think the meta glasses were a flashier pony show like the um yeah i don't know do you want to go down this list i think there's a lot of things in there that i okay so let's this to me i think is the biggest thing that like let's imagine these as if they were consumer products like the thing that i would want it to be and like which neither of them are neither of them are where you know like i guess we can kind of take this and think of it as like this is what they should become yeah down the line but let's talk about form factor first these are supposed to be glasses that you kind of wear like all day do you think so david and i were literally having this i want to hear the conversation about that's true do you wear these all day or do you put them on to do stuff and then take them off to be a person yeah i guess i would actually walk somewhere in the middle all day nah i'd say all day out and not at home if If you're making a computer for my face, I want to be able to put it on and not think about it all day.

44:41I don't want to have to think about whether I want to take it off or not. Okay, look, not to be overly pessimistic, but, like, does everyone really want glasses that you wear all the time that are computer connected? Because at some point, the ads are going to start coming. Yes. Yes. Yes. And you're not going to have an option. I can't argue that. Yeah. And also, like, do we really want a future where you're sitting in a coffee shop scrolling reels, but nobody even knows that you're doing that? Like, you're going to have subway surfers playing off to the side while you're trying to have a conversation with your mom.

45:14That's epic. I want it. Sorry, mom. Have a better conversation. My mom listens to this. She's not going to love that. From meta. Anyway. No, no, no. You could block out the ads. It's super in this beautiful AR future. Well, yeah, with meta premium. the whole idea of like being able to dive into some computing by putting on the glasses while still not being like taken out of because i'll be real i'll be real i'd rather have a coffee shop full of people with ar glasses on tiktok than a coffee shop full of people with airpods and their phones on tiktok well they're still gonna wear the airpods well no because of the yeah but they have leakage I think I'm not worried about that that being said I agree with you David I think the battery life restrictions on these things are a good thing don't make it don't make it better keep it there and yeah the ads are really worrying it's a sad world when you're in the car with your bud you're doing a road trip and you're both on your speckies and you look out the window and you both stare at the same area and you see different billboards.

46:26Right now, if we're trying to talk about what's cool about these, getting straight into the potential ad conversation feels like we're losing a little bit of the tech on this. Form factor. We're still having this conversation, though, of do you wear them for a few hours? When companies started using HTC Vibes and all of that stuff in actual practice, you know there would be press releases that say like bmw or mercedes is using vibes to like help design the interiors of the cars i'm not sure if that actually was a thing that they like implemented full on or if they did it once so that they could have a press release why else would there be a hard hat hololens that's fair point fair point um but either way you know those are tasks that you are specifically using the device so that it is better while you are designing the little bits of this car for an hour and a half right and so i think we've looked at things like the uh apple vision pro in a similar way right like oh you want to do a video call a facetime call with someone and you want to feel like this telepresence and they're floating in the room and you're doing this over here like they're kind of positioning it as a work and entertainment device but they're not positioning that as like an all-day device and i understand it's because it's a headset and not a pair of glasses um but for a for a computer to be on your face all the time i feel like it would be better for people to use it for specific tasks and then put it away the the thing that kind of makes that tricky is that they're trying to make it look as much like a normal pair of glasses that you would normally wear all day as possible and so i do think the future we're headed towards is the future where they're trying to get that eight hours of battery life and that's that's because at the end of the day both meta and snapchat are companies whose business models rely on attention increasing engagement and increasing time spent i mean i think here both of them are building these as things that stay on your face for a significant part of your day not just pulling it out for when you want to use which is a shame i disagree that's how i want i guess like if i'm going out for the day i don't want I have to bring like a pair of sun I want my sunglasses to just have the things in it already and when I want that I have it I'm not saying I want it on all day I just want it to be a regular pair of glasses all day and then when I need to use it it's just there because otherwise I'm not bringing it which is what the meta Ray-Bans are supposed to be basically well but they have no projection no no but that's still the world that they're like looking towards right they're trying to make these in the form factor of the meta Ray-Bans that's like their ultimate goal this is all to say as a form factor assuming we're only wearing these for an hour at a time these are just too big to be comfortable they're just for sure barely too big to be comfortable form factor the meta orions win and by a mile yeah i'm laying it down here first i'm pro puck oh i was just gonna say i disagree because these don't have a puck now the space you save in the glasses that I would assume is because in part because of the compute puck is cool and it fits into my fantasy of when I need to use these I take out my glasses in a cute little glasses case I take out the puck in a cute little puck case and I put it on the table and I use my glasses and then when I'm done I wrap it all up and I go back to being a human person with blood in my veins my perfect example my perfect use case for this are these glasses the snapchat ones with no puck because the compute is in my phone I'm already carrying around a puck let me just use the brains in that thing whoa yeah i mean i would prefer not to carry an extra piece of equipment yeah yeah but the only reason the meta orion glasses have a puck is because they can't make a phone if they could just make a phone and people would use it it would just be in the phone well they can make an app that's all snapped yeah but then apple's gonna take 30 percent now i i still think as far as form factor goes i like the idea of lighter weight more comfortable glasses and a companion and I like it.

50:31I'm sorry. So you don't need your phone. I guess the benefit there is you don't need your phone. I mean, the ultimate form factor is just the glasses. What about this? What about glasses that you can wear all the time, but they work so well as regular glasses that are like transition lenses or whatever that you can like have them be off. And then when you want to use the compute, you can turn them on. That's what they're doing. Yeah, but I think that the idea right now is sort of just that they're always sort of running in the background and giving you additional AR cues and that kind of stuff.

51:03You don't think about it. You walk up to a new person. It says, Andrew, above your head. I don't think that's necessarily they're forcing that or anything. I think we're imagining things because meta is bad, which I don't disagree with. But I don't think they've ever said that this is just going to start playing things without you asking or doing things. But they haven't not said that. yeah and we've all used facebook so form factor which one the orion orion yeah but you too but i haven't gotten to try it so i have no opinion but just form factor i mean like you saw them on people's faces which one looked more like yeah the orion definitely looks more like glasses okay but style points for the speckys nice i like them yeah they do look they're cool and you can call them speckys which is a plus if i look you know there's there's two sides there's one side where it's like the right outfit roll up to the club at 1 a.m you're getting in with those the other side is if you wear any orange at all you will become vector from despicable me so you know whatever i um the four vector i want is the original generation of spectacles but with the benefits yeah those were the most okay next resolution disgusting uh that is not a question because the Snapchat spectacles have such a better resolution than the Orion ones.

52:27The actual projections on the Snapchat spectacles are what feels like miles ahead. And we have to say over at Meta, they were like, we could have made it higher resolution, but we were prioritizing battery life and saving compute for other things. Okay, so question for you guys, since you tried it, do you think that's the right trade-off? Would you take a hit in resolution to have more power like that? I think both of the battery lives are terrible on these. So I don't think it's really like - Resolution or field of view? Field of view. That's a really good question. I'd rather have the field of view than the resolution.

53:03Field of view too. But I also, I think we should, and this will make, we can talk about this more when we get to the actual experiences. Assuming that there was a major compute hit on, like either it was like literal compute or like the extra thermal load you need to be able to take up by doing that much more compute. I did find the experiences to be a lot more enriching on the Snapchat spectacles. Wait, but those are the higher resolution ones. So what the hell? I mean, I think there's just more experiences. I mean, we can talk about that. There's also just a lot of stuff you can do. Absent experiences, the Snapchat spectacles have way more things than, I think for Orion.

53:40And better things. And better. Like, are we going into experiences now? Are we there? Yeah, let's just do experiences. We all said resolution for spectacles, if that's just resolution. tech companies, David and I have been saying this for a while, you can't use an example of your product as I'm too stupid to do this without a computer. You can't. So when they were like, I want to make a smoothie and my pantry is only smoothie ingredients and I just can't figure it out. Or he was like, I go into the grocery store and I have no idea what a summer squash is, but my wife will be mad. It's like, dude, you don't even need to take out your phone for that one.

54:17Straight up. like yeah yeah i mean in that instance i think it's more showing off the fact that they were able to pin the names of objects they are identifying i think it was more that was the more important part it was a demo not what you could actually do with it yeah i mean i yeah i agree it's like that's a banana thanks for letting me know i or like that's the giant bag that says like stevia on it right within giant letters it's like okay you read that it said stevia these are all i agree with you though the pinning was impressive yeah no the pinning was impressive the object recognition it's great but it's the same time it's like there's a you're making a lifestyle proposition when you're doing stuff like this and it's like if the lifestyle proposition is like do you order doordash so much that you can't identify basic foods do you need the rest of your life be more like doordash buy these thirty thousand dollar glass totally i mean the classic example is like i've been to so many chatbot demos and large language model demos and every single time it's like some google engineer who has like 30 patents and probably a nobel prize and they're just like so how do i write a social media post about my cute dog and then the the post that gets written is happy dog day hashtag saturday you know i it's i don't know whatever we can move on from that sorry that was a separate tangent this is a separate tangent let's go down the list in terms of like the experience no no experience deviating okay so But in all seriousness, my favorite experience was the ping pong pong, just regular pong.

55:49I played with Marquez. On the Orion glasses. And it was because it was the first time I had ever used MRAR VR and had like a really meaningful shared experience with someone else. I've done multiplayer games with people in Quest and it was fun. and I've done a few, I had a great time with my cousins playing this like squirrel game in VR. That was really great. Oh, I do remember that. Yeah, that's so fun. But in VR, being able to like see Marquez and play a game with him. And then when I asked, you know, it wasn't built into this current thing, but they were like, yeah, if you had a room full of people also wearing the spectacles, they could like spectate, you know, like the Orion glasses.

56:29Thank you. Yeah. That's cool, man. That's really cool. So you're Orion. No, I thought that was every other experience other than that one I thought was cooler on the spectacles I thought that I think it was called beat lab. It was like this music making one dude. I tried that one I could not get it to work properly Okay, the hand tracking. Yeah, the hand tracking was rough spectacles. It's pretty rough It was golden. I thought yeah And I thought the experience was so fun that I actually didn't care about how how rough it was I thought the educational things like looked really beautiful and were like really engaging um the lego thing was i thought i just thought yeah like yeah i had way more fun the easy thing here is the the room we did with the orion spectacle or the the orion glasses was like five experiences maybe it was video chatting make a smoothie pong that arcade airplane game and go on instagram and go and the instagram app that's also not on an ipad snapchat you open up the first menu of experiences and there's already more than that and then you can scroll for what feels like quite a while so there are 10x the amount of apps on spectacles whether it's just a not so great golf game, that's another story but the Orion things weren't that great either so I think apps experiences the Snapchat spectacles to be fair, this is kind of Snapchat's bread and butter it's what they've been working on for years and clearly Meta has a lot going on so they're a lean team you know oh my goodness it is funny that they built an Instagram app for AR before they built it for the iPad makes me mad can't make that stuff up let's go since you guys both briefly talked about it though like controlling so I can't just call it hand tracking because it's different on the Orion glasses there's hand tracking as well as the bracelet yeah I was gonna say are we counting the EMG band yes it's part of the package I feel like yeah It doesn't need it, which I think by itself is a great thing that Meta did was like, you can get this, but you also don't need it.

58:34So if you pass your classes off to someone else, they can use hand tracking. So I never actually got to try the EMG band. So I can compare them both on computer vision. Hand track. Should I do that? And then I'll let you guys dive into the band. So the winner here for me was Orion. And maybe it was because I'm used to the Quest system and I'm familiar with the gestures and how to make them really clear and stuff. But I felt like it more accurately got that. I did feel like the Snapchat Spectacles had really nice and easy physical buttons on them. and I'm looping that in with just like general bandless control that I thought was really cool.

59:12But overall, other than the hand tracking clarity, I didn't find one of them to be dramatically better than the other one. An interesting thing to note is if you hold the Orion glasses, there's cameras everywhere on them. If you look at these, there's only two cameras on the front, but on the bottom, despite it looking like smooth plastic, there's actually infrared cameras. and those are the downward facing cameras I think they actually might be right there I don't actually know where they are but I do know that they're in there and that's how they look down at your hands and I thought that was a really nifty fact for us to give you here at Waveform I think it's pretty easy to describe how good the band was and that's imagine the Dragons the Apple Vision Pro first of all you get to use your eyes to look at things, which I think is the best way of selecting things inside of AR VR.

1:00:09When it's calibrated correctly. When it's calibrated well, which you do do a calibration process in the Orion ones. Sorry, say it again. So imagine the Apple Vision Pro eye selecting and tapping, except because you have that wristband, you get feedback with it every time as well. It's fantastic. I think it's so much better. And then being able to do flipping and scrolling is awesome. that band itself and the fact that it's like very minimal it doesn't feel like you're wearing this giant like handcuff or anything it's right in fact marquez was wearing it we went to eat lunch and forgot he was wearing it he just thought it was like oh he never took it off he never took it off you forget you're wearing it and then you're like whoop there it is hey yo because it looks like a whoop it does look like a whoop so i think control wise meta wins like hands down right well hands up hands literally anywhere you want random is using his hands behind his back wow which I don't think you oh sorry I was gonna say hand behind his back right yeah that is kind of crazy though because we talked about on the vision pro it has like a really wide field of vision for what you're doing with your fingers but that's because it has those lenses on the bottom area where it points down but you can't do behind your back I don't really know why you would want to do that but at least at least you could you know I mean I technically like in my hoodie could be doing controls inside of my hoodie yeah or like you know I feel like a lot of this is going to be used for evil stuff so when you're in your big living room and you're pacing behind your back the evil villain pace yeah because evil humans plot with their hands behind their back evil flies are the ones that plot with their hands in front of them friction yeah anywho damn i was so close to cutting that but now i have to keep it that was hilarious yeah thanks man um all right pinning we kind of talked about i think pinning and tracking is the same technology right uh um like i feel like tracking i think of hand tracking and pinning yeah but what's the difference i'm talking about like pinning things in the physical world and them staying no no i get that but like is it not the same tracking it's just tracking a 3d space with the snapchat spectacles when you like lay something on a table if you walk away and come back is it in the same space i had a window floating by my desk that i came back to it yeah still really on these yeah i can confirm if you think about it that's both of these companies know how to do that already snapchat's been doing it with ar things inside of your phone and snapchat forever they're You're good at pinning the dancing hot dog guy on wherever you want.

1:02:50And Meta's been doing it in the quests. We've been able to do this since like a 3DS. They're both great at it. So I don't know if I have a clear winner on that. It's easier to see all the things you pinned on the Orion glasses, because it's 70 degree field of view instead of 46 degree field of view. But they're probably both pinned pretty well. Yeah. From what we've tried. I mean, it's also, we've all tried these for 20 minutes each maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So not anything too crazy. Yeah. Speakers. It's minimal. If you're gonna ask me which pair of these speakers is better, that's like asking a pizza chef, like who makes a better slice?

1:03:28Lunchables or Lunchly? Neither of them are pizza. One's got mold on it, though. Right now, bad example. This will be my only thing. It's not even sound quality. Whenever anyone was using the Meta glasses, I never heard it as an outsider. These spectacles, whether the volume was just too loud, but I felt like I heard everybody using these in the office. The Meta Ray-Ban glasses are good at, when you're playing music, just playing them directly into your ears and not being that loud. That is true. That could be user error. and I don't know if we just turn these on too loud but everyone I heard with this, I heard you guys.

1:04:01I think that the Meta Ray-Bans they probably took those learnings from the Meta Ray-Bans and they definitely, those are product product products so they have to be out in the real world and work correctly. These are extremely demo unit and I know that the Orion glasses are also demo units but they still tried to make them more product like. Well you're saying they most likely they took the learnings from an actual product. like an evolved version that's the only reason i would give orion the speakers yeah right now i did not come away from those experiences feeling like they were significantly yeah different in any way except for isolation i guess yeah but i was the one wearing them so yeah fair enough um battery life this is literally just a number orion is better yeah by double yeah but that makes it worse for the reasons i said earlier well even if you want them but wouldn't you rather than if you're using it minimally to then have to charge it less?

1:04:56Nope.

1:05:00The last thing I have on here is just the actual lens material itself and how that affects using them. At first, I was going to say the Snapchat Spectacles because they're glass, and I thought it felt like a clear... I keep wanting to call it pass-through, but, you know, seeing is just what it really is. AR. Yeah, because the silicon carbide had what felt like kind of a tint. And it felt like I was looking through something. But then now seeing these in more direct lights and seeing that prism effect, I do think that affects the actual things on your screen. Can I see the glass? I just feel like in order to say the next thing I'm going to say, I need to...

1:05:47Put them on. the uh index of refraction with a glass wave guide is uh worse and it does create weirder artifacts weird rainbows and it is a little clearer the thing that i would describe the like overall um like clarity experience is and i understand this is something that very few people have like actually seen but sorry i'm taking off the glasses it's very awkward um If you've ever gotten the chance to hold a raw LCD panel, not in an enclosure, just took up to a power supply and a cord, and then you un-helix all of the crystals at once by setting it a pure pattern, that is what it looks like.

1:06:35Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. Okay, but engineers listen to this. They might have done that. I still think very few people have done that. everyone go to alibaba.com but that's that's what i would compare it to like like on unhoused lcd fully unhelixed does it change your opinion at all that using silicon carbide potentially 10x is the price of whatever it is well that's an interesting point here that i think we can i mean it's all dev stuff so it doesn't really matter yeah these are available for people who want to develop for outside of snap well that's what i was gonna say it doesn't matter and they're like 120 a month for at least one year expensive but doable versus the other one is basically unobtainium unless you work for meta yeah and it seems like and if you listen after this ad break marquez is going to do an interview with boz and i believe he threw out the number 20 000 to 30 000 a unit and i'm pretty sure he did not fight back on that look dude instagram not on a phone is expensive so those yeah those units are significantly more expensive yeah they did say something interesting at that briefing which was they believe that silicon carbide is the the future technology for this product class when it becomes like a widely adopted thing but they also said if the industry decides they're going with glass they're ready to make the switch like they're they're not willing to die on the silicon carbide hill even though they believe eventually it will be the dominant waveguide material well evan spiegel told us that he thinks that glass is going to be where it's at so exactly i think oh i guess that's it i guess that's all the categories that's all i have do you have any other questions about orion or if you just by how we're explaining orion what do you think would be the more enjoyable experience between the two i mean i think that the little things often make for a better experience and the little things in my opinion are going to be how good it is at actually like tracking what you want to do with the input with it uh the field of view those things are things that like you kind of got to get the fit and finish before people actually want to put it on their face because if even if you had like really really good software if the input's bad you're not going to use it if you have really really good software but it only works here it's not going to be immersive yep so i think that kind of stuff is the stuff that's eventually going to win out this isn't to say i mean i'm sure that snapchat is working on much more advanced versions of these that have like much wider field of view and all those different things um you know i'm they'll probably release something in the next year or so i'm i i totally agree like as much as i want resolution to be so much better the field of view was like the field of view and literally wearing it on my face where it's not folding my ear in half yeah it's like the entire experience itself yeah so i have to like vote for the orion glasses on this um i would not be surprised if the eventual consumer version of both of these look vastly vastly different totally um because like the that chart of what the orion glasses looked like over the last couple years they showed us the first one was gigantic yeah and then within like a couple years it was down to something that actually is under 100 grams yeah I still really want to try Orion because a lot of people were like, it's absolutely the future.

1:10:03It's incredible. And I just don't get that from AR right now. You have to, I think, and maybe you'll agree with me on this. You have to look at it in the most optimistic viewpoint possible to come to that conclusion. And I think if you can see how far it's come to get to that and how much they have to do in so small of a form factor and do all the stuff, that is super impressive. But if you just took that pair of glasses and went to like a friend of yours and said, hey, try this out, they would be like, this is why would I ever use these? I think and this is no shade to anyone that said the Orion glasses were the future and amazing.

1:10:42But I think if you had tried the Snapchat ones first, you would have probably like I don't really think that Orion glasses in particular, like this super special thing. Also, remember, it's these were debuted as part of like a briefing. Like people didn't just try these. they listen to executives talk about how good they are for an hour and then try them like like we do that with a lot of stuff yeah and you know sometimes we go to hawaii for a week and uh and look at qualcomm chips um yeah i have a free i have a free idea any developer can take this for an ar experience it's called anti-meditation and its goal is to do the exact opposite of what a meditative experience is supposed to do so the whole idea is like you have your glasses right and then i'm assuming if you have the glasses you are wearable out you've got the whoop you've got the ring in this universe you've got the the theranos chip that's like tracking your blood and all of these health metrics your uh your eight sleep mattress all of them on the the the lenses as like a permanent hud you've got like 60 health bars i know where you're going and the whole idea is you can constantly just look and see what's going on in your body and over the years your your your personal like instinctive relationship about your own bodily innards will be disintegrated by just by the concept and eventually you'll be completely detached from all your inner thoughts feelings and urges isn't this just brian johnson i was literally just about to say that i was gonna say i'm pretty sure brian johnson goes through this every day so if you want to steal that idea it's all yours it's officially in the public domain um speaking of brian johnson okay so after this uh mark after the next ad break marquez is going to be talking to meta cto boz about the orion glasses uh etc so we'll cut to there soon but first ha you thought i was gonna say trivia just letting you guys know the books palma 2 has just dropped let's go they added a phone they didn't that would have been great uh has a new processor It has a, the fingerprint reader is built into the power button now and it runs Android 13 and that's it.

1:12:57Did you say it didn't have a camera? That is a cheap version that's launching in China, but the official Books Palma 2 still has the exact same camera and the exact same resolution screen and the exact same everything and it's the exact same price. People spend so much money like on like photo editing apps and like After Effects filters and like all this stuff to make their photos look a type of way and that books palma camera just nails it in body bro excuse me that books palma photo document scanner it's such if you it's so dope i love that camera so much yeah i will have to get it i'm bringing my books back tomorrow it's been a few weeks since i've dailied it but man i gotta i gotta celebrate with my with my palmers out there yeah so we'll have to get a books books books books it's books but i think books I think for us we'll get one in the office and we'll test it out and it's probably gonna be exactly the same as the first one but at least you'll be able to buy them now because it was very difficult to buy the books palma because the number one books palma influencer in the world just created a storm you and David Pierce probably sold 80 % of their of their market David I was first actually I think you might actually I think that who me no David Pierce yeah I think he was first I think in it I don't know I think the dumb phone video is before that I don't think so he mentioned it in a newsletter I think and was like oh I haven't tried this but it's kind of cool and then I shocked the world by doing it and then I and then I think David wrote it up again we'll do a deeper timeline dive coming up but uh until then let's take it to trivia trivia second question what is Boz's real name like his first name yeah like his first name i will give bonus points because ellis has an actual question but no i want the full name i'm throwing in a bonus question just to keep you on your toes what's the bonus question i just told that was that was the bonus question now we need the real question yeah now you're getting the real that was just the bonus that was just me messing with you guys so what is boz's real name now ellis has a real question i do have a real question and what's hilarious is i didn't write it down because i did write down a question that sucked and then i thought of a better question while i was over here okay which is the origa the oregano the original macintosh aka the macintosh 128k had a lot of features that its competitors had but it had one utility feature that would be repeated on the imac g3 what was it can i have a hint because that feels very broad I'm trying to think of a hint what would be a good hint the feature I'll give you a hint when we get to the a similar feature ask me a question define a utility feature something that you can use the computer I don't know Give me an adjacent utility feature.

1:16:12Like another utility feature that the computer had. This is kind of the one. I mean, it's the original Macintosh. It wasn't a very usable feature. It's the feature. Here. It's a design element. Wait. Wait. That doesn't help at all. This is one of the iconic parts of this computer and the iMac G3. I have a guess. I have a guess also now. I had the iBook G4 clamshell. Yeah, that PowerBook. Yeah, the PowerBook. That shipped with Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. No, not the PowerBook. The iBook. The one that looked like a clam. It looked like the clear colors. And had a handle built into it. It was a laptop with a handle?

1:16:50Yeah. iBook G3. Crazy. Who would ever put a handle on a computer? We'll answer those questions after the break.

1:17:32Thank you.

1:17:37All right, Boz, thank you for the time. Yeah, of course. And for the expertise. Okay, so I'm holding a transparent version of the Orions. And these are fully functional. Like, everything fits and works in these. That's right. And when they're transparent like this, I can see that there is a ton of stuff happening in here. What is the most challenging part of getting to this plane from all the previous, much larger versions you had? That's right. There's two parts of this that are hard. The first one is the displays. Just having them exist at all in any form factor is super hard. Yeah. And obviously the challenge of the tightness.

1:18:07And then the second one is the thermals. I mean, the reason it's as big as it is, and we worked hard to get it down, is how much technology is running in there is putting off heat, and that will cause it to shut down. That's why the real version has magnesium. It's clear plastic one we use as a demo, but actually it would shut down in about 30 minutes of use just because of the thermals. So these ones are actually magnesium. It's kind of very cool code of magnesium to allow more thermal dissipation. So actually these run at the limit to the battery life, about two to three hours of active use.

1:18:36And honestly, you cannot believe how much we have to put in here to cover eye tracking, you know, SLAM, obviously, the displays, all the wireless, all the audio, all the microphones. Yeah. That's quite a bit in there. It is incredibly efficient. I mean, you have the custom silicon, you're doing a lot of processing to turn the seven sensors on the outside into usable data, tracking the outside world, tracking the eyes. I noticed there's only two sensors on the arms tracking the eyes. That's right. That's it. Yeah, we've got two sensors in the arms and then glints of infrared light coming from the inside of the lens.

1:19:11And that's enough to track the eyes really effectively. And we've been so pleased that people have noticed that we've gotten, we think, to, you know, industry-leading level of eye tracking in this tiny form factor. That's obviously a tremendous feat, not just of hardware, but of software as well. Yeah. So, obviously, these aren't going to be shipping to everyone. These are an internal prototype that was at some point considered maybe plausible to ship? When we started, we wanted to ship it externally. And actually, amazingly, the technology is working as well as we'd hoped it would back then. The cost ended up being much higher.

1:19:43So that's my question. So obviously, there are pieces of this that cost a lot. It's low volume, of course, it's more expensive. But what does getting to a lower price actually look like for these? And what is a price that that feels like a good target for potentially the first ever AR glasses that people actually get to use. Yeah. So the major driver of the cost, 90 % of the cost, is in the display architecture. And these are custom micro LEDs that we designed, developed, manufactured ourselves. They're individually hundreds of thousands of nits and brightness. And they pipe through these waveguides, silicon carbide waveguides, which is very cool.

1:20:21I'm glad we got this with us. Very cool material. Yeah. And a very challenging material to work with, like very hard. And there's not really a supply chain for growing silicon carbide crystals of this clarity at this size. And then manufacturing is tough. And that was really what ended up being the thing that set us in the product path of making this an internal prototype that we're using to develop the software for future versions. There is some good news, though, which is that other materials have some tradeoffs that are tough. Really tough to maintain the field of view that we have without super high index refraction materials like that.

1:20:51But other materials are much cheaper, much lighter. Like glass, you were saying. Like glass, lithium niobate, high-index refraction glass. Like there's a lot of materials that are, we can still do a lot of the same kind of holograms in space, really cool visual artifacts that you can manipulate, and ends up being potentially cheaper, smaller, a little thinner, maybe even a little bit brighter. So there are some trade-offs that are, it's not all bad news. Yeah, I mean, these are also super, super dense in just tech in general. And the fact that like literally the magnesium on the outside is a heat sink for the components on the inside is a testament to how well integrated this is Talk to me about like how you decide about like the future of these products and okay We have almost no supply chain now for silicon carbide But we think that this is the best option to at least give a shot What are your thoughts on like exploring other materials?

1:21:47Is this going to potentially be like opening a door for many other manufacturers to try silicon carbide? and maybe that becomes a way forward in the future? Yeah, I love this. First of all, we've always been multi-pathing this thing. So when you're building something this risky, actually, honestly, you probably had as many failures as we had successes to get to this point. We had a lot of technology paths that dead-ended, but we had enough paths going in parallel that some of them made it through enough to make this whole product. And so the same is true. We're going to continue to pursue silicon carbide.

1:22:16We're also pursuing lithium niobate and high-index glass. And we're also looking at novel materials, actually, in research. We've actually run a very cool thing that I haven't told anyone about before. Took a large language model and trained it on material properties. And have now identified a candidate set of materials that could have incredible optical properties and be much cheaper and lighter to manufacture. Did you ask Orion for it? We just use HeyMeta. That's right. Got it. And so we've been working with FAIR on that. So we're pursuing every path we can. And what is really exciting to me is with AI in particular, we see a lot of cool products between the Raylan Metas that I'm wearing now and these Orion glasses that are all super valid.

1:22:55So what if I had AI? Do I need a huge display if what I really want is to get my answers more efficiently, just visually back to me? Then I can have a smaller field of view display, a smaller product, a cheaper product, and that's going to be fine. As far as what the price is going to be, it's funny. I did have some of the folks on our research team who've been around a long time, in particular our chief scientist, Michael Abrash, who's been through several generations of computing. And he reminded me that he paid, you know, modern equivalent of$25 ,000 or$30 ,000 for his first computer back in the 1980s.

1:23:26And that wasn't uncommon. And that would be what we're talking about as a retail price for something today. And so it's not outlandish. I do think the expectation that we have as savvy modern consumers is a lot higher than that. So we want to drive the prices down. It's hard for me to imagine full AR glasses coming in for less than a cell phone, given that they literally have more than a cell phone worth of technology in them. But I think there's a lot of products like these Ray-Ban Metas that I'm wearing now, that between that and this kind of full AR glasses that are pretty great, and will hopefully come in at price points in between.

1:23:58Yeah, it's interesting. Because I think a lot of people see this, and this is super cool, and this is futuristic, but there is a potential lineup of different products at different price points. I've been saying Google Glass is ahead of its time for so long, because every time I see these, I always remember Google Glass had some of this stuff, even though it looked kind of weird. But I always picture walking through New York City with a little arrow in the corner of my head to tell me where to turn for the next subway stop. And the fact that that's actually now potentially with these tracked over the actual street, for example, in real time, just all these examples pop into my head of things that this could do for regular people.

1:24:35Is there a killer app that you think is going to convince people that AR glasses are actually the future? Yeah, as they say in our industry, there's no bad ideas, just bad timing. And I think in the case of Google Glass, they didn't respect how much people care how they look. And I think it's one of the things we've tried to design. One of the reasons we're working with Luxottica on these glasses is to really respect that. The killer use cases are, frankly, just, this is one of the reasons I love building this internal prototype. It's a fully working prototype. You've used it. Like, the operating system works.

1:25:03You can run apps. so you can get it in and out of the system pretty easily. A lot of our ideas of what was gonna be great have not been as great. We talked about the idea, we used to always talk about, oh, we're gonna have a chess game between us. But chess is like a very fiddly game. Actually, if you and I wanted to summon a chess board, we would just summon a 2D panel between us and play it that way. Whereas a bunch of things that we thought maybe wouldn't be great have been great. So I don't want to put words in your mouth. For me at least, video calling, which I was very skeptical of, why would I want a video call for my glasses?

1:25:30I actually found it very compelling. I was like, oh, this is cool. I'm hands-free. I could be animated to the other party via Kodak avatar and I'm just like, yeah, casually doing whatever I'm doing and taking a video call. I would probably do more video calls if that was a technology that I had. We never would have guessed that before we built and used the prototype. So it's still super early. I don't think we've identified the killer app by any means. But I do think, you know, watching video in downtime, things that I would normally kind of take my phone out of my pocket to do, but like, eh, like it's inconvenient.

1:26:01I think those things we underestimate the degree of friction that little movement creates. That's what we've seen with the Ray-Ban Meta's with cameras. That little bit of friction, you have a great camera in your pocket, but that little bit of friction is enough for me to miss a picture of my kid or to not want to take my camera out and disintermediate myself from the experience. So there's a bunch of things that we're going to learn just from having this prototype internally and being able to use it and play with it. Yeah, that's my always huge question is like I feel like I'm so focused on today's gadgets that I have a hard time picturing a future without smartphones.

1:26:29I feel like we'll always just have a thing that we just carry. But to your point, there are little things like that where it feels like that is something that it actually does better than smartphones, which is cool. I've also been wearing something this entire video that I don't know if anyone's noticed, which is this wristband on my wrist, which is a crazy tech in itself. That it's looking at electrical impulses inside my arm to determine which fingers are touching. And I've heard you guys describe this as a very high ceiling input. That's right. With potential amazing future stuff. Can you talk about that?

1:27:03Yeah. So this is just the beginning. Today, you're using it to detect taps and touches. And it's nice that you can have your hands completely at your rest, which is, especially if you're walking, you don't want to walk with your hands out in front of you. But over time, we think we can do a lot more with it. For example, internally, we have a demo with just with that wristband, I can detect my handwriting. And so I can do text entry just by handwriting in my pocket. I can't believe that. Okay, so you're in space, not even holding a pen. No, just at rest. Just at rest, and you're just writing things in air, and it can detect, based on the electrical impulses moving through my arm, roughly the shapes that I'm drawing in the air, and then create words from that.

1:27:37That's right. That's amazing. Yeah, so we have that. And if you had one on each wrist, for example, if there was a watch in your other hand that had the same kind of EMG technology built into it, you could also type at rest, and it could absolutely detect what you were typing with very, very high accuracy. Wow. And so we think there's a lot of upside to this kind of thing. And we've also discovered, this is again, the value of building prototypes and putting them into the world, is people have really enjoyed the haptics. You have a little haptic feedback. So you actually have a sense of what you're doing, how you're interacting with the system, which we think we can develop a lot more.

1:28:09And over time, this also should be a system that we can develop to learn you so well that over time, you actually don't have to really do the full A handwriting. You just kind of do the gesture that you and the machine have co-evolved to learn. means A to you. Oh, wow. So the machine starts to learn me after a while and becomes more fine-tuned to my own inputs. Absolutely. Everyone's computer is a little bit more fine-tuned towards them. That's right. Which is true about computing in general. That's, yeah, really interesting stuff. We have to solve these problems that, frankly, our industry hasn't had to solve in a while because ever since, you know, kind of Xerox PARC and Stanford Research Institute gave us the keyboard and mouse, we've had these, like, direct manipulation interfaces.

1:28:47It's true that we replaced the mouse with touch screens, but it's still very direct manipulation. and you're just not going to have those things walking around with your AR glasses. So what are we going to do? And this is, I think, the beginnings of a gesture-based kind of language that you're going to have to interact with machines. So I guess the big question is, do you actually foresee this as a next compute platform after the smartphone or does this sort of, because there is a compute puck separately as of right now. There's still a ton of interplay between these and something I'm carrying.

1:29:18Do you think there is a future where we aren't carrying anything? we're wearing our full-time daily computer? Yeah. I mean, I want to put words in your mouth. I think this is a device that when I put it on a few months ago and the software was running, it was the first time I've been able to imagine not having a cell phone. Like, oh, this actually does the things that I need to get done, and it does them pretty well. I want to be clear. Sometimes technologies replace other technologies. More often, they find new avenues. Like, I still use a laptop, and I still use a cell phone, and I use them both together.

1:29:50It's not a problem. And so I think there's a, for the foreseeable future, even when these things exist, they're probably going to exist in conjunction with cell phones. Because the tech has a long way to go still. Like it's a two-hour battery life. It's an expensive piece of hardware. There's a lot between now and that as like a real future people can imagine. That's right. But if you extrapolate far ahead enough with the lines of sight you have in a lot of these technologies, it feels real maybe. I think that's right. And I think to really put a thought in your head, looking far into the future, imagine a world where you have a universal interface with this neural interface and you have a universal kind of display with your glasses on.

1:30:30Now, how do you design everything differently? Cars, homes. So your home, like the famous problem, everyone's home, like every microwave is completely inscrutable. No one knows how to work any other microwave. Like the systems are all different. Shower controls. Like everything. All terrible. Why would you need that? if you had a shower, probably for now, let's keep using those controls conventionally, but for the microwave, for the kitchen at least, yeah, you don't need everything to have a clock and a display. You have a permanent display. You don't need to have a bunch of buttons on it. You have a permanent ability to manipulate things.

1:31:01And so I think it starts to get to the point where it doesn't just have an impact on whether we're carrying a cell phone or not. It starts to have an impact on how other physical goods are designed and built. Not to mention updating the need for some physical good entirely. If we all had our glasses on, do I need to dedicate an entire wall of my house to a big TV? Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, this is the far out like future stuff that I start to picture when you see how far these prototypes have come and you try to continue fast forwarding and see how good it can actually get. Well, I'm going to be thinking a lot about this.

1:31:33This is one of the most interesting pieces of tech in that realm that I've seen, even though I can't buy it and use it and probably won't be able to use it for a while. Really cool stuff. Thanks for walking me through it. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the time. Cheers. Welcome back. That was a great interview, wasn't it? You probably didn't know this, but Andrew and I were like three feet away that whole time. Just couldn't see us because that's how cameras work. But yeah, thank you, Boz, for coming on the show and doing a fun little interview with us. Thank you, United Airlines, for flying us to California and back.

1:32:06Thank you to my mother for 26 years ago. Thank you, Mom, for believing me when I was like, I work at a YouTube channel now. My mom does not know what that means. So thank you for letting me do it anyway. Anyway. Right on cue. Trivia, dude. Dude. Okay. Quick update on the scores. Marquez with 20. Andrew leading the pack. 23. David carrying the one. 22. Wow. I guess in that case, Andrew's carrying the one. Yeah. Anyway, question one. What was the previous version of Apple's Magic Mouse called?

1:32:53And I guess like, it's not really the previous version. It was just the mouse before, but like, I don't know how else to phrase that. But the one before the Magic Mouse, what was that called?

1:33:05I'm either right or embarrassingly wrong. I really hope you're right because the name is hilarious. I'm hilarious but I'm wrong and Flip and Read what do you got the Apple track mouse track mouse no I wrote the mighty mouse the mighty mouse correct oh is it right yeah it was the mighty mouse that's also the name of like a cartoon yeah okay mighty mouse alright that mouse is awesome by the way yes correct the apple one yeah yeah oh I was talking about the cartoon no that mouse was awesome it was not awesome I thought it was clear There was a clear one I did like this mouse I loved just side scrolling on a timeline which now that's like why Marquez likes his MX Master although he uses his trackpad he doesn't even do that MX Master My bonus question What is Boz's real name?

1:34:02Bozly the hair loss medication Oh his name is Boston Correct The band? No Boss Haas I wish I know this because when Marquez said We were talking to him I was like Isn't there also a Jaws or a Waz Yeah there are both And there are both of them and there's also Boz So I had to look up their names Andrew Bosworth Andrew Bosworth Why did you guys what? Correct How did you know that? Why did you know that? I didn't know that either. Did you guys both look it up? No, just no executive names. I looked it up, like I said, when we went to Meta. Evan Spiegel, Eric Schmidt, Andrew Bosworth. Do you know all of the C-suite executives at every major tech company?

1:34:55Yes. Cool. They're all named Billy. Ellis, next question. Question number two. The original Macintosh had one design element utility feature that I think it was kind of iconic for. and also was repeated on the iMac G3. What am I talking about? Can we please have a hint of some kind? If I'm right, he gave a hint before. I did give a hint before. Do you want another hint? Yes, please. It's on Apple devices. No, it's only on these two, as far as I'm aware. Are they on Apple devices? It's on one other product that I know of. What? You want another hint? It's a thing you can hold. I drew it. Flip him and read.

1:35:41What do you got? Oh. David, what did you put? What is that? Is that a tongue? This is a handle. No, it was a keyboard. Yeah. I don't know if this is right. Is it a handle? It is a handle. When you said it has a handle, Ellis went, hmm, it has a handle. No, and then I looked dead into that camera and said, who would ever put a handle on a computer how did i not pick up on that yeah yeah i booked g3 also to handle and that is the one other thing that he now does and the original macintosh and i don't know the specifics on this but i'm pretty sure it was it was actually sort of a design fight in the original apple uh in the original macintosh whether or not to put a handle on it because this computer is not light it's not portable it doesn't have a battery ostensibly you would never take it from place to place but it was just really important in the design language to make it feel like a real tool like something that could be used in that way if you needed to yeah have you seen Halt and Catch Fire the show?

1:36:48I have not handles and computers are a very important part of that show just saying spoiler? no not really but you should watch it it's very good it's one of my all time favorite TV shows what is it called? Halt and Catch Fire it's about the 80s computer revolution it has Lee Pace in it it's very good four seasons, each season gets better extremely good anyway, thank you for listening to this episode of the Waveform Podcast it has been a blast I always love when I get to sit at the big boy table with you guys I'm about to get kicked back into my little crevice where I'm forced to produce this show from but until then thank you for listening make sure to like and subscribe follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify subscribe to us on YouTube Pocket Casts I've heard it's good I love it, I use it listen to us in your Tesla Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network Group and our intro outro music is produced by Vain

1:38:01So, big go!