Quest 3 can be paired with Ray-Ban Meta glasses to privately upload videos and photos anywhere.
In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg spent $3 billion on Oculus VR and $19 billion on WhatsApp. Ten years later, you can carry Meta’s glasses with you and take photos and videos for up to three minutes. While they charge in their case, you can take out your VR headset to download those videos and share the ones you want with your friends on WhatsApp. I tested this successfully.
The $22 billion Zuckerberg spent to acquire these companies was just the beginning of his investment in building that future. He then had to spend another $100 billion or more over the past decade to develop the foundational technologies that would enable a new type of digital nomad. Now Zuckerberg needs to spend tens of billions more to secure that future.
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Digital nomads without phones or laptops
In the long term, we should expect services like music, calls, and media transfer to seamlessly transition from a comfortable pair of glasses to a powerful headset, and vice versa.
In this case, I successfully uploaded videos and photos from my Ray-Ban Meta glasses to the Meta View app running on the Quest 3 headset. Meta hasn’t created any file management tools yet, so it’s not really useful, but the headset offers a much larger screen on which to view captured media than any phone.
The evidence that this path works is starting to make Zuckerberg’s vision of the future a little clearer. Physical Androids and iPhones are currently the best at running Meta View and managing Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. But it’s important to note that phones are technically optional equipment here. Yes, running an app meant for a phone on a headset to upload photos from glasses is absurd. In 2005, the idea of jumping into cars driven by strangers who had signed up for work on their phones was equally absurd.
If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a particularly nomadic person, follow me on a thought experiment as we consider the idea of leaving your laptop and phone at home and simply packing glasses and headphones for a long journey by foot, train, or bus.
What would that look like?
Headphones for private concentration
Meta’s journey with photos and videos, from glasses to headset, is arguably more private than any other personal computing device ever made.
The Quest 3 is a VR headset, so it produces light only for its wearer. It’s an infinite canvas on which to display any amount of media for a single person. The idea that others can simply glance over and see what you’re looking at is foreign to it. On a multi-city trip, you can enjoy any number of books, movies, videos, songs, or games using app panels downloaded with media in folders on the Quest 3, powered by USB-C cables and battery packs. In a scenario where it’s your only media device, the 512GB model offers a small but usable amount of space to store content, media, and apps to get you by without streaming.
Glasses for public capture
For times when you’re not wearing a headset, the glasses can capture video of what you’re seeing for up to three minutes at a time. This is where planning real-world trips gets really interesting.
Mark Zuckerberg sails the ocean in his sunglasses, and the Ray-Ban Meta account on Threads shows the idea that you can switch between different viewpoints during a concert with multiple captures.
I filmed a cat walking his humans in Central Park.
I met a dog named Henry who howled at me as I walked away. I still miss him to this day, but you can watch his video and we can both appreciate what a good little boy he is.
I photographed a family of raccoons at dusk. There were the drummers in the subway station and the band on the train to Brooklyn. I wore the glasses to my wedding and a concert to capture a clip of hundreds of phones lit up to capture videos of their hand-shaken perspectives in Madison Square Garden. And is that Natalie Portman in my New Year’s Day ice skating video?
It’s a lot of weird and interesting things to have seen and captured in such detail during my time in New York and my attempts to capture images in public. When I was in California, I also used the glasses for work and met my first robot with them while I was making his trolley problem myself.
In this hypothetical cross-country trip without a phone or laptop, every bus change is an opportunity to put the headset in a bag and explore the host city while capturing the views and exploring the area with the Meta glasses as a kind of notepad.
The next bus is a great time to upload those videos and photos to the headset. If Wi-Fi is available in a cafe, hotel or on the bus itself, it’s perfectly possible to send your views to friends and family on WhatsApp or Messenger directly from your Meta glasses.
Horizon, meet the view
Phones are excluded from this thought experiment for several reasons.
First, many travelers don’t have the budget or inclination to pay for data plans in multiple countries or a cell phone plan everywhere. Second, a phone’s vibrations and notifications are active distractions from what else you could be doing.
It’s almost unimaginable to imagine a nomad in 2024 without a cellular connection to stay connected to the Internet at all times. Indeed, it’s truly magical to be on WhatsApp with a phone that transmits your vision through glasses to a remote interlocutor. While a cellular connection allows you to stay connected to the world around you almost constantly, breaking that connection is also totally liberating in a way that some people haven’t experienced in decades. For Facebook, born in the all-connected era of this century, this is precisely where Meta’s greatest opportunity lies.
Over 15 years ago, Apple introduced visual voicemail that made it easier to listen to your voicemails. Today, mobile carriers have to flag unwanted calls before you answer to sort out the abuse that’s now baked into that communications system. All those notifications on your phone advertising services you don’t really need? Meta has the ability to make all that go away, and that road trip I just described without an iPhone or Android would free you from hundreds of potential interruptions you don’t necessarily need that would be pouring onto your phone during that trip.
Essentially, giving up cellular connectivity on your glass tablet effectively unsubscribes you from the 20th century’s primary means of communication – telephones – while allowing you to start fresh in a new era of wearables.
It’s 2024, sure, but by the end of the decade, people should be able to travel the world with a cellphone-compatible wristband that connects to glasses with a headset in their bag so they can pull it out to watch private media and socialize online anywhere, with anyone.
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Meta recently showed the press its first in-person look at the progress it’s making toward a wristband that can detect your intentions. In 2019, the company, formerly known as Facebook, acquired a startup called CTRL-Labs that was working on a wrist-worn device to read electrical activity flowing to your hand. It does this with EMG, or electromyography,
Meta has been working towards this goal for over a decade, and while it’s been a tough battle between Gear VR, Oculus Go, and Rift, their work is paying off with the Quest 3 and Ray-Ban. For the established tech giants, they’ll have to reimagine everything they do from the perspective of someone who’s more than ready to develop a new relationship with technology.
For Meta, the glasses and headsets allow Zuckerberg to forge this new relationship with billions of people.
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