Anticipatory Experiences
Ben Thompson discussing his experience with Meta Ray-Ban Display:
AI is absolutely the killer feature for these glasses, although the current experience is lacking. Not only is it still based on Llama, but it’s kind of at parity to apps in terms of its centrality to the experience. While I bemoan the loss of chrome in places like MacOS, in this case I don’t want any chrome at all: everything should be mediated — and ideally anticipated — by AI, showing me what I need when I need it and getting out of the way the rest of the time.[...]
The Display, however, is at its best when interaction is more serendipitous than intentional. It is AI that can deliver that serendipity, and for that reason alone I am glad that Meta doubled down on AI and that the Meta Spark model appears to be a solid step in the right direction, particularly in terms of multimodality. And, by extension, I do wonder about Apple’s long-term capabilities in terms of AR. The company’s old playbook will work with VR; AR isn’t a converging area, in my opinion, but one that actually will diverge more and more. PCs never did become tablets, and vice versa, and Windows 8 was a failure. These are two categories, and I think Meta is much better placed than Apple in terms of AR specifically. I can’t overstate what a big deal the Neural Band is in this regard. This is obviously the right input method for this experience, and honestly, I wish I could use it in more places.
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The outlines of a future interaction paradigm are here, but the AI in particular needs to get better (I hope the Display team has a strong relationship with Meta SuperIntelligence). Right now everything is too manual and intentional, and not sufficiently anticipatory and serendipitous. Still, there is something here — more than there was with Orion — and I’m excited to see how it develops.
"anticipatory and serendipitous" is exactly where this needs to go.