Quest 3 pairs with Meta Ray-Ban glasses to privately download videos and photos from anywhere.
In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg spent $3 billion on Oculus VR and $19 billion on WhatsApp. A decade later, you can take your Meta glasses outside and take photos and videos for up to three minutes at a time. While they’re charging in the case, you can take out your VR headset, download videos, and share the ones you like with your friends on WhatsApp. I tested this successfully.
The $22 billion Zuckerberg spent to buy these companies was just the beginning of the investments needed to make this future a reality. Over the past decade, it’s taken another $100 billion to build the core technologies that will enable a new breed of digital nomad. Now, Zuckerberg faces the need to spend tens of billions more to secure this future.
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Digital nomad without a mobile phone or laptop
In the long term, we expect services like music, calls and media transfer to be seamlessly handed over from the comfortable glasses to the powerful headset, and vice versa.
In this case, I was able to download videos and photos from my Ray-Ban Meta glasses to the Meta View app running on my Quest 3 headset. This isn’t terribly useful, as Meta still lacks file management tools, but the headset has a much larger screen than any phone to view your captured media.
Proving that this method works starts to make Zuckerberg’s vision of the future a little clearer. Currently, physical Androids and iPhones are the best way to run Meta View and manage Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. But it’s important to note that a phone is technically optional hardware. Sure, it’s silly to run a phone app on a headset in order to download photos from your glasses. In 2005, the idea of hopping in a car driven by a stranger who signed up for a job over the phone was also silly.
If you’ve ever imagined yourself as a particularly nomadic person, join me in a thought experiment to consider the idea of leaving your laptop and phone at home and embarking on long journeys by foot, train or bus with just your glasses and a headset.
What would that look like?
Private Focus Headset
Meta’s path of photos and videos from glasses to headset is arguably more private than any other personal computing device ever made.
Because Quest 3 is a VR headset, it generates light only for the wearer. It’s an infinite canvas that can display any amount of media to a single user. The idea that others can glance over and see what you’re looking at is foreign to this headset. While traveling across multiple cities, you can enjoy any number of books, movies, videos, songs, and games using the panel of sideloaded apps with media in the Quest 3’s folders while powered by the USB-C cord and battery pack. If this is your only media device, the 512GB model offers a small but practical amount of space to store content, media, and apps without streaming.
Glasses for public capture
While you’re not wearing the headset, the glasses let you record up to three minutes of video of what you see – this is where real-world trip planning gets really interesting.
Mark Zuckerberg has worn sunglasses across the ocean, and Threads’ Ray-Ban Meta account shows off the idea of being able to swipe through multiple captures of a concert to switch perspectives.
A cat was photographed walking its owner in Central Park.
I met a dog named Henry who barked at me as I was leaving. I still miss him, but when I watch his videos we both enjoy what a good boy he is.
I’ve photographed a family of raccoons at sunset, there was a drummer in a subway station and a band on a Brooklyn-bound train, I’ve worn the glasses at weddings and concerts, and I’ve photographed hundreds of cell phones turning on at Madison Square Garden to film footage from a shaky handheld perspective, and is that Natalie Portman in a New Year’s Day ice-skating video?
While living in New York, I pressed the capture button on my glasses in public places and saw many strange and interesting things, capturing them in vivid detail. When I was in California, I also used the glasses at work, creating a trolley problem and encountering a robot for the first time.
This fictional cell phone and laptop-free transcontinental trip gives me the opportunity to explore the host city, taking in the sights and exploring my surroundings as I hop between buses, with my headset in my bag and my Meta glasses as a notepad.
The next bus ride is the perfect time to download videos and photos to your headset. If the cafe, hotel or bus itself has Wi-Fi, you can send your views to friends and family on WhatsApp or Messenger directly from your Meta eyewear.
Horizon, Meet View
Mobile phones were excluded from this thought experiment for several reasons.
First, there are many travelers who don’t have the budget or desire to buy data plans in multiple countries or have a cell phone contract everywhere, and second, cell phone vibrations and notifications are a distraction from what else you’re doing.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a constantly connected internet nomad in 2024 without a cellular connection. In fact, making a WhatsApp call using a phone that relays what you see through your glasses to a distant contact feels truly magical. Cellular connections allow us to be almost always connected to the world around us, but disconnecting from them gives us a total freedom we haven’t experienced in decades. And therein lies Facebook’s biggest opportunity with Meta, born in the always-online era of this century.
More than 15 years after Apple’s visual voicemail made it easy to listen to voice messages, we now live in an age where cell phone companies must mark nuisance calls before picking them up in order to triage the amount of abuse built into the communications system. Meta could eliminate all the advertising notifications on your phone for services you don’t really need. That iPhone- or Android-free road trip we just described would be free from the hundreds of unnecessary interruptions that flood your phone during the trip.
In essence, abandoning cellular connectivity for a glass handheld device effectively opts out of the central 20th century form of communication – the telephone – while simultaneously allowing a new era of wearables to begin anew.
Sure, it’s 2024 now, but in 10 years’ time, we’ll likely be connecting our cell phone-enabled wristband to our glasses, slipping a headset in our bag and taking it out to privately watch and interact with anyone, anywhere online.
Zuckerberg predicts neural wristbands will surpass keyboards by 2028
Meta recently gave reporters their first peek at the progress it’s making on a wristband that can sense your intentions. In 2019, the company, formerly known as Facebook, acquired a startup called CTRL-Labs, which was developing a device that can be worn on the wrist and read electrical activity going to the hand. The device does this using EMG (electromyography).
Meta has been working toward this goal for over a decade, struggling with Gear VR, Oculus Go, and Rift, but the results are starting to pay off with Quest 3 and Ray-Bans. Established tech giants will need to rethink everything they do from the perspective of someone ready for a new relationship with technology.
For Meta, the glasses and headset will enable Zuckerberg to build new connections with billions of people.
