Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a pair of Ray-Ban smart glasses appear on screen, during the Meta Connect event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, US on Sept 27, 2023. Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars researching and building futuristic wearable technology, a bet on his belief that augmented reality glasses, which can overlay images and text on a user’s view of the physical world, will be the next major computing platform. — Reuters
Li-Chen Miller wasn’t even a Meta Platforms Inc employee when she started working to fix the company’s video-recording sunglasses.
Miller was working at Microsoft Corp in late 2021 when she purchased a pair of Ray-Ban Stories, the first version of Meta’s souped-up sunglasses. But her excitement about the novel idea was quickly overshadowed by all the ways she thought they could be improved. So she dashed off a detailed – and unsolicited – list of suggested fixes to Alex Himel, Meta’s head of wearables.
"She wrote me an email that articulated what she thought was good about the device and what was promising, and then a longer list of things that she would improve,” Himel said, recalling that he agreed with most of the ideas.
Miller’s email and her meticulous attention to detail landed her a job the following year at Meta, where she now oversees products for the entire wearables division, including a full line of the Ray-Ban glasses she previously critiqued. Once more of a novelty, the glasses are becoming increasingly important within Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars researching and building futuristic wearable technology, a bet on his belief that augmented reality glasses, which can overlay images and text on a user’s view of the physical world, will be the next major computing platform. One day, the company has suggested, they may even replace the phone in your pocket.
That vision will be on display Sept 25 at Meta’s annual Connect conference in Menlo Park, California, where the company is expected to unveil an AR glasses prototype that also falls under Miller’s authority, codenamed Orion. While an AR version is still years away from mainstream availability, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses are available now, and have been a "bigger hit sooner than we expected,” Zuckerberg told investors last month.
While the current edition of Meta-powered Ray-Bans don’t yet have augmented reality capabilities, they do have video cameras, speakers and an AI assistant you can talk to. They’re also significantly more stylish than the Orion glasses are expected to be, and cost US$299 (RM1,244).
That’s been enough to attract more than half a million consumers, according to market research firm IDC, which estimates Meta has shipped upwards of 700,000 pairs of the latest Ray-Bans since their launch in 2023.
Meta’s goal is to one day merge these two projects into one product: A fashionable pair of glasses coupled with advanced AR technology. The idea is to get people accustomed to the idea of smart glasses slowly, building up to a pair with full augmented reality capabilities.
There’s a “laddering up to AR glasses that we’re certainly going after”, said Heidi Young, Meta’s vice president of engineering.
For now, the top of that ladder is many rungs away. After years of investment, Meta is still far from delivering a pair of glasses that are stylish enough to work for general consumers but powerful enough to offer AR features.
Other companies have tried augmented reality glasses, including Alphabet Inc’s Google and Snapchat parent Snap Inc, though neither has found a robust market for their products in part because the glasses look bulky or weird.
Eight years after first taking a crack at the wearables market, Snap showed off its own AR glasses, called Spectacles, earlier this month, but is only releasing them to developers.
For Zuckerberg, successfully blending the Ray-Ban styles with AR features would be the ultimate aim, since owning a widely used pair of AR glasses would mark a step toward decreasing Meta’s reliance on rivals like Apple Inc and Google. The two companies dominate the smartphone market, which also means they serve as middlemen between Meta’s products and the consumers who use them.
Zuckerberg has said that structure has hurt Meta’s business and can be “soul crushing”. If glasses are indeed the future, Zuckerberg wants to own the market.
Miller will have a major role in determining whether Zuckerberg’s vision succeeds. A self-described “crazy cat lady”, she took the stage at Meta’s Connect conference a year ago in a pair of Hello Kitty jeans and a T-shirt featuring a picture of her own cat, Adobo.
She delivered an impassioned speech to thousands of software developers about the potential for Meta’s smart glasses. “You no longer have to choose between capturing the moment or truly experiencing it,” she said.
Even though the attendees had mostly flocked to Meta’s headquarters to hear more about the company’s latest Quest virtual reality headsets, Miller stole the show.
“They were not there for glasses, and then she took the stage and I think really overpowered the event,” Himel said. “A large percentage of people who went to the event actually bought glasses on the spot and took them home.”
Sales savvy aside, Miller’s contributions to Meta’s wearables division are the result of spending almost two decades at Microsoft, where she worked on a collection of consumer products that included Xbox, Windows, Windows Phone and the Bing search engine. It was there that Miller first developed a reputation among colleagues for being “in the weeds” – displaying a knack for the kind of detailed analysis that caught Himel’s eye.
“She would be in every single ship room and review we had for the program,” said Marleine Daoud, who worked with Miller on new features for Xbox’s rewards program. That level of involvement was rare for leaders at her level, Daoud said.
Miller also learned the challenges of packing a lot of computing power into tiny devices, said Shiraz Cupala, a product leader for Microsoft Teams, who worked with Miller on bringing Xbox features to Windows Phone.
“You have to take into account the constraints of the device to create an experience that really works well and is reliable,” Cupala said. "She has a very strong instinct about how to make those hard decisions.”
That skillset has been put to use as Miller worked on Meta’s smart glasses, which feel as thin as regular sunglasses but are enhanced by Meta’s virtual assistant, Meta AI, and can take photos, record videos, play music and respond to voice commands.
She uses them all the time, sometimes for helpful things, like using the camera and voice assistant to translate a menu in a foreign language, or for mundane things like recording her cats playing around in the living room. Some days, Miller wears the glasses as much as 14 hours.
While in Paris this summer to watch the Olympics, for example, Miller brought along three different pairs of Meta’s smart glasses, some of which had unreleased features and technology, to stress test them in the “wild”, according to Himel. When she returned from vacation, she once again handed her boss a list of changes and feedback.
“When you wear a product that much, you do love it,” Young said. “But you also see all of the little flaws and warts all over the product and so you just become doggedly obsessed with fixing those things.”
Young credits Miller with having an outsized influence on the product’s look and feel, including the cat-eye shape, which Meta worked on alongside Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica.
She also said Miller has pushed hard to improve the camera and its functionality within the glasses to ensure high-quality photos. “If there was one person that put their fingerprint on this product, I would say it’s her,” Young said.
Miller says part of what motivated her to join Meta was the company’s drive to dominate a new category of technology. “I want to work on something that will still be here and be relevant in 10 years,” she said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek earlier this year. “It was very attractive to me that Meta is very ambitious. Mark puts money where his mouth is.”
Miller wasn’t the only critic of Meta’s first pair of smart glasses from 2021; only 10% of the people who bought them used them monthly, according to the Wall Street Journal. Snap fared even worse with its first effort at glasses several years ago, and the company ended up taking a US$40mil (RM166.54mil) writedown for unsold inventory.
Zuckerberg seems more optimistic this time. He said advancements in Meta’s AI voice assistant are part of why the current Meta-enabled Ray-Bans are more useful, spurring adoption.
“Demand is still outpacing our ability to build them,” he said in July. – Bloomberg
