- All right,? here's a theory I've been thinking about. Someday, maybe not next year or five, or even 10 years,, but maybe someday we'll all live in a world where we all have these wearable computers on our faces all the time.. And A lot of these tech companies really believe in that future. Like I've never spoken to anyone on Planet Earth who believes more than Mark Zuckerberg that humans are on their way to spending tons of their time in some sort of Metaverse.

But The tech is clearly not good enough yet, today in 2023 for anyone to wanna do that. Like This is what a VR headset looks like in 2023, and this is the best we've got.. And Even now,, the computers and pixels and batteries, and everything on your face are too much for people to wanna spend all day in something like this.. But We're all kind of on board that maybe someday the tech will shrink down more, and more, and more and more.

until eventually, it's no more than just a normal looking pair of glasses. And Then maybe at that point, we'll all be cool wearing it every day. So This is Quest 3, this newest and latest and greatest headset from Meta. My Theory is, is on this side of the scale, and on the other side of the sliding scale is smart Glasses.

And Meta literally is also announcing smart glasses at their event. So These things are literally called the RayBan Meta Smart Glasses, AKA the RayBan Stories too. Right Now, they are super simple,. they don't do much because they can only fit a camera and small speakers, and a battery, but there are some clever tricks that enable them to do as much as possible.

And Maybe someday the tech will get powerful enough and useful enough for people to want to use these every day. So VR Headsets are racing to get smaller and smaller, and smart glasses are racing to get better and better tech, And they're both basically racing towards each other,. And companies like Meta are spending tons and tons of money to develop these things to figure out which strategy will hit first. So Let's see.

Let's start with the headset. So This is the latest and greatest from Meta, the Quest 3. And This is the year they made their big pivot to it being a mixed reality headset, which in hindsight feels like a natural progression for these things if you wanna get them more comfortable for people to wear every day like glasses. So In previous VR headsets, it really felt like pass through was an afterthought..

Like You put the headset on, and you're just immediately in your own world until you take the headset off. And This new version is still built to be immersive, it still has all the light blocking and fills your field of view with screens and makes it as immersive as possible. But It now has a bunch more sensors arranged around the outside that make pass through dramatically better than before. It's now color, stereo,, very low latency, and decently high resolution.

And There's immediately a bunch of benefits to having pass through being this good. First of all,, the setup was way more intuitive. Like You can literally take it to a new spot for the first time and just put it on it, boots up,, and automatically you look down and it just maps out the floor of the room you're in. The Available floor space, the objects in the room,, the spots where you can stand, and to surprisingly great accuracy..

So It's using a pair of RGB cameras and the Lidar sensor in the middle. So You no longer have to painstakingly draw a play area every single time and stick with it. It Just naturally feels like it plants the menu floating right in the middle of where you're standing, and you can still see everything around you. Now You may be wondering, okay, how good though.

like exactly is the Quest 3? Is it the best? Is It better than the Quest Pro? Yes, it's better than the Quest Pro but it is not as good as Apple Vision Pro. I would kind of equate it to like, if I gave you a clear pair of glasses that were not exactly your prescription. But Basically, this one's good because it's stereo and color, and nearly real time, so you see accurate colors,. you look at your hands, and you can find the controllers wherever they are in the room,.

just pick them up and put them down without needing someone to hand them to you. Just So many benefits like that. There's also just a small amount of distortion with up close objects and things near the edges of your vision. But It's not quite high enough fidelity to like pick up your phone and start using that screen.

So Like if you get a text, you're still gonna have to take the headset off to be able to read it. And I Know, comparing it to a $3,500 headset feels unnecessary. and it kind of is,. but also a lot of people are asking me about it, and I'm one of the few people who can actually say they've tried both..

So I Will say that yes, Apple Vision Pro is still the best pass through I've ever experienced. I Distinctly remember taking notes about my experience on my phone while still wearing the headset, It was kind of insane. But for a $500 headset, Yeah. This is absolutely as good as you're gonna see.

And Combined with the high resolution of the actual menus and the accuracy of the controllers, I think it's pretty awesome. And Then, of course,, the other benefit to having way higher quality sensors around the outside of the headset is you don't actually need the controllers.. Now You've always had the choice to either use the controllers or use your hands. And These controllers have gotten better over the years,.

they're smaller,, they're pretty sweet,, they have better haptics than ever before. But The hand tracking has also gotten way better and really intuitive and responsive. And I Think this is key again, to feeling like the future. So You do this pinch gesture here to pull up the menu and move around to select things.

You can literally scroll around menus by touching the digital menu and flinging them through space with your finger. Or You can grab a window and just move it around, putting it on a table or floating it in the air, and it just stays locked there, which is pretty awesome. So Pretty much everything except typing is natural. It works as you'd expect, like you're typing on a virtual keyboard floating in space, but this will definitely take more practice, because there's no haptic feedback.

See The other gestures I was talking about almost always have a haptic feedback of your own fingers hitting each other,, which is really interesting.. This Keyboard Here, you're sort of just poking an invisible plane in the air where the keyboard should be, so that that's a little tougher. The Main selling point of this headset, though,, is still playing games,. that's still what it's super good at.

and it plays all the same games that the Quest 2 could play,. And there are even some games optimized for Quest 3 that it's even better at. It has this Nextgen Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip, it has higher resolution per eye,. it has a wider, more immersive field of view,, and it's, in my opinion, slightly more comfortable, thanks to this new strap that improves weight distribution.

So I've been playing a bunch, I've really enjoyed this golf game that feels surprisingly realistic as someone that was expecting like wee golf levels of graphics and control.. Also Pinging Pong, which this has this eerie multiplayer mode online, where someone else's avatar just shows up in your space standing 10 feet away from you, but with no legs. But There's the classics like Beat Saber, Super Hot, and then even some new ones like The Rotag is Blowing Up. All This stuff is the main reason why today, you'd buy something like this, to spend like half an hour in the thing.

But Again,, the tech is shrinking down more and more and more, and will every single year, until it gets close to something like these, Smart glasses. So Let's talk about the smart glasses. So These are the Meta Smart Glasses, and there's others like it, but they're gonna start at the other end of the spectrum where there's only so much stuff that you can stuff into a regular looking pair of glasses that nobody would even look twice at. But Over time, as tech gets better and more powerful, and more miniaturized, these things will get more and more powerful and more and more able to do more stuff.

So Right now, this is a 12 megapixel camera with a little LED light ring to indicate when it's recording or taking a picture. A shutter button on top, and then a literal computer inside with some storage, a touch pad on the side, and then some microphones, and then these really tiny pinhole speakers that fire audio downwards directly into your ears. It doesn't sound like much, but when paired directly to your phone, and the Meta View app, this thing is surprisingly capable as a little computer on your face. So You can use the camera, of course, to just take first person pictures and videos just by hitting the shutter button.

Videos are limited to 60 seconds or less, and portrait orientation. But Honestly,, despite all that,, they're actually pretty solid looking videos and there's some promise here,. I Kind of feel like I might want to use these for auto focus for like car driving footage,. If I could get wide screen out of them, that would be awesome.

And Then you can also start a recording or take a picture just by saying, "Hey, Meta take a picture." And So you could see that it was pretty fast, the little light there. I Don't know if you wanna say that phrase out loud very often, so you might just stick to one of these, but yeah,, it has a voice assistant built in. So You can send and receive messages through WhatsApp Messenger, you know, Meta stuff. But It's just audio, like there's no screen anywhere in here built in.

So This really works best with experiences that can be entirely handled with just audio. So They're connected all the time to your phone via Bluetooth, so you can listen to music. And These little speakers are directional enough that at half volume, there's really not that much bleed. And that high volume, it kind of just sounds the same as someone like maybe listening next to you with open back headphones..

That's as loud as it gets. But You can also ask questions of the Meta virtual assistant, little AI virtual assistant built into the computers in this little pair of glasses. And You have to ask it, "Hey Meta, what's the weather tomorrow?" And Then it reads the answers directly into your ears. And So now I know it's gonna rain for our last parts of the year, great.

We Can also ask it random questions about people. I Asked it to write a poem and it gave me a poem. It's internet connected from your phone, so it can do a bunch of stuff. For fun, I Asked it to write an acceptance speech for me as I walk onto stage wearing the sunglasses.

And By the time I got on stage, I can start saying an acceptance speech as it's reading them into my ears, which I thought was, that's kind of a fun hack. So This is all based on Meta's new Llama 2 language model. So It's pretty fluid and you don't have to rely on saying certain specific phrases to get it to keep going through the conversation. Now You know,, it's not the best AI Assistant I've ever heard, and it still has its limitations,.

it still can't set alarms, or access third party services that aren't Meta. But The fact that I could be on a phone call right now and you wouldn't even notice in public, that's kind of the point.. There's two different styles by RayBan for these. These are the headliner and the Wayfarer.

The Downside is very clearly battery life. I Mean, this is a small, small battery to fit in here. So It's cool that you have this wireless charging case. So The second you take them off, you can just put them in the case, and charge them back up, just like earbuds basically.

So It's more about how many times the case can charge them up. Honestly, on one charge, if I listen to a bunch of music and take a bunch of pictures and videos, I can kill these things in under two hours. But They're quoting 36 total hours of battery life with the charging case. By The way,: the recording light is on one side, but then it's the camera on the other side.

So That keeps it nice and symmetrical like normal glasses should be.. But That's the idea,. this is about as much tech as you can fit in a normal looking pair of glasses in 2023 without it starting to look weird with the current tech we have, but it's gonna be more and more and more stuff, and still looking like this every year. So The question is,, which side would you bet gets mass adoption first? And This is a question tech companies have to answer before they start investing.

Now Meta is invested in both. So Maybe they win either way and they're involved. But If you're Snapchat, they've already tried, just the smart glasses, and maybe they'll keep doing that later. If you're Apple, they've clearly started with Apple Vision Pro, and they're gonna try to miniaturize that and shrink that year after year.

But Which side? And What a time to be alive for all of this! 'Cause The tech that we're gonna have on our faces in 10, 20 years is gonna look insane compared to what we have today. The Same way that the tech we had 10 years ago looks archaic compared to what we have now. So All that being said,, I'll leave you with this;. One, Quest 3 for 500 bucks is awesome, and if you're looking to get a VR headset or a mixed reality headset at all,, no problem recommending this one, it's pretty sweet.

Two, Apple's Vision Pro is still on track to be released early 2024, and I think it's gonna be pretty awesome. So Make sure you get subscribed to see the review of that when it happens. And Three,, I'm pretty sure we are barreling towards this computer's on our faces future. At Some point it does feel like it's picking up that much steam and that much investment.

So Even if you don't believe we're all gonna be wearing these on our faces for a super long time,, it probably won't be this, it'll be something smaller, and slowly we'll get more and more base computer time. So Which side do you pick? Thanks for watching. Catch you on the next one. Peace.