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Lyrics & Translation

[English]

(relaxed electronic music) (pool ball clacks)

(birds chirping)

(electronic chime)

- This might be the best look

into the future of tech that I've ever seen.

(upbeat electronic music)

So I am one of a very, very small number of people

who now has tried both of the new

and very rare real augmented reality glasses in 2024.

The Meta Orion Smartglasses

and the Snapchat AR Spectacles.

Neither of them is available to the public

and you'll see why in a second.

But also they're both pretty incredible

in very different ways.

I made a whole video a few months ago about this idea

but in case you missed that, VR headsets are over here,

smartglasses are over here and they're both racing

towards this Goldilocks zone in the center somewhere

which would would be AR glasses.

Like virtual reality headsets are incredible.

They have tons of tech, amazing immersion,

super wide field of view but also they're absolutely massive

and you don't really just go walking around

in public with them, at least most people don't want to.

But then smartglasses are the exact opposite.

They look like something you might just

wear out in regular everyday life

but they can't really fit that much tech in them.

So you're limited to maybe a camera

and some batteries and speakers

and a little computer inside and that's about it.

So VR headsets want to shrink down

more and more until they can compact all the tech

and actually look like regular glasses,

while smart glasses want to add

more and more tech as much as they can to be better

while still looking like regular glasses

and so somewhere in the middle is this fantasy product

called augmented reality glasses.

But what if we could pull back the curtain a little bit

and see what that looks like with today's tech?

That is what these are.

So Meta and Snapchat have taken two very, very

different approaches to bringing these creations to life

and neither of these will be sold to the public

and I think that's probably a good thing.

Neither of them is exactly ready yet

but I still think they're both super cool

and now that I've used them both,

I kinda can't help but compare them to each other.

So let's start with Meta's Orion project.

So they unveiled these on stage at their Connect event a few

weeks ago and they've let a few people try 'em since then

and they're actually a three-part system.

It is the glasses that you wear on your face

and there's also a wireless computer puck

that must be within about 15 feet of the glasses

at all times and there's also a wrist strap

that's measuring electrical impulses through your arm

and that's used as an input device.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

So combined, these three things form an augmented reality

experience unlike anything I've ever experienced before.

Now yes, there was Magic Leap and yes,

there was HoloLens and things like that

but now just wearing a pair of

what feels like just transparent glasses

that's actually overlaying tracked digital things

onto the real world in front of me

kind of feels like something out of science fiction.

The main challenge actually with making a video about

these things is there isn't really like screen recording.

'Cause like I said, it's literally I'm looking through glass

and seeing things overlayed onto the real world.

Which is crazy but the best we can do

is take a first person video

and then overlay the graphics from the glasses

on top of the video to sort of give you

an idea of what it looks like to my eye.

But it's really hard to do it justice.

But either way, with the Meta Orion glasses,

I got to walk through three basic demos here.

So the first one was just a kinda basic usage.

So just imagine sitting down

in some coffee shop or somewhere on a bench

and just scrolling through Instagram,

which was a window floating

in the middle of the room that only I could see

and then I did a little bit of multi-window here and there.

So I had a video call going in one spot,

some other floating windows with messaging

and Instagram floating around me.

Pretty basic but still pretty cool.

The glasses, they're pretty light on my face.

They weigh around 100 grams.

The audio from Instagram, since I'm watching Reels,

it was playing through the built-in speakers

that were right above my ears and I scrolled through them

by making this gesture with my thumb

and swiping on my own hand.

So now seeing that, you might believe that the cameras

and the sensors on the front of the glasses are picking up

my hand doing this gesture

and then doing the scroll in sync with it.

There is hand tracking but it's not for that.

This gesture would be picked up anywhere

if it was in my sweatshirt pocket, behind my back

because I'm wearing that wristband

and this thing may be the coolest input device,

the coolest piece of tech I've tried in a long time.

This is the EMG wristband that they've built.

EMG stands for electromyography.

It's about the size of a WHOOP, as you can see.

It has electronics built into the textile weave.

It has an onboard machine learning computer

that connects via Bluetooth to the puck

and is able to measure the electronic signals

being sent from your brain to your fingers

and it's pretty great actually.

If you think about it, I mean your tendons

sort of run through your arm and they're connecting

all the way through your nervous system to your brain

and so the set of electrical impulses

that go through your tendons to do this gesture

is very distinct and different

from the set of impulses when you do this gesture

and also different from when you do this gesture

and so the wristband can measure those electrical impulses

and pick them up on the way to your hand

and map that to the controls.

So even in this prototype version I'm using,

it felt like it's getting about 80% accuracy

and it also had haptic feedback as well

to confirm when it was getting things right.

The people I talked to at Meta,

including CTO Boz, say things like

they love this as a really high ceiling new input method

and they could see it developing massively over time,

potentially even getting to the point

where they say they could measure you draw

letters in midair with an imaginary pen

and it uses those electrical impulses to map that

to real letters as text input with handwriting.

It's crazy.

So either way, it's working for scrolling

through Instagram here as I'm looking at it in the glasses.

I'm also looking at the Instagram app with my eyes

to make sure that's what I'm controlling

because there is eye control

and scrolling with the gesture, it's working.

That by itself is pretty cool but they weren't done.

The second demo was walking up to a table with a bunch

of ingredients on it, looking at it and doing a gesture

and then asking the built-in AI,

what type of smoothie could I make with this stuff?

And of course, there's cameras on the front

and Meta's AI looks at the camera feed,

sees a bunch of clearly-labeled ingredients

and then the most recognizable fruits of all time

sitting on a contrasty table and then decides oh,

you could make a pineapple smoothie with matcha, great.

But that's not what the most

impressive part of that was to me.

What was impressive was the nice little touch of AR

which was these little blue dots that appeared

and then tracked onto the ingredients on the table,

labeling each thing and then staying on those things

as I moved around and looked around the space.

It's such a little thing but it made a big difference.

Again, you have to realize it doesn't look amazing

through this video but in real life,

just picture yourself looking at objects

through your glasses and seeing labels pop up over them.

That was like sci-fi, it was amazing.

So then the third and final demo was probably

the coolest because it was also a shared spaces demo.

So there's two people with glasses on.

So both people walk up to this QR code

in the middle of the room, stare at it for a few seconds

and then that becomes the anchor point

for a shared experience in 3D space,

which in this case was a game of 3D Pong.

So with the sensors at the front,

now it's just shifted to visually tracking my hand

through the air and mapping that to a paddle

and it let me hit this ball back and forth.

So I started getting kinda good at it, not gonna lie.

Sorry Ellis, competition is competition.

Going hard in the paint.

But yeah, this is just Pong in real life

that only the people wearing the glasses can see.

It's also funny because we felt

kinda cool playing this game.

But yeah, this is how it looks

to people not wearing the glasses.

Not so fun.

There's a lot of complicated technology and material science

that goes into making these glasses work.

Just from the sensors at the front

and at the back pointing at your eyes,

pointing at the real world

to the micro-LED projectors inside

to the wave guides, the silicon carbide material

that's allowing us to refract the light

at an extreme angle without distortion.

I went way into the weeds with this

with the CTO of Meta, Boz,

and I'm gonna put that whole segment

on the Waveform podcast.

It should be out by the time you watch this

but I'll leave a link below to subscribe

to Waveform so you can get into the weeds

with us this week on that stuff.

But I think what you should take out of this is

this thing is packed to the gills.

They have seven small sensors and cameras

that are custom-designed to do

the eye tracking and environment tracking.

There's custom silicon in here

to bring all of the data together.

There's batteries split up

to weight them evenly across your face.

There's speakers.

The frames themselves are made of magnesium,

both because it had to be rigid enough

to keep the lenses in alignment

but also because that made for a good thermal conductor

as the literal heat sink to the entire computer inside.

They actually made a working

see-through version to help get us

a better idea of how squashed in there everything is

and it overheats faster because the transparent plastic

is not as good of a heat sink.

So yeah, these glasses are absolutely

thermally constrained using today's technology

and they have a battery life of about two to three hours

and that's not even to mention

the completely separate compute puck with a co-processor

where they're offloading the app logic.

That is truly a technical marvel.

But all of that adds up to a set of glasses

that was mostly pretty transparent,

pretty lightweight,

comfortable enough to wear for the two hours

before they started to get a little warm

and a little bit heavy on my ears

and then the graphics themselves

that it's overlaying were tracked pretty well.

Not the highest resolution I've ever seen

but pretty respectable and with a 70-degree field of view,

which meant I could look around a bit

and the graphics would mostly stay in my line of sight.

You can see 'em start to get cut off at the edges

a little bit and that's actually how I saw it in real life.

But in total, it felt like just wearing slightly thicker,

slightly heavier than normal glasses

with a little tint and a little bit of flare.

But delivering the most convincing demo of a post-smartphone

augmented reality future that I've ever seen.

Of course, none of that matters right now

because Meta is not shipping this, ever.

It's kind of a weird move for a tech company

to announce and show off and demo a new product

but then never actually plan on selling it to people.

But think of it as PR.

Again, you can watch the entire chat with Boz

but basically what I got out of talking to him

was that they believe that continuing to iterate

on this thing that they've made behind the scenes

without all of the extra attention to packaging

and marketing and selling the first thing will allow them

to make something even better in a second or third iteration

that may be good enough to actually sell.

Ideally it can be brighter

and can have better battery life of course

and have a higher resolution potentially

and still work towards all those things to be a real,

shippable, deliverable thing for early adopters.

Especially those wave guides and the silicon carbide

and the price, there's just an immense assumed price tag

for this low volume prototype that they've made.

But that's the idea and I think I actually agree with that.

So these,

these are the Snapchat AR Spectacles

and right off the bat, they look

dramatically more like a piece of technology on my face.

But fundamentally, the same thing is happening in here.

I am looking through these glasses at the real world.

I can open this up.

In front of you, the lens,

there is a menu right now that you can't see

and it's stuff overlaid over on top of the real world

and it's actually incredible that it works.

But there are a few fundamental differences between these

and Meta's that I think are really interesting.

So difference number one,

there is no separate computer puck.

Everything is in these glasses.

So I think we can safely assume

that that's why there's so much more mass here in general.

Meta's glasses looked much more like normal glasses

but had an entire separate smartphone-sized computer

paired to it the entire time, tethered to it basically.

These you can connect to your phone but otherwise

they do operate without any other additional hardware.

Everything's in the glasses.

So that's definitely way more hardware on your face.

But then difference number two is materials and build.

Most of which you're looking at here all the way around

is just it's black plastic all the way around

and that's actually kinda interesting.

That's not to say that they're built worse or poorly at all.

They're still actually very rigid but I actually

think this is more of a weight-saving measure.

But then they still needed a high quality heat sink,

which is why there's this metal band on each side.

So you can still dissipate heat from the hottest components

using the cooler air outside of the glasses.

But in total, these still weigh 228 grams

and when you put them on, they are,

I mean they're huge, they are massive.

You can see the arm extends way back beyond my ear.

There's a lot of mass on the front of my face.

They're trying to be more balanced.

I mean, there's some level of appreciation for the fact

that there is no separate computer puck of course

but like yeah, this is today's tech we're talking about.

So there's a lot going on here.

But then that brings us to number three,

which is when you actually turn them on

and there's two immediate differences with the display.

Again, I'm not looking at a lens right now.

I'm looking at a menu in front of the lens

but it's the resolution and the field of view.

Now this is obviously really hard to explain

and show on video and show you what I'm seeing.

No eye tracking,

it's just gonna be hand-based and gesture-based.

But on the Snapchat glasses,

the resolution of the menus is dramatically higher.

Everything is much sharper

than the very pixelated-looking Meta glasses,

honestly close to like what a Vision Pro

looks like when I'm wearing those.

But the field of view is significantly less.

I think the number is 46 degrees versus Meta's 70 degrees

and candidly, you notice that a lot.

Now field of view is normally not so bad

that there's any interruption of the thing

that you're looking at like straight ahead of you

but it's actually close and this is one

of the biggest differences between them

as someone who happens to have used these

and the Meta glasses back-to-back.

Now I don't know if immersion is the right word here

but my main way of describing it is when you're actually

using the glasses, you're doing whatever with them,

whatever software, whatever overlay you have pulled up,

you're not really thinking about field of view.

You're just immersed in the thing,

using the app, looking forward.

But the second you start poking around

or moving your head a lot or observing more

of what's around right in front of you,

then things get cut off.

You can actually see this a little bit at the edges

of some apps with the Meta Orion graphics actually.

Right here, right there.

At the edge, you saw the UI kinda get clipped off a bit

and that's how it looked to me too.

My eye sees that and that was with Meta's,

which have the 70-degree field of view.

This is even more restrictive.

It's really only going to overlay things

directly in front of you and if you even turn a little bit,

it gets clipped.

There's a golf game in here

which I was playing for a little bit and it's fun

but you have your phone which is mapped to the golf club

and you look down and you can see the golf ball

but you can't see anything else.

And in golf, your peripheral is very important.

So you look up to see the hole

and then look down to see the club

and you keep having to look back and forth

and you hit it and you have to track it with your eye

just right so it doesn't leave the field of view.

There's just, yeah,

it's much more noticeable with these.

But probably my favorite difference actually

with the display or whatever you want to call it here

is the electrochromic tint.

Because the Snapchat AR Spectacles have a built-in tint

made from the same tech that snaps the sunroof

of the new Rivians from clear to tinted and back.

It's actually built into these glasses as well

and so that helps them go from clear to tinted

and that helps dramatically with readability

and contrast of the things that

aren't supposed to be overlaid over your real world.

So I guess immersion is actually the right word here.

Maybe it's just a scoreboard floating in place

or a social media feed or maybe you're on an airplane

and just want to watch a couple of videos.

You can add the tint and then it kinda

feels a little closer to a VR headset

where the background is faded away and you're just

looking at something in front of you floating.

It is crazy how much tech is built into these glasses.

And then probably the last major difference here with these

is on the subject of developers, developers, developers.

See, both of these glasses are not real products

that are gonna ship and be in stores ever.

But one of them, the Meta glasses feel like

a super high-end tech demo and it's incredible

that it works but the other one, these,

these are actually a developer kit.

You could theoretically get your hands on these today

and start making apps for them.

I mean, you'd have to spend 100 bucks a month

and be locked into the developer program

with a minimum one-year commitment.

But then you get these and you're off

to the races building lenses for Snap OS

and there's a bunch of them actually already available.

There's that golf app I told you about.

There's also a browser app and a music creation app

and a "Beat Saber" equivalent called "Beatboxer"

and dozens more that I can already play with

and there's even more really impressive

shared space experiences.

Like Snap's glasses,

they don't even require you to scan a QR code.

They will actually just map the room you're in actively

as long as you're looking around with the other person

and it immediately matches you up and you can now both see

and manipulate the same floating object in 3D space.

It's kind of awesome.

So if the golden question with AR glasses,

at least for now is what can you even do with these things?

Then I do like Snap's strategy of just

getting these out to people as early as possible

and then just seeing what they make.

Now me personally, I actually have two

dream use cases for AR glasses.

Here, the first one is I just want like any instrument,

being able to learn any instrument by having the visual.

Like the "Guitar Hero" overlay.

Piano, that's the one you've probably already seen

where the piano notes come down

and you can just sort of match it up and play piano.

Any instrument, I think that would be incredible.

But my other one is so you know

how when you're on an airplane and you look out

and you see like a cool monument or some like visual thing

that you recognize, how super cool that is?

What if, hear me out, you've got the glasses on,

it's like glasses AR airplane app, whatever.

You look out the airplane window

and it outlines like the territory outlines

or the state outlines or whatever

and you can see the scale of things

and it pops up little monuments and landmarks

and things that you may recognize

just by looking out the airplane window.

That I think, I would think that was awesome.

So clearly more development

is needed for both of these glasses.

The Meta glasses,

they have a separate computer in your pocket, right?

They only have a two-hour battery life

and an estimated $25,000 retail price thanks to materials

and the Snapchat glasses,

they have a 45-minute battery life and they look like this.

So yeah, the tech is clearly not ready

to start selling this to real people yet.

But you almost can't help

but picture the future that we might have,

that we could have maybe even looking at our phones less

if we have this AR glasses thing actually come to life.

Maybe.

Someday.

It could be cool.

Thanks for watching.

Catch you guys in the next one, peace.

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