• last month
Transcript
00:00All right, here's a theory I've been thinking about.
00:03Someday, maybe not next year or five or even 10 years,
00:06but maybe someday we'll all live in a world
00:09where we all have these wearable computers
00:11on our faces all the time.
00:13And a lot of these tech companies
00:15really believe in that future.
00:16Like I've never spoken to anyone on planet earth
00:18who believes more than Mark Zuckerberg
00:20that humans are on their way to spending tons of their time
00:24in some sort of metaverse.
00:25But the tech is clearly not good enough yet today in 2023
00:29for anyone to want to do that.
00:30Like this is what a VR headset looks like in 2023.
00:33And this is the best we've got.
00:35And even now the computers and pixels and batteries
00:40and everything on your face are too much
00:42for people to want to spend all day in something like this.
00:45But we're all kind of on board that maybe someday
00:47the tech will shrink down more and more and more and more
00:51until eventually it's no more
00:53than just a normal looking pair of glasses.
00:55And then maybe at that point
00:57we'll all be cool wearing it every day.
00:58So this Quest 3,
00:59this newest and latest and greatest headset from Meta,
01:01my theory is, is on this side of the scale.
01:05And on the other side of the sliding scale is smart glasses.
01:09And Meta literally is also announcing smart glasses
01:11at their event.
01:12So these things are literally called
01:13the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses,
01:15AKA the Ray-Ban Stories 2.
01:17Right now they are super simple.
01:19They don't do much because they can only fit a camera
01:21and small speakers and a battery.
01:23But there are some clever tricks
01:25that enable them to do as much as possible.
01:27And maybe someday the tech will get powerful enough
01:30and useful enough for people to wanna use these every day.
01:34So VR headsets are racing to get smaller and smaller
01:37and smart glasses are racing to get better and better tech.
01:40And they're both basically racing towards each other
01:42and companies like Meta are spending tons and tons of money
01:45to develop these things,
01:47to figure out which strategy will hit first.
01:50So let's see, let's start with the headset.
01:54So this is the latest and greatest from Meta,
01:57the Quest 3.
01:57And this is the year they made their big pivot
01:59to it being a mixed reality headset,
02:02which in hindsight feels like a natural progression
02:04for these things,
02:05if you wanna get them more comfortable
02:06for people to wear every day like glasses.
02:08So in previous VR headsets,
02:10it really felt like pass through was an afterthought.
02:12Like you put the headset on
02:14and you're just immediately in your own world
02:16until you take the headset off.
02:18And this new version is still built to be immersive.
02:20It still has all the light blocking
02:22and fills your field of view with screens
02:23and makes it as immersive as possible.
02:25But it now has a bunch more sensors
02:28arranged around the outside
02:29that make pass through dramatically better than before.
02:33It's now color, stereo, very low latency
02:37and decently high resolution.
02:39And there's immediately a bunch of benefits
02:41to having pass through being this good.
02:43First of all, the setup was way more intuitive.
02:46Like you can literally take it to a new spot
02:47for the first time and just put it on and boots up
02:49and automatically you look down
02:51and it just maps out the floor of the room you're in.
02:53The available floor space, the objects in the room,
02:56the spots where you can stand
02:57and to surprisingly great accuracy.
02:59So it's using a pair of RGB cameras
03:02and the LiDAR sensor in the middle.
03:04So you no longer have to painstakingly draw a play area
03:07every single time and stick with it.
03:09It just naturally feels like it plants the menu
03:11floating right in the middle of where you're standing
03:13and you can still see everything around you.
03:15Now you may be wondering,
03:16okay, how good though exactly is the Quest 3?
03:20Is it the best?
03:21Is it better than the Quest Pro?
03:25Yes, it's better than the Quest Pro,
03:26but it is not as good as Apple Vision Pro.
03:30I would kind of equate it to like,
03:31if I gave you a clear pair of glasses
03:33that were not exactly your prescription,
03:36but basically this one's good
03:38because it's stereo and color and nearly real time.
03:40So you see accurate colors, you look at your hands
03:43and you can find the controllers
03:45wherever they are in the room,
03:46just pick them up and put them down
03:47without needing someone to hand them to you.
03:49Just so many benefits like that.
03:52There's also just a small amount of distortion
03:53with up close objects
03:54and things near the edges of your vision,
03:56but it's not quite high enough fidelity
03:59to like pick up your phone and start using that screen.
04:02So like if you get a text,
04:04you're still gonna have to take the headset off
04:05to be able to read it.
04:06And I know comparing it to a $3,500 headset
04:09feels unnecessary and it kind of is,
04:11but also a lot of people have asked me about it
04:13and I am one of the few people
04:14who can actually say they've tried both.
04:16So I will say that yes,
04:18Apple Vision Pro is still the best pass through
04:21I've ever experienced.
04:22I distinctly remember taking notes about my experience
04:25on my phone while still wearing the headset.
04:27It was kind of insane.
04:28But for a $500 headset, yeah,
04:30this is absolutely as good as you're gonna see.
04:32And combined with the high resolution of the actual menus
04:35and the accuracy of the controllers,
04:37I think it's pretty awesome.
04:38And then of course the other benefit
04:39to having way higher quality sensors
04:42around the outside of the headset
04:43is you don't actually need the controllers.
04:45Now you've always had the choice
04:47to either use the controllers or use your hands.
04:49And these controllers have gotten better over the years.
04:51They're smaller, they're pretty sweet.
04:53They have better haptics than ever before.
04:55But the hand tracking has also gotten way better
04:58and really intuitive and responsive.
05:00And I think this is key again to feeling like the future.
05:03So you do this pinch gesture here to pull up the menu
05:06and move around to select things.
05:08You can literally scroll around menus
05:10by touching the digital menu
05:12and flinging them through space with your finger.
05:14Or you can grab a window and just move it around,
05:17putting it on a table or floating it in the air
05:19and it just stays locked there, which is pretty awesome.
05:21So pretty much everything except typing is natural.
05:25It works as you'd expect,
05:27like you're typing on a virtual keyboard floating in space,
05:29but this will definitely take more practice
05:31because there's no haptic feedback.
05:32See the other gestures I was talking about
05:34almost always have a haptic feedback
05:36of your own fingers hitting each other,
05:38which is really interesting.
05:39This keyboard here,
05:41you're sort of just poking an invisible plane in the air
05:44where the keyboard should be.
05:45So that's a little tougher.
05:46The main selling point of this headset though
05:48is still playing games.
05:50That's still what it's super good at.
05:51And it plays all the same games that the Quest 2 could play.
05:54And there are even some games optimized for Quest 3
05:55that it's even better at.
05:56It has this next gen Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip.
06:00It has higher resolution per eye.
06:02It has a wider, more immersive field of view.
06:04And it's in my opinion, slightly more comfortable
06:06thanks to this new strap that improves weight distribution.
06:09So I've been playing a bunch.
06:09I've really enjoyed this golf game
06:11that feels surprisingly realistic
06:14as someone that was expecting like
06:16Wii golf levels of graphics and control.
06:18Also ping pong,
06:19which this has this eerie multiplayer mode online
06:23where someone else's avatar just shows up in your space
06:26standing 10 feet away from you, but with no legs.
06:29But there's the classics like Beat Saber, Superhot,
06:32and then even some new ones like Gorilla Tag is blowing up.
06:35All of this stuff is the main reason why today
06:37you'd buy something like this
06:39to spend like half an hour in the thing.
06:41But again, the tech is shrinking down
06:43more and more and more and will every single year
06:46until it gets close to something like these, smart glasses.
06:51So let's talk about the smart glasses.
06:52So these are the Meta smart glasses
06:54and there's others like it,
06:55but they're gonna start at the other end of the spectrum
06:57where there's only so much stuff
06:59that you can stuff into a regular looking pair of glasses
07:01that nobody would even look twice at.
07:04But over time as tech gets better and more powerful
07:07and more miniaturized,
07:08these things will get more and more powerful
07:12and more and more able to do more stuff.
07:13So right now, this is a 12 megapixel camera
07:16with a little LED light ring to indicate
07:18when it's recording or taking a picture,
07:20a shutter button on top,
07:22and then a literal computer inside with some storage,
07:25a touch pad on the side, and then some microphones
07:28and then these really tiny pinhole speakers
07:30that fire audio downwards directly into your ears.
07:33It doesn't sound like much,
07:35but when paired directly to your phone
07:37and the Meta View app,
07:38this thing is surprisingly capable
07:39as a little computer on your face.
07:41So you can use the camera, of course,
07:43to just take first person pictures and videos
07:45just by hitting the shutter button.
07:47Videos are limited to 60 seconds or less
07:50and portrait orientation,
07:52but honestly, despite all that,
07:53they're actually pretty solid looking videos
07:55and there's some promise here.
07:56I kind of feel like I might wanna use these
07:58for autofocus for like car driving footage.
08:00If I could get widescreen out of them, that'd be awesome.
08:02And then you can also start a recording or take a picture
08:04just by saying, hey Meta, take a picture.
08:08And so you can see that.
08:10It was pretty fast, the little light there.
08:12I don't know if you wanna say that phrase out loud
08:14very often, so you might just stick to one of these,
08:17but yeah, it has a voice assistant built in.
08:20So you can send and receive messages
08:21through WhatsApp, Messenger, you know, Meta stuff,
08:24but it's just audio.
08:26Like there's no screen anywhere in here built in.
08:29So this really works best with experiences
08:32that can be entirely handled with just audio.
08:35So they're connected all the time
08:37to your phone via Bluetooth.
08:38So you can listen to music and these little speakers
08:41are directional enough that at half volume,
08:44there's really not that much bleed.
08:46And that high volume, it kind of just sounds the same
08:48as someone like maybe listening next to you
08:49with open back headphones.
08:51♪ Morning praise for uplink is more than ever ♪
08:53♪ And never to fade away, it's got so much to ask for good ♪
08:57That's as loud as it gets.
08:58But you can also ask questions of the Meta virtual assistant,
09:04little AI virtual assistant built into the computers
09:06in this little pair of glasses.
09:08And you have to ask it,
09:09hey Meta, what's the weather tomorrow?
09:11And then it reads the answers directly into your ears.
09:15And so now I know it's gonna rain
09:17for our last practice of the year, great.
09:19We can also ask it random questions about people.
09:22I asked it to write a poem and it gave me a poem.
09:24It's internet connected from your phone
09:26so it can do a bunch of stuff.
09:27For fun, I asked it to write an acceptance speech for me
09:30as I walk onto stage wearing the sunglasses
09:33and by the time I got on stage,
09:34I can start saying an acceptance speech
09:37as it's reading them into my ears,
09:39which I thought was, that's kind of a fun hack.
09:41So this is all based on Meta's new Lama 2 language model.
09:45So it's pretty fluid
09:46and you don't have to rely on saying
09:48certain specific phrases to get it
09:49to keep going through the conversation.
09:51Now, it's not the best AI assistant I've ever heard
09:54and it still has its limitations.
09:55It still can't set alarms
09:57or access third-party services that aren't Meta.
10:01But the fact that I could be on a phone call right now
10:05and you wouldn't even notice in public,
10:09that's kind of the point.
10:10There's two different styles by Ray-Ban for these.
10:13These are the Headliner and the Wayfarer.
10:16The downside is very clearly battery life.
10:18I mean, this is a small, small battery to fit in here.
10:21So it's cool that you have this wireless charging case.
10:23So the second you take them off,
10:24you can just put them in the case and charge them back up,
10:27just like earbuds, basically.
10:29So it's more about how many times
10:30the case can charge them up.
10:32Honestly, on one charge,
10:34if I listen to a bunch of music
10:35and take a bunch of pictures and videos,
10:36I can kill these things in under two hours.
10:39But they're quoting 36 total hours of battery life
10:42with the charging case.
10:43By the way, the recording light is on one side,
10:45but then it's the camera on the other side.
10:47So that keeps it nice and symmetrical
10:49like normal glasses should be.
10:50But that's the idea.
10:51This is about as much tech
10:54as you can fit in a normal looking pair of glasses in 2023
10:58without it starting to look weird
11:00with the current tech we have.
11:01But it's gonna be more and more and more stuff
11:04and still looking like this every year.
11:06So the question is,
11:08which side would you bet gets mass adoption first?
11:12And this is a question tech companies have to answer
11:15before they start investing.
11:16Now, Meta is invested in both.
11:18So maybe they win either way and they're involved.
11:20But if you're Snapchat,
11:22they've already tried just the smart glasses
11:24and maybe they'll keep doing that later.
11:26If you're Apple,
11:27they've clearly started with Apple Vision Pro
11:29and they're gonna try to miniaturize that
11:31and shrink that year after year.
11:33But which side?
11:34And what a time to be alive for all of this
11:36because the tech that we're gonna have on our faces
11:38in 10, 20 years is gonna look insane
11:42compared to what we have today.
11:43The same way that the tech we had 10 years ago
11:45looks archaic compared to what we have now.
11:48So all that being said,
11:49I'll leave you with this.
11:50One, Quest 3 for 500 bucks is awesome.
11:53And if you're looking to get a VR headset
11:55or a mixed reality headset at all,
11:57no problem recommending this one.
11:58It's pretty sweet.
12:00Two, Apple's Vision Pro is still on track
12:04to be released early 2024.
12:06And I think it's gonna be pretty awesome.
12:08So make sure you get subscribed
12:09to see the review of that when it happens.
12:12And three, I'm pretty sure we are barreling
12:16towards this computers on our faces future.
12:18At some point, it does feel like it's picking up
12:20that much steam and that much investment.
12:22So even if you don't believe
12:24we are gonna be wearing these on our faces
12:26for a super long time,
12:27it probably won't be this.
12:29It'll be something smaller
12:30and slowly we'll get more and more face computer time.
12:34So which side do you pick?
12:39Thanks for watching.
12:40Catch you in the next one.
12:41Peace.
12:42Peace.
12:43Peace.
12:44Peace.
12:45Peace.
12:46Peace.
12:46Peace.
12:47Peace.
12:48Peace.
12:49Peace.