Meta Platforms, Inc. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth provided a technical explanation via his Instagram account regarding the multiple smart glasses demonstration failures that occurred during the company's developer conference "Meta Connect" this week.

On Wednesday, Meta Platforms, Inc. unveiled three new smart glasses models, including an upgraded version of the existing "Ray-Ban Meta" product, the all-new "Meta Ray-Ban Display" featuring wristband controllers, and the sports-focused "Oakley Meta Vanguard."

However, during multiple segments of the conference demonstrations, these real-time technology showcases ended in failure.

In one scenario, cooking content creator Jack Mancuso asked his Ray-Ban Meta glasses about the preparation steps for a sauce recipe. He repeatedly asked "What should I do first?" but received no response from the glasses. The AI then jumped directly to later steps in the recipe, forcing him to abort the demonstration. He subsequently redirected the conversation back to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that Wi-Fi might be the issue.

In another demonstration, a real-time WhatsApp video call between Bosworth and Zuckerberg failed to be recognized by the glasses, ultimately forcing Zuckerberg to abandon the attempt. Bosworth then took the stage, jokingly attributing the problem to "terrible" Wi-Fi.

"We've practiced these demonstrations hundreds of times, but you never know what will happen live," Zuckerberg commented at the time.

Following the conference, Bosworth conducted a Q&A session on his Instagram account, addressing questions about the new technology and the real-time demonstration failures.

Regarding the demo failures, he explained that the issue with the chef's (Mancuso's) glasses was not actually caused by Wi-Fi, but rather by a resource management planning error.

"When the chef said 'Hey Meta, start Live AI,' every Ray-Ban Meta glasses in the venue activated the Live AI feature. And there were many people in the venue at the time," Bosworth explained. "Obviously, this didn't happen during rehearsals – we didn't have so many devices starting up simultaneously during rehearsals." The "devices" he referenced were the number of glasses that were triggered to activate the feature at that moment.

However, this alone was insufficient to cause the demonstration interruption. The second reason for the failure related to Meta Platforms, Inc.'s traffic routing setup during the demonstration: to achieve isolated testing during the demo, Meta chose to route Live AI traffic to its development servers. However, during operation, this setting was applied to all devices connected to that network hotspot in the venue, including all the smart glasses.

"So essentially, our demonstration created a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against ourselves," Bosworth added. (A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS attack, refers to overwhelming a server or service with large amounts of traffic, causing it to slow down or become unusable. In this incident, Meta Platforms, Inc.'s development servers were not configured to handle the massive traffic generated by other glasses in the venue – the company had originally planned for them to handle only the traffic needed for the demonstration.)

Meanwhile, the WhatsApp call demonstration failure was caused by a new program bug.

Bosworth stated that just as the call was connecting, the smart glasses' display happened to enter sleep mode. When Zuckerberg woke up the display, the screen did not show him the incoming call notification. The CTO described this as a "race condition" bug – occurring when two or more different processes attempt to use the same resource simultaneously, with the final result depending on the unpredictable and uncoordinated execution timing of these processes.

"We had never encountered this bug before," Bosworth noted. "This was the first time we discovered it. The bug has now been fixed, and it's really unfortunate that it appeared in this setting." He emphasized that Meta Platforms, Inc. certainly possesses the technology to handle video calls, and the company feels "frustrated" about this bug appearing during the demonstration.

Despite these issues, Bosworth indicated he is not concerned that these malfunctions will affect the product itself.

"Obviously, I'm not satisfied with this, but I know the product itself is viable and has the functionality it should have. So this was really just a demonstration failure, not a problem with the product itself," he said.