Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Tri-Fold Phones and Orion Glasses: Welcome to the Future?

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

This week, David is off so Marques and Andrew talk about everything from the Epic vs. Google decision to the Huawei Mate XT triple folding phone which Marques got mere minutes before sitting down to record. Besides that, they also talk about their experience trying out the Meta Orion glasses and make a few predictions about the Tesla event which happened Thursday night. Of course, we wrap it all up with some trivia. Enjoy! Links: Google Keyword Appeal: https://bit.ly/4dNL8O6 Verge Google Vs Epic Explainer: https://bit.ly/3U0NIt9 Bloomberg Robotaxi: https://bloom.bg/3BQL0zZ Music provided by Epidemic Sound  Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to start a free trial or learn more. David, by the way, did we mention he's not in this week Visit Huntress.com slash Vox to start a free trial or learn more. We told him to go back to the movie theater and just watch that movie over and over and over again until he agrees with you. That'll be the first hour of next week is him talking about what he learned from that. Yeah. And apologizing profusely. Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts.

I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And David not here this week he is re-watching the wild robot movie a whole bunch of times to try to get a better understanding clearly the first watch wasn't enough for him so he's he's out watching that a whole bunch more times um so i think we're actually going to have some special guests, a.k.a. familiar guests, filling in in David's seat. Starting with Adam. Adam first. Then we have an applause.

We could just... Wait. Acoustic applause. Wait. No, I wasn't ready. I have this. Welcome. Welcome.

Welcome to the pod. Welcome back. Thanks, guys. It's a pleasure to be here. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the pod. Welcome back. Thanks, guys. Glad to be here. There we go. We're ready. So, yeah, in this first episode, we're going to take a look at the Huawei Mate X here in hand. We have one now.

I'm so excited. I'm very excited. I have just taken it out the box. So these are like real true first impressions. We also are going to make some predictions about Tesla's Robotaxi event, despite the fact that we're recording it before the event, but you're going to be listening to it after the event. So you can see exactly how smart or

dumb we sound in real time. But also there's some other stuff. We got to experience Meta's Orion glasses, finally. And Ellis is going to step in because he also got to experience that with us. So... I heard there was a crazy game of ping pong involved. Not so much ping, but yes, pong.

There was. That'll make more sense later. It's also fresh on our minds because we essentially just landed and got back to the studio. Might have been a dream, fever dream. Not sure yet. We'll see. But first, the headline I have in front of me is epic beats google and third-party app stores are now allowed is this real life yes i guess who knows with laws and judge judges and stuff but i'm

i'm gonna do a very quick breakdown of this because a lot happened but we've previously covered uh like a bunch of like epic versus apple epic versus google right it's been going on for a super long time but there's this pretty big uh decision made recently where uh there's a ruling that in the epic versus google case that google app store is now considered a legal monopoly yeah and because of that there's a lot of changes that they will have to make um so for the next three years not only does Google have to allow, the Play Store needs to allow third-party app stores, but they also need to give those third-party app stores

full access to the catalog of Google Play apps, which is a step I wasn't expecting, which is kind of wild. So if you decide you want to use the epic app store that app store has to have full access to google play apps whether those develop there is an option for developers to opt out like gmail like anything you can get on the app store i think it needs access into its catalog to be able to download those things from that um also a couple other things but first of all this is us only and this is not on the apple app store this is only on google phones play store yeah um so here's another

couple things that need to change and this is starting in november and going on for three years they can't require apps to use google play billing so right now pretty much if you want to purchase anything in an app you have to use the google play billing yep that is not a requirement anymore developers are allowed to have alternate ways to pay from within the play store developers are allowed to link alternate ways to download apps outside of the play store they're not allowed to offer money google is not allowed to offer money or perks to launch apps exclusively inside of the Play Store or even Play Store first. Google's not allowed to offer money or perks to not launch in third-party app stores.

So they can't pay people to say, please don't go to that app store. You can't even offer. You can't even offer. And they're not allowed to offer phone manufacturers or carriers money to have the Play Store pre-installed on phones. There's a couple other things. Those were kind of the big ones that I saw. But like... Feels like they thought of everything.

Even with all of that said, I think Epic still wanted a little more. They wanted six years instead of three years. And there's a couple other small things. i guess the real tldr of this is that epic proved that google's created so many different deals between developers carriers and device makers that the judge deemed it impossible for any other rival app stores to compete against them which impossible it made it very very difficult and worth this lawsuit happening. Yeah. Google's obviously appealing, which is why I said, like, is this real? I have no idea with the court system. But it seems like not just a huge win for Epic, but I guess a huge loss for Google. Yeah.

Google actually, they released a blog statement on, I think, the keyword, which is like their internal blog or whatever. Can I read my favorite line from that? Sure. Because because it is they're so salty and it's hilarious the decision rests on a flawed finding that android is a market in itself in contrast the apple decision upheld on appeal rightly found that android and ios compete in the same market this is obvious to anyone who has bought a smartphone walk into a store that sells smartphones and you'll see the options side by side. That's a true statement. I like how they're basically like, no, y'all, everything you said is right within Android.

But don't forget Apple. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like and, you know, maybe this is just me reading it over pretty quickly that like a lot of the reasons this was found in the google lawsuit and not the apple lawsuit is because of all the kind of shady stuff they did of like offering money to be play store exclusive and like devices to have play stores pre-informed like they just have so much money anyone else can't really compete with them including amazon has an app store and they've haven't been able to compete so

well i think amazon hasn't been able to compete for different reasons what are the like their app store is garbage well that's why this thing in here about needing to require the catalog is yeah bro what are you talking about amazon app store is fire damn that's good if i was there, I would stick over there. The last thing I just want to say, unless you guys have any other questions, is if you want like an actual really in-depth article about this, Sean Hollister from The Verge wrote a great piece that

not only explains it way better than we are here, but has links because he's been covering this for so long. He was in the courtroom, I believe, for the majority of this trial. He has a ton of really, really in-depth information about all of this. So highly suggest looking at that. You guys did miss one really important detail about all this, which is when the judge delivered the verdict, all of the epic lawyers stood up and did Fortnite dances. And when the judge struck his gavel, he said, victory royale.

We need an AI to create that there's no footage of this just drawings of tim sweeney flossing on the yeah naturally i would love that i can't believe this all started with remember like that video that they launched like two ago? The Apple one? The Apple one? Yeah, that's crazy. It did say in here that this kind of all stemmed from the very purposeful play of telling people to buy skins outside of it, knowing that both of these companies would be upset with that, and seeing. They were playing two chess boards, and they checkmated one and got made it on the other got made it on the other sorry i got very distracted because uh did you know okay so this this quote that you put in the doc was in italics

and did you know that if you put an emoji in italics it oh wait what no you see this yeah it's like a slanted i didn't know you could do italics emojis sorry i was very distracted can you bold nothing happened oh whoops i pasted command b oh wait no it got a little bigger you can see it did you mention that we all slept on an airplane last night yeah i'm i am slept as a bold word yeah all over the place also wait i was gonna i was gonna say something else i forgot my brain bold word. Yeah. All over the place. Also, wait, I was going to say something else. I forgot. My brain is all...

Dude, this is awesome. ...over the place. What was I about to say? Okay, we were talking about the phone and we were talking about the... Oh, did you guys see that YouTube shorts are going to be three minutes long?

Oh, yo! In like a couple of days, YouTube is going to finally have up to three minute long shorts. That doesn't mean anything that's previously three minutes or less will be a short. That means anything from that point on uploaded in vertical that's under three minutes can be triggered into the shorts feed if you want to uh big news for some people

wait when you say if you want to does that mean that if i have something that's two minutes i'm gonna have to check a box that says make this a short specifically or will it auto detect it like it does now it will auto detect it like it does now but if you don't want it to be a short you don't have to because obviously monetization for shorts is still dog water yeah so if you have a three minute video you might decide you want to just have it as a regular three minute video um but if it is a vertical two minute 45 second video it will automatically trigger as a short which could be great for discovery it's great for us it makes me think of now all creators that i watch that do shorts, how that affects them. Like, you know, Forrest, who does the car videos.

He'll just absolutely nail all the features of a car in rapid speed. And now he has three minutes to play with. Does the style change? Does he keep doing it? Leo Abrams, too. She has like a really great short. The crazy visuals. Yeah, like the visuals are now three times as long.

I feel like... Oh. I think it'll still favor like tiktok has 10 minutes now but i feel like that's just stuff you get served more is shorter it's still good so i do think it's going to be super beneficial for people like us who are you know we're cutting out a couple lines um internet shaquille made a great point about it once where he was like i wish it was 90 seconds because when i'm cutting down to 60 generally the line i have to take out like is a context line and it's like the one line i have to sacrifice is now 60 of the comments like why

didn't you say this part or like i don't understand this because of that so i do think it's going to favor the people who are still around that 90 second mark but at least we'll be able to get in that like one extra thing we were dying to say and we're really hurting to cut out so we're working on a short for uh autofocus that's like three minutes long um i regularly hit 59 seconds and change with our main channel shorts and i I am constantly cutting like the air, but like, as I breathe between words, like I'm cutting that out to hit 60 seconds.

So this will be awesome. I don't think I'm going to make, I say this now, but I don't think I'm going to make three minute shorts. I think I'm going to make 90 second to two minute shorts just because we have the time now. I'm going to put this and make it a short. It's going to be long.

It's going to be three full minutes. Now, what are we calling them long shorts shorts x mids i'm calling them capris i don't know about you um i like it feels right all right all of you are way more creative than that feels right uh let's get to what bring out the crumple phone this is the huawei mate xt and you might remember it by name as that weird triple folding phone that the CEO was walking around with not too long ago. There's a little story behind this phone. I mean, you've seen dual screen, not dual screen, you've seen folding screen phones before. Folding, flipping, all sorts of companies are making them now.

We just reviewed the Pixel Fold. This one, it folds twice. That's the whole story. It's a Huawei phone, though, so it's China only. So we had to really work to get our hands on it. Shout out to dbrand. Anytime I ask them if they can get their hands on something, they always pull it off, and I never ask questions.

Is that the reason you were on a plane? You were coming back? Yeah, that's what really. No, but it was it was basically just like we bought it we sent them the money for it and they just found one and got it to us so this is it can i pose a question out there for our audience to help us out why is it called trifold like this is not just a thing for this phone it's like tri-folds are a type of pamphlet but they have two folds and three sections so it's just mean try as an amount of sections and that they fold i always assumed

it was in reference to wallets like a tri-fold wallet has two folds and three sections a bi-fold has one crease and two sections wow am i just like thinking too literally about this like saying the try buy is representing the fold or are they like no if you were thinking literally it would have to be that because you're trying to fold the phone ah excellent point thank you no i think your latin is correct which is by full by fold means two folds trifold means three folds like the prefix suggests there's three folds there isn't it's just but while he's naming it correctly this is how like every pamphlet is called everyone's calling it a trifold okay someone help us out here's how it works because we tried to describe this on video last time and it went haywire right so it looks like an s

when you're when it's folded actually a z it looks like a z so from the front you can use it as a single screen phone matter of fact i'll light it up bang there it is single screen phone regular aspect ratio I think it's a six point feels like about a 6.8 inch screen like it's a full size screen but let's say you want twice as much screen you actually then open to that so you no longer use the front screen I already missed this can. Can you do that again? Yes. Okay. It's like a magic trick, right? Yes.

The first screen, you totally bypass the first screen into your second two screens. Nice. Okay. Yes. The top part of the fold you're folding out is a fold. So you're going on to the farthest back screen now is open. Yes. So you've seen all three screens now.

You've seen the first screen now you've seen the first screen and you've seen the second two screens but if you want all three screens then you have to unfold this is the harder one first screen from the back you're doing great sweetie yes that looks hard but i appreciate how uh the third screen oh man that looks so good so that's so sick number one impression i had was it's a little bit smaller than i originally pictured like i thought i think i it's like a 10 inch diagonal yeah and i was picturing ipad but there's like no bezels so it kind of feels smaller than an ipad it's more like ipad mini ish it's closer to an ipad mini but i bet if we put it next to an ipad mini it dwarfs an iPad mini.

Here we go vertical, in case you were wondering. That's... Oh my... Wait, why does that look so much better? It's massive. That's a lot of icons. That's a lot of space. Okay, now that's like an older iPad mini. This is a big tablet.

So you have this in your pocket and you can do all kinds of things. You can multitask across them. My second impression was that the creases are not bad. No, not at all no and like they have a black wallpaper and yeah they're hiding them well but i can't see them from this angle yeah i think my first impression from you holding it is my number one worry of this was now with two folds when it's straight how straight is it gonna feel and how solid

that looks like totally pretty flat yeah totally flat i'm really impressed by that oh yeah so my third and final impression is i don't remember which one it was but maybe a year or two ago there was a wedge shaped foldable and that had most of the weight in your right hand this kind of feels like that again this huge camera bump is like most of the weight and the rest of the phone is very thin but yes oh that's ah yeah it's a rocker when it's on the table but i'll let you uh play with and unfold i'm gonna give you the made xt oh the honors first i want to hold it up next to the honors a different phone holding it up next to my i'm tired

this definitely feels chunkier and it's way more square but then again the fold six is like very narrow the fold so the Samsung Z Fold 6 is notably like skinnier and thicker that's is that thinner than the fold oh now with the camera bump yeah let me take off the my little magsafe thing putting them next to each other no it's close yeah but the triple's a little thicker. Yeah, the triple's a little thicker, but it's very close. Interesting. Okay.

Anyway. I don't know how I feel about this on the right side being rounded out. I guess that's the only way that they can make that work, obviously. Ooh, this is so nice. Oh, my God. Wait, can you compare it single Single fold open next to yours. To the Fold 6. Yeah, so the dual screen mode or, you know, two thirds mode, I guess I would call it,

is like the same size as a Z Fold. It's just a little taller. Slightly taller. Wait, let me hold it up to the camera. If you're listening in audio, you're not missing much. It's pretty much the same size. It's very similar to a Fold 6. Yeah. Don't even go to the video for this part maybe later but then you open up then you see go to the video for this part then you open it up and oh oh you can feel the hinge though

if you like when you're opening it as you pull it open as you pull it up so i guess i bet you're not supposed to anchor your hand there i bet you're supposed to like sort of pry into the corner and like pull it out open by the outside edge. This is sick. Does it have like a YouTube kickstand mode like the other ones? Just put a MagSafe in the software? No, no, no. Like, you know how with like other folding phones, you can like sort of semi-fold it and then like eat your lunch alone and watch some YouTube videos? I don't know.

Yeah. Okay. then like eat your lunch alone and watch some youtube videos i don't know yeah okay can confirm you can take pictures like you do with an ipad with this giant phone and it's awesome is there a selfie camera anywhere inside the one of those three screens or is it just yes and it highlights it oh yeah it does there's like a little animation that shows okay so it's on the primary screen yeah gotcha all right i'm gonna close it now and give this to Andrew. The funny thing about this is I made Brandon set up a set so we could unbox this on camera because I'm assuming we're doing a video on this

and I wanted to talk about it on the pod. And I was like, oh yeah, it's red. The phone? Yeah, you could make a red background. So if the top-down set for unboxing doesn't match, that's my fault. No, the box was red. The box was red, box was red so i

assumed it was red but yeah i think there was a red version but yeah i think there's a red like it has the like faux leather back this it's like a hexagon it's so the camera bump is gigantic this is a heavy phone it is a top heavy phone as i almost drop it yeah i love it is the camera of an octagon it is yeah eight times yeah it of an octagon? It is. Yeah. Guys, it's an octagon. We shouldn't have to think about this. It doesn't have sharp edges, that's why. It's, like, very rounded off, so it's a little weird. It's just an octagon.

Yeah, it's an... Because a square circle is a squircle. What is a circled octagon? A squactagon. A squactagon. No, wait. No, that's a square octagon. An octurcle. An octurcle! That's it. That's what it is. That's going in the review. Yeah, this is thick.

I don't mind the rounded edge right here. I'll give you a couple other interesting specs about it. Obviously, the video is in the works, so you guys should watch that for all the details on this thing. 5,600 milliampere battery total, which for a folding phone is relatively high but for a 10 inch screen is relatively low for context like the samsung super thin 10 inch tablet has a 10 000 milliamp hour battery so that's an interesting spec uh it charges

crazy fast it came with an 88 watt car charger in the box. Dang. Oh, that's pretty cool to see that it fast charges. That's awesome. 16 gigs of Ram and a terabyte of storage, no water or dust resistance at all. I can't wait.

It comes with a terabyte of storage, like base. I don't think that's base. Okay. I will double check, but a terabyte of storage is in fact based. It is. It was based, but is it the base spec? I don't think it is. Because i will double check but a terabyte of storage is in fact based it is it was based but is it the base spec i don't think it is because you're paying how much is this okay so that's another interesting spec roughly 3500 us is the equivalent but we ended up spending

way more to acquire and import this um but that's roughly how much it goes for if you trend if you convert yeah so yeah it's expensive it's more than a dual screen dual fold i keep saying dual fold as if that's what i feel so like oh this is a terrible i love the dual phone like i love the pixel 9 pro fold but this is just a totally different phone it's crazy and then each of the each of the bills is so thin yo can i say some of the animations on here are fantastic yeah well i went hard with that look at the like opening it from the normal fold and everything slides out from the left yeah and then when you go all the way open the dots for like what page you're on slide by two two. That's good. Because it's opening two pages at this time.

Smart. And then the like back that pops out wherever you're doing it and it's like fun little blob. The back gesture. The back gesture from the side of the screen. Huawei, great job. It's a 2232 by 3184 full resolution.

Beautiful. So it's like a 3K by 2K. That's another thing you can do. That's the thumbnail right there. That's another thing you can do is you can have it partially open not quite a stand up by itself and yeah it's a 6.4 inch screen if you just use it like a single screen phone so can i peel the screen protector off i would not do that actually triggered i've had some experiences with that yeah i would not do that quite yet but yeah it's a it's a weird one how are you

gonna use this well first i'm gonna try to use it like a regular phone then i'm gonna see what the software features will allow it to do that even a dual screen phone can't do or a dual fold i keep calling it a dual screen what what a normal fold cannot do but you can't put this on a on at&t or ryzen or something oh as far as dailying it? I don't think so. I mean, this is a Huawei phone with no Google Play services or probably even the correct bands to drop my SIM card in here. Like, I have an AT&T SIM, but I typically don't put them in Huawei phones.

So I will be using this kind of like a tablet, basically. But you can. I could make a phone call like this, though. Just the straight hole open. Tablet to your ear new phone who dis on it that's what celebrities you use for paparazzi they answer they just talk on the phone with a completely open trifold and it just covers up their entire face from the photographer when they reboot the Pink Panther again they're gonna have him like cover you thought the pro max is big I know this is intimidating to When they reboot the Pink Panther again, they're going to have him covering his face instead of newspaper.

He thought the Pro Max was big. I know. This is intimidating to get a photo taken of you. It's like an iPad. I feel like I'm looking at an iPad. Yeah. Like an older iPad, but it says Huawei Ultimate Design on the back instead.

This is just so much laughter. Dude, wait. Can I see it standing in vertical? For some reason that looks cooler yeah it definitely looks cooler and vertical this feels more tablety this is the dream right am i am i the only one that feels like this is the dream ellis you know who you're talking to right now this is one step closer we're dude we're so this is 50 closer than we've ever been i i couldn't agree more yeah the next version next version, I almost just bent it the wrong way.

I made it a crumple phone. You do have to think about which way you're folding it. All right, so what they need to do next is fold open, fold open, and then this folds up. Oh my God. And then you've got double screen real estate. The commitment is real. I mean, this is essentially a square when it's

two so the fold six z fold six basically a square i this obviously you know is kind of the first generation which is crazy to think that this is like the first gen of this i know didn't tcl make like a a trifold and there have been a couple prototypes this like ultimately getting to the point of being able to hold it like this is what I would want in a folding phone. It's probably- Like vertical instead of horizontal. Yeah, like vertical instead of portrait

or instead of landscape. And oh man, all the TikTok I could watch on this. But a few years when this is cheaper and if anyone decides to go it, that's what I think I would jump into a folding phone for. Give it a decade. Skipping over all the regular folds straight to the dual. Yeah.

All right. Well, stay tuned for the full video. Obviously, these are like super early first looks, but I want to play with this a lot more and get you guys super high-res detailed looks at this thing. We should take a quick break. We got a lot more to talk about, including some smart glasses.

But before we do that... Oh, you have the smart glasses? Oh, no. These are... Oh. I just picked up the Ray--ban metas that i have because i think they look cool nice but we should also uh we should do trivia trivia dude i'm gonna have ellis ask the glasses directly go ahead before we get into trivia okay i was trying to see if an octurcle is a real thing and mark has i think i found something that is going to ruin your life which is called octurtle

an octurtle is i played that oh yeah it's a game it did ruin my life briefly it is eight games of wordle that you play simultaneously you all know about this first there was wordle then there was dordle then there was quartal remember the song one there was like music there was hurdle hurdle hurdle which was fun there was like a bunch of clones after wordle for like the next two months right we're all doing a bunch of different things it's no one remembers mastermind just because it's not named in a way that's easy to remember. But that's the game that Wordle is a clone of.

Oh, we don't know. What is that then? It's Wordle. Wasn't that like a British thing though? Mastermind? It's a board game. Anyway, without further ado. Marques, I'm going to let you keep the glasses on, but I'm watching you. But also, Marques, I'm going to let you keep the glasses on, but I'm watching you. Okay. But also, Marques, this question is for you specifically.

Oh my God, I'm going to get a point? I hope maybe. Marques and everyone else, except Adam. Except me because I know the answer. Andrew, what animal has a faster recorded top speed? Wow. The leopard tortoise or the slow loris? I thought that would be a very different set of answers.

Okay. I'll think about that one. The leopard tortoise or the slow loris? I like how they rhyme. Good job. Thank you. One of them has a fast name. One of them has a slow name. Well, leopard. I didn't think rhyme. Good job. Thank you. One of them has a fast name. One of them has a slow name.

Well, leopard. I didn't think about that. Yeah. Interesting. All right. I'll ponder that. Answers at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

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First, the bad news. SAP Business AI won't help you generate cubist versions of your family's holiday photos, but it will help you understand which supplier is best to help you roll out your plant-based packaging in Southeast Asia, identify the training your junior project manager needs to rise up the ranks, and automate repetitive tasks while you focus on big innovations so you can be ready for the next opportunity revolutionary technology real world results that's sap business ai all right welcome back we are back from california literally just got back from an overnight flight that's why we look so fresh and so clean uh-huh from meta where we actually got a late look but

also an early look at the orion glasses i'm saying a late look because other people have already seen it and i was in australia when they asked if i wanted to see it but then i kept expressing interest and they're like do you still want to see it and i was like yeah and so now i'm gonna see it these are products that are never coming out but that initially had intentions of coming out, which is a set of full augmented reality smart glasses from Meta. And they aren't quite like anything we've ever seen. Just to sort of lay the background of what this actually is,

I am currently wearing the existing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. There is no display to these glasses. There's just a camera, speakers, batteries, headphones. I can talk to it and AI will talk back to me in my ear. Great. But if I want to see anything, I can't. If I want to look at my answer instead of have it read back to me, I can't. Then if you remember Google Glass from 8,000 to 10,000 thousand years ago never heard of it google glass ahead of its time as i always say uh actually had a display up in the corner of your field of view so there

was a little projector and a little prism and it would project text and graphics and actual answers to googled queries in the corner of your field of view. So it wouldn't be overlaid over your real world, but anytime you look up into that corner of your vision, you could see what it's displaying. Not quite AR, but a step in the right direction. And then you have something like, you know, a Quest or a Vision Pro,

which is a full-on virtual reality headset. This completely covers your vision and puts displays in front of your eyes and will either show you a new world or show you with pass-through your existing world through cameras i think hi i'm here yeah ellis is in the hot i think uh thanks is that only playing out of his computer it is we still heard it we're tired oh god um okay uh i noticed the all the meta executives only referred to the quests as mr they really did not want to call it vr which is different yeah and apple calls the vision pro spatial computing and I've given up trying to use all their fancy names.

They're virtual reality headsets. They just are. Anyway, the point is we haven't seen an AR glasses thing actually working up until now. But what this is is essentially special lenses that can overlay anywhere in your field of view. It's a 70-degree field of view. can overlay anywhere in your field of view it's a 70 almost anywhere in front of your actual field of view and tracked onto the actual real world in front of you so if you think of uh my best analogy is like uh headphones that are noise canceling that have like a transparency mode so you have regular music playing and then you have the noise canceling

and you just hear the music and then you turn transparency mode on and it feeds in the real world through microphones. That's a VR headset. This is open back headphones. This is your actual real world with graphics overlaid on top of it. And there's a lot of computing and a lot of physics and a lot of material science and chemistry that goes into making this happen and that is all going to be broken down in a video that we are working on it is fascinating stuff but at the end of the day we all got to try it and see what today's version of that tech looks like and maybe we should go over each of our thoughts and impressions from those those couple hours we spent.

Do it. I guess I'll start with like, what did they actually look like? Because we've seen like prototypes and we've seen, you know, Magic Leap and we've seen other things that look very much like a prototype. Yeah, in video they look pretty massive. In video, they look pretty massive. Yeah. I think you bringing the meta Ray-Bans in is a really good just like starting point or reference of these things

from anything we've seen of attempted AR glasses like a HoloLens or a Magic Leap are miles ahead of that. They look even more like glasses than real glasses. Yeah. Which is crazy. I do think one thing they kept saying is like these are glasses you can tell these are glasses and i i do think that's true they are thick

they are not even really like when you look at the ray-ban glasses which are actually thicker than regular ray-bans at least in the little stems the ear i don't know what you call the side parts we googled this when this came out and i forgot the name okay arms the arm is it arms um but they're significantly bigger i was kind of relating them to if anyone's watched schitt's creek like something david rose would wear maybe um like maybe thicker and there's definitely types of glasses where people use thicker frames um i don't think these would pass off as regular glasses to anyone yet not quite they're close if you were a centric individual fair then i could see someone being like oh you chose crazy glasses but yeah i agree and i think what's going to be

hard about talking about these is i have i can't quite figure out what I think about them because in like one hand, what they've done to achieve that is like wild. Like they, what they, they've put inside of the, that small form factor is so crazy, but they still are definitely quite a bit away from being just replacing a pair of glasses to feeling like a

regular pair of glasses um so i feel like i'm gonna go back and forth this whole time with being like this is one of the wildest things i've ever seen to like it's not really that close yet yeah i think but yeah both can be true i think uh we we lived through the boom of smartphones we went from not having real smartphones to having the first gen smartphones, which were kind of rough, but kind of revolutionary in the input. And then having the smartphones we have today, which are amazing. And you can kind of look at this as like the beginning of smartphones again for this form factor. The resolution was not great. It was kind of pixelated. There were, you know, flares and different like lights that kind of sort of bled through the the wave guides like it wasn't perfectly transparent all the time it

was a little bit tinted there were things that didn't track perfectly there were things in input that weren't extremely responsive but the fact that i was looking through clear glass at actual overlaid graphics on top of the world in front of me. Not glass. Not glass. Sorry. Silicon carbide. That was amazing. And that felt like the revolutionary part in the same way that maybe multi-touch on a glass screen was revolutionary for smartphones. into this can we say that and they've said this but it was a product that they were pretty close

on letting consumers have and then decided to keep it as an internal development prototype i think the phrasing would be they initially intended this to be but it not close they mentioned that they wanted to iterate it one or two more times yes uh which is so cool of you guys. I honestly think it was like, it's the right decision. No, no, it was one, it was a great decision. We've had such a year of companies releasing things that are not ready

or worse saying they're going to release something that's not ready and then taking seven years and still not releasing it. So for them to be like, show and tell, see you soon. Yes. It's interesting because some companies you would

you would probably not want that from like uh i've heard a lot of chatter and seen some posts about how like apple would never do this apple would never show us something on stage like a presentation and then be like but we're not selling this to anyone no one can ever have it just would be a weird thing for them to do. They love to finish something before they sell it. But for Meta, the benefit for them, well, that's a rare miss, but I think for Meta, their benefit is they get to show that they are a leader in this space. And maybe for some companies watching, they're like, oh, look how far they've gotten. We haven't thought of that. There's some interesting things here uh so it is cool that they are actually presenting something that they've been working on yeah i think people like there are people who want to try new revolutionary things that would

pay for that and probably pay a wild amount but i don't think enough people that would make it worth it and i think keeping it as this internal testing device so they can make it the iterations better because we got to see some photos of like the old iterations that looked like your master chief inhaler yeah um or like us one of the like saw torture devices like on their heads um and the fact that how quickly they've gotten to this mistakeably glasses form factor is really impressive and and solved solved in air quotes in air quotes uh a lot of the other kind of things that hold a lot of these products back like the fact that the puck is wireless yeah i should mention i should mention there's some things that come with the glasses experience yeah so there are the glasses that you're wearing that

have a ton of compute in them sensors cameras speakers etc but there is also two other things one is there is a separate computer about the size of a smartphone that is wirelessly connected to it via wi-fi 6 i believe it would fit snugly in a glasses case without much air and that is doing a lot of the app logic that is a separate computer that's wireless connected must be within about 10 to 15 feet of it at all times and there is also a separate input device it can do hand tracking and eye tracking but there's also a bracelet that uses a technology called electromyography and to i guess oversimplify what it's doing is you put this bracelet on and it's essentially reading the electrical signals as they fire through the nerves in your

wrist so that when you make different gestures and scroll and do things with your arms and hands it tells that as it translates that as input into the Glass's UI. It's crazy. It was the most impressive thing we saw. It was pretty cool. Because you got to try a prototype of it a very long time ago. Years ago. And you hear it reading electric connection between your muscles or whatever. And no matter what company that is you're like all right okay i don't think i used it for 10 15 minutes maybe i can't think of a

single time it didn't correctly trigger the thing i was trying to do according to them they feel like they can progress that technology to the point where they can recognize your handwriting solely by monitoring the different electrical paths running through your forearm which is that to me seems insane that is crazy yeah that is what it did to me seemed insane yeah it already did i was really impressed so it is it did have a little haptic feedback it's like the size of a smart watch band it would tap the back of your wrist as you did inputs so it sort of confirmed that you were doing what you were doing but yeah it was literally like pinch your finger in midair behind your back totally out of view of the glasses and it would pick it up because it's reading the electrical inputs through your wrist

really impressive wait can i ask a question yeah so the the information flow i'm assuming would go from the wristband to the puck to the glasses oh i'm so glad the wristband is actually also directly connected to the glasses this time via bluetooth i thought the wristband was connected to the puck via bluetooth and the glasses were connected to the puck via wi-fi yeah but they have i mean there's a ton of custom silicon in here to make all the sensors work there's a ton of like they split up the batteries in the different parts of the arm of the band to keep it better balanced the whole thing weighs under 100 grams under 50 grams no no these are the 50 grams they said they're standard they want to be under 50 for glasses and that but this was under 100 oh was it or they said that these were no no no my bad so yeah it's they're super super cool

so i here's the three things that they let me do with the glasses because you might be wondering okay you have this crazy tech it does something with your input cool what do you actually do with it the software is not even done yet it's not really a full os but i did three things one was a sort of a regular multitasking experience like sitting on a couch open up a window watch some instagram reels open up a browser, watch some Instagram reels, open up a browser, watch the Hot Ones episode. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yes, exactly. You heard that right.

Yep. There is an Instagram app for a device that does not exist and not the iPad. Honestly, I love the level of petty. That's so funny. Adam, let's talk. We actually, we walked, we were walking to Jack in the Box as Californians do. And we walked past, we were just walking and and I noticed on the map it said Instagram HQ, and we all looked at the building and then could see the Meta headquarters, and we're like, that is a lean building. That is a smaller building, so maybe I do believe them.

Relatively speaking, smaller than the Meta HQ. But yeah, no, these were windows floating in the air in front of me, tracked over my actual environment. So I was looking at the actual couch and the actual people around me. But then right in between them, there was a translucent browser window with a Hot Ones episode playing that I was watching. And no one could see what I was watching because it just looks like I'm wearing glasses. And there's some little glints of purple every now and then. But you really can't see or hear, unless you have the volume all way up what i'm actually doing how did it look did it look like a screen or was it like a weird projection thing or it the thing that it reminded me i mean i don't think you've ever seen this but

it had sort of looked similar to the samsung transparent micro led displays with a much low resolution oh i have seen those yes it also had a similar fraying around the edges to those spinning transparent displays do you know i'm talking like the single band of leds that spin so fast and form a continuous like that is honestly the display technology that i would compare it most to visually yeah okay there was some chat from meta about how you know these are internal so we we knew we could have we could have actually doubled the resolution at the expense of thermals, but we didn't. You could tell it was pretty low resolution. But just in general, the fact that I was moving windows around, I was multitasking, I was just with natural input sort of dragging things around, resizing windows in a very similar

way, honestly, to Vision Pro. Like it had similar UI elements, like close window Xs and like grab the tab at the bottom, move the window. I'll have a screen recording that I think will be in the main video as well. So you can see sort of what I saw when I was doing this. The second thing that I tried was looking at a bunch of ingredients on a table and asking Meta's AI to tell me something that I could make with them. A very contrived demo, if I'm being honest, like it's a bag of dates that said dates in all caps on it. Like how hard could that be? But what I found interesting was it looked at all the things and then it dropped a pin, a little glowing pin on each of those things. And so I moved my head

around and I looked around the room and I looked back and each of those was glowing and tracked in real time i thought that was super cool uh and then it would tell me yeah you can make a smoothie which yeah no that's what you're supposed to do it's always a smoothie or an omelet yeah you can make an omelet trust me um drink omelet the last but i think that was most impressive to me because of the tracking like the dots were track over the objects which is cool the last thing was games actually they built a couple games which is cool one of them was like a head tracked uh space fighter like 3d asteroids 3d asteroids game it was kind of like in a tunnel so you would move your head around and actually dodge things i'm sure you looked real dumb like this with glasses on or no one can see what you're doing, but you're playing a game. And the other was actually a multiplayer game. This, it kind of

broke my brain. I, I, it was super low res. It was super low fidelity, but just the fact that you could do it so easily, uh, it was amazing to me. Two people with the Orion glasses on at once, me. Two people with the Orion glasses on at once, both stare at a QR code in the room. That QR code becomes the placement lock for where the game appears. So that's all you have to do. Imagine, like I've been talking about this with the Vision Pro, there's no shared experiences in quite the same way. You don't share the same virtual space in Vision Pro, but this is in your real physical space. There's a QR code. Look at the table. You enter the shared space with that person. The game pops up and it's Pong and you, your hand is tracked to the paddle and you just play 3d Pong back and forth in this little tunnel. I already have so

many questions. So simple of a concept. It's low res. Like you can just break it easily by turning your head too fast. Like if your hand's not close enough, you can just break it easily by turning your head too fast like if your hand's not close enough you can miss like it you could get out of the immersion of it but the fact that in 10 seconds you could set it up and share this invisible game that no one else in the room can see that to me was like oh there's something here this is this is really cool the fact that you can do this at all but what go ahead. What questions? I have all the answers. Okay. So two sets of Orion glasses, right? Yep. Each with their own puck or connected to the same puck?

Each with their own puck. Each with their own puck. Okay. Next question. When you're playing pong, is there like a Z axis? Yes. Yes. There is.

There is. So imagine like a rectangular prism between me and you and the ball is like bouncing across in through the prism to you and then you hit it back and it bounces across to me and I just hit it back to you. Can it go up like on the Y axis? Yes. Damn. Yeah. It's pretty cool. It's a pretty fun game. So they're kind of

explaining like the typical imagined scenarios for shared gaming like they brought up chess a lot and it turns out chess isn't a great example because there's all these little pieces and the board has to be flat and it kind of doesn't really work that well you kind of want it to be like vertical in front of the two players what about life-size chess um or even vertical chess like you could just flip the board vertical i think it'd be easier but like i think adam's talking about harry potter not me i didn't even think

of that but yes that they just kind of made these sort of retro feeling games because the nostalgia is most universal and just looks cool. And fits with the resolution the best probably. Also definitely, yeah. Yeah, I'm super down for any arcade style games like that in AR. That would be sick. Yeah, I want to play Pac-Man on that. You're running away from Pac-Man?

Oh my gosh. I think one cool thing we learned in the pong demo which was when ellis went to play against marquez first they did a really cool so there's multiple ways to interact with the classes the the best way is with the wristband and what it does is it has eye tracking so that's how you're selecting things and then you're using your hand motions to select to bring up menus to scroll with this cool like quarter flip like how you're selecting things. And then you're using your hand motions to select, to bring up menus, to scroll with this cool like quarter flip. Like if you're flipping a coin on your hand, that's how you scroll.

That's the gesture. But if you want, there's also is hand gestures and the calibration needed is like, you can hand off a pair of glasses to someone without doing a full calibration and still have fairly accurate controls. So like Ellis took a pair of glasses to someone without doing a full calibration and still have fairly accurate controls. So like Ellis took a pair of glasses, didn't calibrate, wasn't wearing the wrist strap and just through hand movement and the eye tracking, which comes from the side. One thing I found interesting and never thought about is eye tracking on AR glasses is so much

harder because in VR they can essentially put the camera lenses directly in front of your eyes. Can't do that when it's a clear past. so they need to come from the side and they were i thought they were pretty accurate you know one of the things we asked them was like if you the the quests do all the hand tracking stuff and there's this emg bracelet is not a part of that so why did you feel the need to add like a second sensor when the hand there are more gestures? But they're not like crazy complicated gestures and one of the they brought up a bunch of reasons why they like having Like a multimodal experience for that But one of the things they brought up is in the final product form of this

You should just be able to take off your glasses Put them on someone else and they should have the experience like they should that you don't need to take off the wristband You don't need to like Google the eyes around like just you're in do they mean like way down the line or they mean the consumer version that's coming in a couple years no comment i think it's a general goal but it was the first time i ever put the smart glasses on i did go through an eye tracking calibration um but it seemed to be not like super necessary like i think it would still work because it's still going to be those sensors on each side just looking at your eyeball but i think that was just for maximum accuracy but yeah the idea is yeah you can just hand someone the glasses they can see what you see

and you can just use your hands and just jump right in. And the benefit of the, sorry, the wristband is, hand tracking always needs to be in front of you, right? The wristband lets you do things like super discreetly, essentially, so you don't have to be the person. These are supposed to be things you wear in the everyday world. It's a little stranger when you're in the grocery store and all the things you have to do

are touched out in front of you. You could essentially use this wristband in your pocket if you wanted to, and it would still the the different controls yeah it's fun that would look so much weirder with okay yeah that's pockets in the grocery store i'm just trying to say it's but it's true i actually walked out of the room and we had lunch and the entire time i had the wristband on and totally forgot and then i walked back in and they were like we have to put the band back on. I was like, I've had it on this whole time.

We should explain that. It's like a slightly thicker band. Oh, okay. Yep. Wait, so what's to stop them from using that wristband with these meta Ray-Ban glasses? I think in general, this wristband, this input device has the most applicable use for them.

I think that this is i mean there is no visual component to these so you're not really controlling anything but i think in general they imagine a variety of form factors in the future that the wristband could be useful for just the orion being one of them maybe something with like a small heads-up display in the future kind of like google has been more natural looking could exist, and this wristband could control any of them. So I thought it was really cool. And yeah, that mind-blowing fact, Ellis, of like, theoretically,

we can read the electrical impulses through your wrist so accurately that you could just write, not even holding a pen, just write in midair, and we can pick up what you're writing. That's like science fiction to me. They also said the same works with typing, in midair and we can pick up what you're writing that's like science fiction to me they also said the

same works with typing which you need both hands yeah and also people type differently I'm realizing so that that'd be hard I want to try that so bad all of those things were theoretical things they didn't even mention if they were or weren't working on that but it was just like this

is the type of technology and how much room for potential there is for it and if i'm being honest like seeing how well it worked with just a few basic functions was really impressive yeah that's like one step away from mind reading because i mean we're wanting nerve impulse five steps away from wally like yeah if you just put that same technology on the temples, by the way, I googled it, it's temples or arms for the thing on the glasses that goes over your ear. But if you put that same sensor technology

just on those temples, you don't even need to move your hands. I thought you meant insert it into your temple so it reads your brain. It's reading the neural impulse, like the electrical signals. So that's the difference. There's different paths that the electrical signals take. I think what we picture like neural link is like literally like reading brain activity and that's one thing. But I think you can, the tendons are like skin deep. They're like basically right underneath your skin. And you have one per finger. yeah it's really it's like piano strings in your arm where like if you use different fingers it's a very distinct pattern of things that are happening with the muscles in your wrist so i

think that's why it made the most sense like okay if i have a gesture like this that really fire that looks the same every time to the input device i think um we talk about materials for a little bit oh yeah they were really stoked on the material sciences advances they made in this and i'll be real don't know a lot about material science uh but one thing i thought was really interesting that they brought up was that um you know we got two eyes surprise surprise that's some of us uh very true um most of us have two eyes, and we combine those images to get stereoscopic vision. And on a VR headset, that's less of a big deal because you can make it a little heavier, you can make it this big solid thing, and it's very easy to keep both lenses fixed in

the exact same position on your eyes. Glasses, on the other hand, are much thinner. You can't put steel plates in them. They will flex a little bit. The problem is that when you have these wave steel plates in them they will uh flex a little bit and the problem is is that when you have these wave guides in front of your eyes if the glasses flex even a little bit you begin to see double your brain like can't merge the images anymore and so they were very stoked on the magnesium frame that they built for these uh because if i do you remember it was five microns like that the margin for error

between the two sides it was something incredibly small like a few microns yeah where if you did torque them torque them uh heavily they wouldn't work very well so they had to they had to get that rigid like super and then they were also very excited to be like you know magnesium it's really hard to make glossy so they're actually naturally matte black also thermally they needed to do it i believe yeah they said like because they had this version that was a clear plastic so you could see inside it and they were like thermally the battery life would be like half on this one than the other one because of heat dissipation the magnesium frame was part structural part heat sink because of its thermal uh thermal properties yeah so interesting there i learned a new word during

that briefing arc minutes thank you for explaining it's a radial measurement i believe it's a it's a 60th of a degree okay it's very funny because ellis was like how how specific does it have to be like one one hundredth of a millimeter? And he was like five arc minutes. And all of us were like, what? Well, then he was like, when you reverse the trigonometry to the tangent, that equates to about five microns. And then I was like, I was going to say, like, I'm pretty sure you have heard that before because that's like trig stuff. But you just forgot it.

Unless you're working on AR glasses. like trig stuff but you just forgot it unless you're working on ar glasses hilariously i barely showed up to trigonometry class and then kicked calculus's ass but nice trigonometry wasn't that much into that one arc minutes is one of those things that you'll remember for like two months for the test and after the test you will never need that information again unless you work for meta so yeah i think that was super cool i think the carbon the silicon carbide wave guides is the other part of the equation um it kind of brings me to the last major point about these glasses which is kind of what you started with which is okay they're not ready yet they are not ready for regular customers yet and that comes in the form of one the silicon carbide

there is no supply chain for this there is no optimization process it's an extremely conductive uh extremely clear when pure but very difficult to grow uh substance just like all of the what they're doing with it is in order to get this wider field of view you need it to be super super pure and clear uh and glass doesn't quite in its current stage get that good i think it was less of that glass doesn't quite in its current stage get that good i think it was less of that glass doesn't get clear enough it's that glass in the refraction element of it can take in light and create like prism rainbows and then that affects yeah the what you're seeing because you're bending the light so much through this stuff anyway the cost of these

lenses is insane and i think the total cost uh boz told me would be somewhere in the 20 to 25 thousand dollar range because these are such low volume it's not a shock that it's expensive but like we're not trying to sell people 25 000 ar glasses right now that's the first thing the second thing is uh two hour is-ish battery life, roughly, and we could see it and feel it run down. It was getting warm on our faces. The puck in our back pocket was slowly getting warmer, but in general, that's another thing.

It's not ready for the public with a two- or three-hour battery life. And so all these things combined made it make perfect sense that, okay, they're not going to ship this to people, but they still want something out of the level of R&D that they got to get to this point. So they've packaged it in this really cool way. They'll make some number of them, maybe a few hundred or a few thousand, and they will use it to work on it, iterate it, and keep it up for the next few generations. I think they're years away from this actually being done but it is amazing to see that it's possible to get this close to the dream yeah i i think like if i had to have my wish list and this is being like super

picky wish list of this being a good consumer a really good consumer product yeah it needs to be thinner both uh on the two temples and the actual glass the frames themselves as well thinner and lighter yeah battery life definitely needs to be more i i he boss did a great job of explaining this he doesn't see on this replacing a phone but rather being another accompanying a phone but i think that would mean it has to do a good job of the majority of the time you're outside to be active so two hour battery life is way too low um my super nitpicky the 70 degree field of view was like really good but if you placed a window and then kind of moved your head you would see it cut out and that just kind of breaks immersion yeah um i

think that's like it probably would be fine with 70 degree field of view the vertical field of view was annoying for me i didn't seem to hit that when i was playing pong i felt like i could never see the top of the whole thing yeah really yeah yeah i think the pong was the most vertically stretched thing that we did yeah i think i when i had three windows side by side, that's when I got to the left and right edges of the field of view and it would get cut off. But yeah, I think those are all on my wishlist as well.

Higher resolution is the other thing. Just because fidelity is everything in my world and I would love to see it in crisp 4K if I could. And yeah, I think in general, just, just thinner and lighter. I think Boz, when you interviewed him said he would like the price to be equal to a phone. And I think that's totally reasonable. If not, I think it could be higher. Yeah. The, the question when we think of all of these things being better is how much better higher resolution, how much higher double triple maybe thinner and

lighter okay how much thinner and lighter because we are packing everything into these glasses to get to like 100 grams how much thinner and lighter and then to your point like how much more field of view how much cheaper do we do we really want them to be those are all questions that they have to answer as a company those are all trade-offs that they'll have to make to try to work engineer their way down to maybe something that could ship someday um these sound cool to me but it also seems to me like this was a big recruitment demo they're like look at this cool stuff we're working on come help us build the future yeah because they're not selling these yeah one line that stuck out to me that i think

actually has a lot of weight behind it that they kind of just skimmed by but they said you know everybody starts off wanting to make glasses and then end up just making a headset just because it's like the physics it's just impossible you just make a headset and so you see all these headsets out there and you can see every company's ambition to someday either shrink the headset down or like get to this AR glasses thing but the fact that they actually have made it and you know it's a thing that exists yeah maybe it's maybe not something you can buy but it's a thing that exists is already a pretty monumental step I think which is pretty cool that we're witnessing so yeah I think uh I think stay tuned for the full

video which goes over all our thoughts the hands on you can see what i saw when i was demoing them all that footage hopefully you're gonna see how many times i lost and hopefully as many points as possible pong and me winning um but yeah time we're playing like every time one of us would be like a sick point would be like mariah use that one mariah yeah i did play boz and he smoked me in pong obviously he's got a not smoke you he's got an advantage he hasn't he's played it way more than i have um but it it is it is actually pretty fun nice so my final thoughts meta ray ban clear glasses are the best clear tech product i think i've ever seen yeah i want

them so bad i am in love with these they're so somewhere is like furiously working on yeah well carl pay step it up i also feel the need to say as someone who's done a lot of clowning on these spectacles uh there were many times when i was in meta HQ where I would see an employee and I'd be like oh cool Ray-Bans and then I'd be like those have camera wait like I got fooled multiple times uh by by these so I think uh I think I may have to eat my words I think that's the reason why I like have the extra like critique of those glasses to be smaller is because these are proving to be really impressive and mistaken as glasses, which is the end goal. Yeah. Possibly the funniest moment of me working here was coming down to the hotel lobby and seeing Marquez wearing these, and I'd never seen him wear glasses before, and I was just like, what?

Marquez got LASIK so he can wear tech glasses later. Marques goes, what are you laughing at? If you rewind far back enough on the YouTube channel's history, you will find videos of me wearing glasses. It's only for like a month. The very first video I ever made, I took them off 10 seconds of the video. Really?

Yeah. It's pretty... Continuity. It's very glary when there's a screen in front of you. Anyway, we got a lot seconds into the video. Really? Yeah. It's pretty... Continuity. It's very glary when there's a screen in front of you. Anyway, we got a lot more from that video. Check it out. Get subscribed. Make sure you watch out for that.

But we got a little more to talk about, including the Tesla Robotaxi event. So in any case, we should get to trivia. Yeah! Trivia! It's so cool to be over here for this. Oh, yeah. Everyone except for Ellis,

because Ellis knows the answer. I just dropped a picture into your doc could one of you describe this for me wait did you ever watch top gear uk no because this is actually i'm almost positive a trivia question they did on really really nice there's the three-wheeler great minds i'm just like a decade later oh well this looks like a yeah describe what was the um what was that like one of the first honda um evs the motocompacto no the one that had the uh oh the insight was it the insight i don't it was the insight where it had like the cover over the back wheel google it for aer For aerodynamics. Google it. Yeah. Oh.

Was it not the Insight? I think it was the Insight. It was the Insight. Let's go, baby. I feel like this looks like the Honda Insight got stung by a bee. But it's a two-door and it's got this little sleek. Honda Insight's a two-door. Mercedes, huh?

This is a 2005 Mercedes-Benz concept car. Dude. It looks like one. It looks like one. Yeah. It was inspired by an animal. What kind of animal? And is it faster than the slow-lore? How specific are we going to get?

Because I was going to say like a... Well, don't say it. Don't say it. But I will accept a very broad answer to animal. Okay, sure. Because I was going to give a category. You can get two points if you give me the exact animal. I'll give you the kingdom, phylum, genus, order. you can get two points if you give me the exact animal i'll give you the kingdom phylum genus you will get 10 points i will give you how many legs it had all right we'll we'll talk test the robo taxi after the break be right back Support for the show today comes from NetSuite.

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Tesla RoboTaxi. Now here's the thing. Here's the fun part about this section of the podcast. The Tesla RoboTaxi event is Thursday night. I'm going to go out there and point cameras at this thing and check it out. podcast comes out friday so you already know by the time the podcast comes out exactly what got announced what was shown on stage and what actually happened but this is being recorded on wednesday so right now all the people you're looking at and listening to have no idea what the robo taxi is or what's going to happen and we're still gonna nail these predictions and we're just gonna try to figure it out in real time just kind of guess so i'm actually i've been on the fence about should i even go to this event like what what is it what is a robo taxi event what is the point

like what's happening here and the conclusion i've come to is okay it's Tesla. It's famously very ambitious with their announcements. And I would say every time I've gone to a Tesla event, it has at least been thought-provoking in some way because their announcement isn't just a new product. It often comes with all this baggage of like, this is the category that we are defining here. I went to the Cybertruck event years ago and it was like, this product might not ship for years,

but they are kind of actively trying to redefine electric trucks. I remember going to the Model Y event and coming away thinking this could be the most important electric vehicle, period. I remember the Model 3 event as they went through that production hell and figuring out what a high volume,

low cost EV actually is and so this is another new tesla vehicle i believe and then we kind of don't know anything else other than we robot exactly which uh is a reference to a collection of short stories by isaac asimov it is uh where a uh technology professor type person i haven't actually read this i just sort of know about it i read it famous oh it's really good we'll explain don't remember it it's a it's like a it's a it's a scientific doctor who i believe works for the government uh explaining a bunch of stuff to a reporter so i think that is kind of what they're referencing oh that's the yeah that's the book i believe yes yeah in that process he's saying a bunch of short stories yeah

and one of them is the robot and there's also a will smith movie i was gonna say yeah i've seen the will smith movie does that count as knowing a little bit about this i don't think but it was that i comma robot yeah or is that yeah i, robot. Oh. And the invitation to this event is we, robot. So I assume- You, robot? Us, robots? Which a big part of that book, I believe, is like the laws of robotics.

So this will be interesting because they're naming it after that event. Can we- Or not event. They're naming the event after the book, I mean. Can we kind of open this with like, Tesla has mentioned cars being autonomous taxis before. Yes.

And so that's what my biggest wonder here. I know you put some things out that are like potential rumors of what's coming out. But before we even get to that, I think what's interesting is there have been times where Tesla has said that like, you can buy your car with full self driving, drive it when you're using it.

And then when you are not using it, it can go out and ride share people and make you money. Make you money in the background. They have said this before. And that is just your regular car, like a Model 3. Yes. So when I see RoboTaxi event, I feel like that is either,

are we just going to announce that this can happen now and it's the same car, we don't see anything new, or are we going to see a new car which now and it's the same car we don't see anything new or are we going to see a new car which kind of defeats the old purpose or one of the purposes of purchasing one of those cars you know mark zuckerberg once said if we don't invent the thing that kills facebook someone else will so maybe this is that maybe they're just trying to kill their own idea they're killing their own arts it to them first maybe uh but yeah so i i feel i'm assuming this is going to be something more along the lines of waymo of like a dedicated robo taxi but i just find it funny

that previously your model 3 was just supposed to do this yes yes i think that irony will be heavy through the entire presentation or at least through the lenses of those who have heard those promises before um but i agree with you i do think this will be a dedicated autonomous vehicle whose only purpose is to do what way mode does now which is to do ride sharing and taxi services and things like that important note at least in this great state of california uh this great state no the ellis is always in california yeah i think he's at this great am i in california we were yesterday uh i think technically we were today no we were in the anyway that aside um technically in california they cannot do what waymo does because in order to operate an autonomous vehicle in the great state of california you need specific permits to do that tesla has not even applied for those permits why'd you put air quotes around the

great state of california i did not don't you dare in fact if i could have spoken with an underline and a bold i would have i wouldn't put it past them to save that for after the announcement okay because i think this is a very much this is what we plan to do type of announcement which hey let's be real it's tesla they've done that before where they'll announce something and then this thing doesn't actually come out or happen for many years um i'm generally this is this is my prediction this is what i think they're going to do is they're going to roll a new vehicle on stage. And I think based on a couple of Elon tweets of him saying like, oh, we have to push it back.

We need to redesign the front of it a little bit like it will look a little bit different from the existing model. So they're going to roll a new looking vehicle on stage and then they're going to go look at the inside. There's no steering wheel. No. Why? Because it doesn't need one. And here's all the capabilities based on where we think our tech will be very soon he'll be like it's feature complete it just needs to get approved he'll say that i bet he'll say that and we'll get to this point where it could theoretically with enough

compute like drive around charge itself and do all these things that it should do. There will be some layer of economic upside to it being electric and just making you money passively. Hey, you should own a fleet of these things. They'll do all of that song and dance. And then they'll end with, you can get a ride in this thing. And the only reason I think they'll do that is because when I signed my agreement, I signed a waiver to go to this event. And near the bottom of the waiver was you could go on a ride in a thing and you will not sue us if that goes wrong. It does seem, though, because the event is on the Warner Bros. Discovery lot. It is. So there could be no other cars.

Well, it would be literally illegal for them to do it on public roads in California. Which is why they won't. Yeah. So that's what I think is going to happen. And then I think they will also probably mention like, oh, yeah, you can smart summon. You can use autopilot on our regular cars. And there's all sorts of other great updates coming to our regular cars. But this will be the robo taxi where if you're in any number of these places maybe maybe anywhere maybe just us who knows uh then you'll be able to yeah i have a question for you go for it because you said

something that i had not thought about in all of this which is how do you think they will charge themselves or will they be on the new jersey model where someone has to come and plug them in that one is for you there's a couple yeah there's a couple possible answers possible answer number one is they just hire a bunch of people and when a robo taxi pulls up they just plug it in manually possible option number two have you seen the old clips of the mechanical charge plug? So if you go back far enough, this is a decade plus old. There is an old video from the Tesla factory of a articulating snake-like charger that just like wakes up, finds the charge plug and plugs itself in. And then it whispers, you should eat this apple it is a strange visual and this does not

exist anywhere in the real world now but that could be another thing that they bring back i don't know um okay so yeah that's that's a good question we don't know yeah will the tesla app just become uber then i think they'll probably have to have another app a separate app either another app or like another section of the app or you call one or they'll fold it into x and just make it the oh god they might chat of america jesus that's as much as you might be joking that's honestly what he wants cool that there what's the tesla subscription uh i don't know what it's called like tesla plus isn't it just to get the like plus it's like better it's for streaming it's for like all the data that goes i thought it was also cheaper rates on tesla chargers or something uh tesla

connectivity packages premium you get navigation live traffic sentry mode satellite maps video streaming karaoke music uh internet browser and why don't i think there was one we talked about a while ago that was changing or guaranteeing you like better prices on charging i think that's just if you have a tesla and a tesla oh or is that if you're a non-tesla and you're using the tesla charging network okay yeah i was wondering if somehow the uh ride share would be put into that i do think it would be a separate app as well and a way better name the tesla plus yes um also waymo charges by a technician plugging it in okay so i would assume it would be similar if we're thinking this is like a tesla run on the streets of whatever city they would probably have another lot with technicians in it that would plug them in there's also a few really nascent technologies that i think are

mostly being tested in china that involve battery swaps where you you pull onto a bay and it actually takes out the battery puts it into a charging bay and then replaces it with a full battery that's been charging that's a thing with motorcycles in other countries yeah weirdly enough this is also a thing that tesla has also done a video announcement of where they drove up a model i don't know what model it was but they drove up a tesla onto some station it did a battery swap and they also had like a gas car filling up with gas next to it and then i think if i'm remembering this, they had the electric car finish doing the battery swap, drive away, the crowd cheered, and then another electric car drove up and initiated another battery swap and also finished it before the tank of gas was done. Damn.

But it was also like a six minute tank of gas. So I'm not even sure how to process that. Also, apologies. I just looked it up. It is not a nascent technology. There are 11,000 of these stations for scooters in Taiwan. For scooters, okay. For scooters.

So yeah, there are a whole bunch of random things from Tesla's past that they could bring back, including full self-driving, including motorized chargers, including battery swaps. I think the smart thing to do is probably just look at what Waymo already does, which is, okay, they operate in a small place. They have lots of these things where technicians can look over them every night and they charge and they take off every morning. They beep at 3 o'clock in the morning. They beep all night and annoy people, but at least they have a hub

and maybe that's the model. I think one other thing similar to Waymo I wouldn't be surprised by here is seeing it with a bunch of extra sensors on top similar to Waymo. So this is the interesting thing. Tesla famously doesn't like that at all. They don't like sensors.

At all. And that's like if you watch their AI day, if you watch any of the last couple years of Tesla's presentations they're like, not only do we try to do cameras for as much as possible we've literally gotten rid of other perfectly useful sensors in the cars exactly no more ultrasonic sensors for parking everything is visual there's a hilarious tesla press release that i think i linked somewhere in the script where they're like we've gotten rid of ultrasonic sensors we're only doing what they call tesla vision which is like, um,

and this is better. They're like, this is so much better. It's better in testing. That being said, because we've disabled it, you won't have summon or smart summon, or it might be like very,

very limited now. Yeah. So it is better. And you just can't do this stuff you paid for. I would not be surprised if they were like, we needed to do this for these taxis or, or just kind of forget that they said that and never referenced it at all

and see a swarm of sensors on top of a Tesla. Waymo and Cruise both use LIDAR, specifically LIDAR. And also, when these things were getting phased out in 2021, 2022, the LIDAR manufacturing ecosystem was very different. Now there's hundreds hundreds if not several hundred uh suppliers suppliers of of lidar it's something that's a lot cheaper to implement now i think the that the tesla believers argument or devil's advocate would be that the ceiling is higher

for vision based on ai so they view lidar and ultrasonic as a crutch. And if you drive around with, you know, combining all the sensor data, which kind of is just noise to the visual systems, then that might work better in the short term. Actually, it does work better in the short term. But in the future, you can do more and do better with just compute trained better and better. I mean, AI has been getting amazing lately. You you know if the first generation is the rabbit r1 think of like the 10th generation maybe that could drive itself i think that's that's the argument is the ceiling is higher for just vision that is tbd you know elon in the past has described lidar as a clutch excuse me a crutch for evs like like you're going

to rely on the sensor and and not you know but having just been to meta and then saying like having a multi-modal sensor experience using these two different kind of sensors to error correct each other they seem to feel really confident in that and obviously ar glasses and exactly the same no differences no notes um but yeah so that that's another thing i you know i i'm really curious about is if they're going to double back on this and be like look it's cheaper now our ai is good enough to do like a real multimodal system where we can factor these things in equally without relying on lidar as a as a crutch i think if they do put lidar in

they just pull the apple move of like we never said it was bad look at how good this thing is now they'll have some and ignore it completely i think the most famous example for me has been like i went from a model s that did have ultrasonic to not using it and it just got way bet worse in the rain way worse than the rain autopilot in the rain with ultrasonic sensors that can see straight through the rain was fine visual relying on cameras pouring rain can't see the road as well do you have summon slash smart summon in any of your tesla vision only uh no no now i only currently have a cyber truck i don't have my model s anymore i believe that the model s that is shipping now does not

have any of these features right because i said that and i am quoting directly from a press release but as soon as i said that i was like someone with a tesla is going to be like well i have those features they may have updated to include some of them now but again the truth is that they had to remove them at first yeah all they worked on and i'm reading directly from tesla's website so you can't be you can't be mad. The Wild Robot is a good movie. Okay, last question I have for you guys is, what do you think the price of something like this is? Is that even a question?

Did they even say this on stage? A price tag for a robo-taxi? I think it's just, I'm assuming it's just going to be a direct Waymo competitor where it's not a price for the car, it's a price for the ride share aspect of it. tear guys i just went down a really dark rabbit hole because you guys mentioned earlier like having a fleet of these things for your business is like an enterprise yeah good idea i really think it's a good idea um there's also rumors that they're going to talk about optimus at this

event optimus is what they call their bipedal robot prime what happens when you use the same app to get a fleet of optimuses well optimus is not anywhere near shipping contrary to what some executives have said but the idea of commanding a fleet of humanoid robots for the right price is uh that's some serious iRobot stuff right there I'm referring to a Will Smith movie

this time okay I haven't seen that movie oh but I'm taking your word for it if you google iRobot right now

you will see what looks like a fleet of humanoid robots there's no other way to describe the scenes from that movie other than a fleet of humanoid robots

you should really watch that movie it's really good it's pretty great it's a great movie I'll add it to my list it's fun it's right up my yep this is it yep marquette yep uh-huh yeah wow when you're right you're right yeah so i i the things that came to mind for me were like the tesla semi truck i don't even remember if they announced a price for it but they definitely had a big talk about like cost of operation per mile and of course if you're just speaking to people who are going to get a fleet of these,

that's music to their ears. They just want to hear, I will save money over the current fleet that I use. Maybe it'll be like that. Maybe they don't get a price. Maybe we do have a price. Maybe it's like, hey, if you want to buy six of these and operate them in a little corner of your town

and a little franchise, a little robo-taxi business, maybe that's a thing. I don't know. Oh, so you think they'll sell them to like taxi dispatchers? That's what I imagine. I mean, they keep using the word robo taxi so maybe i think we're just gonna see testing in select cities as a ride share that would be the safe thing it is okay you just you convince me that's not what they're doing yeah that's this time well i'm sure i feel like that's definitely what they're gonna do for like the foreseeable future but like they definitely have like a 5-10 year plan for what they want

this to be they definitely want it everywhere yeah because that would be the if they're if they're intellectually consistent through the past couple years of what they've been trying to do then the benefit of being a vision is that it can be anywhere it doesn't have to be in pre-mapped cities doesn't have to be in select locations full self-driving works on any street in any place so that's if they if they want to be consistent with that then this could launch anywhere at any time there are laws wow that's good whoa exactly like the sound button right there which is probably a great place to end it yes Before we end, we do owe someone a thank you because a lot of these predictions were informed by some really great reporting

by Dana Hull, Cara Carlson, and Edward Ludlow at Bloomberg. So thank you guys for your diligent work. Shout out to Bloomberg. Shout out to me reading the fine print in the invitation. A little insight as well. Shout out to reading Elon's posts on Twitter. It's really painful, but I made it through. Got some insight there.

Yeah, that's it. There's a lot more coming up. There's this event. There's maybe an M4 Mac event coming up soon, as far as we know. There's maybe some other exciting future announcements and videos, so just stay tuned for it all. It's all going to be on Waveform, baby.

That's why we're here. We're ending the year hot. Yeah. I think it's cold usually. Well, speaking of cold, I'm going to try to end my cold streak in trivia. You got a point last time, no? Yeah, you got a point.

Oh, I did? Yeah. Oh, well, this would really end my, this would be like a hot streak then. Starting a hot streak. Ellis, do you want to read your question? Yeah, you mind if I do it from over here? Yeah.

God, this is so cool. I know. I get to look at you in your face. Well, we do that enough, I guess. Well, I have to turn this way, which is a little annoying. You guys, last week, or two weeks ago maybe, Mark has admitted to us that he is quite the aficionado of knowing animal top speeds.

You know, well, when you said that, I assumed you meant like the really fast ones, right? So I did try to throw you a little curveball here. Oh, you did? No, I have to think about it. If listeners are confused, by the way, that episode comes out on October 28th. Be ready. Wait. Oh.

They haven't heard that one yet. Right. But they'll get it later. Hilarious. Yeah. Anyway, that is so funny. Question number one, guys. What animal has a faster top speed?

The leopard tortoise or the slow loris? I've never even heard of a loris it's a lemur i think could be wrong it is unfortunately like one of maybe not one of the most but it's a extremely popular illegal pet that is generally like really terrible how they take them out of their natural habitats yes oh that's not good is that like because they're pretty adorable sugar sugar glider kind of probably yeah all right read what do you got all right we pick separate things okay because what did you put i wrote the slow loris and that is correct that is the faster animal and if you can see this little diagram

i drew down here this doesn't make any sense i'll explain it i believe that the leopard tortoise is named for the way that the shell looks not how fast it is i think that's why it's called the leopard tortoise uh yes the uh slow loris i could not find a world record top speed for but uh it was averaging about 1.2 miles per hour the leopard tortoise i did find a world record recorded speed for in guinness that was 0.6 miles per hour you give that some of miles's pre-workout and some smelling salts get that i think we're pushing 1.7 and marquez was correct by the way it's because of the pattern on its shell or carapace killer i think i was thinking of those turtles that run really fast sometimes not a tortoise have you ever seen that one that's

like on the sidewalk and the guy walks up to it and it just darts back into the water i haven't seen that but i have seen that awesome video of the guy who gave his pet turtle a tech deck skateboard that he like puts under his belly and the confidence this turtle has now that it can move really fast. It's like Doggett and this cat. I need to watch that. It's pretty cute. Question two, Adam. All right, quick update on the score.

Marquez now with 19. Yo, let's go. Turn this franchise around. Andrew and David, both tied with 22. David, by the way, did we mention he's not in this week because he's watching the robot movie over and over yeah we listen to you guys you you really you really lit us up for that one so we told him to to go home we told him to think about what he's

done we don't go back to the movie theater and just watch that movie over and over and over again until he agrees with you so um that'll be the first hour of next week is him talking about what he learned from that yeah yeah. And apologizing profusely. Next question. So the 2005 Mercedes-Benz Bionic concept car was inspired by what animal? You will get one point for the kind of animal and you will get another point for the actual animal like the the god-given name god if i say the the specific name of it and that's wrong but it is in the same category of animals

okay yeah so all right flip them and read what do you got category of animal do i get that okay yeah so all right flip them and read what do you got oh that's a good one hmm so we both wrote something in the water marine animals what did you write i wrote an orca orca damn i could see that though and not a whale orcas are whales yeah but i'm saying it's also not a whale oh no it's not okay well i wrote a fish whales yeah but i'm saying it's also not a whale oh no it's not well i wrote a fish but um it is a fish i'm glad it's a fish because it kind of looks like a fish i vacillated between different fish i ended up landing on a stingray nope it's a box fish a box fish yeah what is a box oh I see it. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah, it kind of tracks. That's weird that, like, why that fish? It's not like a particularly aerodynamic fish.

Maybe it is, though. Hydrodynamic. Hydrodynamic. Okay, yeah. Interesting. Shout out to the Mercedes box fish car. Yeah, wait, what's it called again? The Bionic.

The Bionic. It's just a concept car, so car so it probably well it definitely was never made yeah it never came out yeah interesting well i'm glad i'm glad i got 20 points one of the points 19 up to 20 now i got it oh sick okay i'll take that oh that's huge that is amazing with a come from behind okay don't call it a comeback well that like like I said, it's busy time. It's Techtober. Lots more coming up. Lots more events. Lots more videos.

Get subscribed if you haven't already. David will be back in that chair. Maybe, as long as he thinks about what he did. So many of you guys think David and I are the same person. David? Yes. How? You're constantly in two different chairs.

You like Wild Robot that i haven't seen i do it i want to see it so bad yeah me too it looks awesome well next week david will have seen many more times and ellis will be back in that chair and also we will know what happened at the robotexy event so stay tuned we'll catch you guys next week peace waveform is brought to you by adam fox uh damn you do it waveform was produced by adam alina and alice rovan we're part of the podcast network and our intro outro music is made by then who's still bingo all right one last story before we start adam when we. Adam, when we got to the airport, Marques hadn't had lunch, so he went to Wendy's, and Ellis, Brandon, and I are standing in line.

Marques sits down and eats his food, and Ellis was watching him and said, in perfect harmony with the boarding, he essentially finishes his last bite stands up in one motion throws it like crumples up his wrappers throws it out walks to where the boarding was literally like i watched the the nugget hit his tongue and as soon as it touches they go all right we're gonna begin boarding for this flight to san francisco marquez gets up trash doesn't miss a step walks straight to the gate and on. And I was just like, this bro is so optimized.

It's crazy. Not one wasted fry.