Let’s start with this: Meta Connect was more interesting and fun than Apple’s iPhone event or WWDC keynote. Live demos are better. Even when Mark Zuckerberg was kind of goofy, or when he said “hell yes” and “live demos sometimes work”… Maybe it it wasn’t as polished, with demos that could fail, but it was also more real.
One justification for Apple’s pre-recorded events is that they are tighter and can fit more content (and more diversity of speakers) into a shorter amount of time. There’s no downtime to switch presenters or wait for applause. But in Apple events there is a bunch of wasted time too — time spent on pure marketing, or drone camera shots, instead of substance.
From the time Mark went on stage to revealing the Meta Quest 3S and its price was 1 minute. Another 45 minutes in, they had already demoed or talked about nearly everything: the Quest, Horizon Worlds, Llama 3.2, Ray-Bans with live translation, and Orion. For an event that didn’t feel that well-rehearsed, they covered a lot of ground.
The biggest news of the show was Orion, a prototype for holographic AR glasses. Rewind to earlier this year, when Mark casually dropped this into a video:
For typing or complex tasks, you’re going to want things like hands, or a keyboard, or controllers, or eventually a neural interface…
When he said this, it sounded like science fiction. I sort of thought he had lost his mind. It feels significant to jump a handful of months forward and have a working prototype where I now need to consider “wrist-based neural interface” and read about electromyography. Mark closed the Orion segment with:
The right way to look at Orion is as a time machine. These glasses exist, they are awesome, and they are a glimpse of a future that I think is going to be pretty exciting.
This is the closest anyone has come to an AR design that is a natural evolution of traditional glasses. Most people do not want to strap a computer to their face. Apple’s Vision Pro prioritizes incredible visuals, but it needs to become much cheaper, lighter, and eventually have no opaque screens at all. Meta’s Orion makes different trade-offs. I think it’s already farther down the right path.
I’m not exactly rooting for Meta. I dedicated major sections of my book to the problems with massive, ad-based social networking, with Facebook and Instagram as prominent players. But nevertheless I’m caught up in some of the excitement of new technology at Connect. There’s a refreshing change of pace and tone compared to decades of Apple keynotes.
