Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses glitch twice during live demo

“We’re just gonna go to the next thing that we wanted to show and hope that will work,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said after a glitch cut off Meta’s big demo, encompassing some stark moments of tension during the tech giant’s event.

In a kickoff of the company’s two-day Meta Connect event at the company’s headquarters on Wednesday, Zuckerberg shared the latest updates to Meta’s AI glasses. But during his keynote address , Meta’s AI glasses glitched not once — but twice.

The first time was when Zuckerberg was introducing an improved version of Live AI. He said users can now use the feature “for about an hour or two straight.” To show how this works, Zuckerberg introduced cooking content creator Jack Mancuso to do a live demo.

Mancuso asked Live AI to help him make a Korean-inspired steak sauce. The tech began to glitch after he asked what step he should do first, with the AI glasses jumping ahead in the recipe by several steps. After Mancuso repeated his question, the AI glitched again. After laughs from the crowd, Mancuso said that the “WiFi might be messed up” before throwing it back to Zuckerberg.

One user on X said of the failed demo: “Buy our $799 glasses to cook! Just as long as your WiFi’s better than Mark Zuckerberg’s.”

The second glasses-related glitch happened while Zuckerberg was showing off the Meta Ray-Ban Display to the crowd. The new AI glasses use a Meta Neural Band, which Zuckerberg said replaces the “keyboard, mouse, touchscreen, buttons, dials” with the “ability to send signals from your brain with little muscle movements” that the band would pick up so users can “silently control” the glasses with “barely perceptible movements.” Zuckerberg emphasized that the new glasses aren’t “a prototype”; they’re “ready to go.” He said people will be able to buy the glasses, which start at $799, “in a couple weeks.”

As he continued to amp up the crowd about Meta’s AI glasses, Zuckerberg presented two options: slides or a live demo.

“Let’s do it live,” Zuckerberg said.

He kicked the demo off by showing the room how the glasses can send and receive messages. Zuckerberg successfully received a message from Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, and Zuckerberg sent a message back in response. But the demo took a turn when Bosworth attempted to video call Zuckerberg — to no avail.

For more than a minute, Zuckerberg awkwardly tried to get the video call function to work before finally giving up, saying, “I don’t know what to tell you guys.” Bosworth tried to lighten the mood as he walked onstage: “This WiFi is brutal,” he said. Zuckerberg echoed the frustration. “Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll debug that later,” the CEO said. “You practice these things like a hundred times and then you never know what’s gonna happen.”

“I promise you, no one is more upset about this than I am,” Bosworth said. “This is my team that now has to go debug why this didn’t work on the stage.”

Meta Connect promised the future of AI glasses. Instead, it offered a seemingly bad internet connection.