Lots of new announcements, and I do want to get to Meta's VR glasses in a second because it's clearly a spectacular announcement. But I would love to start with the new Ray-Ban bands that don't have a camera. That's right, the audio only. Could you talk about the motivation for that? What drove you to remove the camera, because obviously the camera has been such a big selling point for the regular Ray-Ban bands?
Yeah, it is. Well, we started this project maybe a year and a half ago or two years ago when the number one most used feature on the Ray-Ban Meta glasses has been audio. And in retrospect, it makes sense. You know, it's a tremendously popular use case. People are listening to music, they're listening to podcasts, they're doing calls. And it's such a popular feature. While you're right, we love what the camera can do for people, it comes with a real cost in terms of literally cost and as well as weight and battery life.
And so, if you're willing to take a pair of glasses and say, 'Let's just focus on the audio features,' not only are you going to get the same great audio, now you're going to get longer battery life. You're going to get lighter weight, and you're going to get a lower cost. So, Mark said on stage a couple years ago, you know, first and foremost, they have to be a great pair of glasses. And then he talked about how we want to have a pair of glasses for everybody. And that's certainly represented in the number of styles that we're launching. So, we have over a hundred styles of glasses. But this is another way that you do that. It's for people for whom this is enough of a value proposition that they want to get audio with a longer battery life and at a lower cost and lower weight, they can do that.
Now, there's another kind of hidden benefit here, which is the AI work that we've done where you're unlocking the ability to interact with your agents via voice also makes these still very, very capable as, you know, kind of the best way to interact with your Muse agent, for example.
I mean, I tried those on earlier and I was actually surprised by how lightweight they felt. I mean, it's something like 40 grams, but I mean, that sort of like rimless design at the bottom, they do it really thin.
Yeah, it unlocks a lot of different design options that just weren't possible when you're still trying to fit a camera and an extra processor into the glasses. And so we're really excited about what it does for us in the design space, letting us unlock these different form factors like these Clubmasters that previously we really couldn't do if you had the camera in there.
Now, I'm sure that the lack of camera will appeal to some of the sort of privacy-focused people as well. I know there's been a lot of debate around the privacy side of things. You guys have obviously done a lot of anti-tampering work in recent weeks and months. So, if you could just talk a little bit about that, some of the progress there.
Yeah, thank you. So, you know, the very first generation of camera glasses we ever put out there had the light on them. Every single generation we've ever done since has had the light to indicate when there's recording because it's not just about do you feel like you look good in the glasses and that you like the functionality. But it's about the people around you. Do they feel comfortable with it? We've known that from the beginning. Well, there are some bad actors out there who are trying to tamper with the light. So, in the second generation of the glasses, we put in tamper detection. So, if the light is covered, we can detect it and disable the camera. Well, people were kind of trying to circumvent that. It's a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, but I think we've got the upper hand now, and we've dramatically improved our tamper detection, and we're willing to take a much stronger step against people who attempt to do that kind of thing. So, we can disable the camera on the glasses permanently, and we can take down any content that they put up on social media that came from a tampered pair of glasses. And in fact, we can take their accounts down. And so we feel like, you know, it's obviously one of those things where there's always going to be people who are attempting to circumvent the systems and it's incumbent upon us to take every avenue we can to ensure that the promises that we built the product with remain intact, so that consumers can feel comfortable and confident when they wear them around.
Now, I want to get to these. I demoed these for about half an hour earlier. I was genuinely quite blown away because I actually think the price isn't too bad for the tech that's on offer, but I think the thing that struck me the most was the visual quality and I mean the UI generally was very impressive, but I did the demo where you sort of watched the Avengers movie. Like the level of detail was, I would say, shocking for the size of the device. Can you talk about maybe some of the challenges that you overcame to get the quality that good because it is impressive.
Yeah, thank you so much. It was our obsession, as you can imagine, over the last several years to land exactly that. And we worked with content creators, you know, we worked with James Cameron, we worked with people who have spent their careers in immersive content and producing the most compelling experience that they can. So, you know, it's a display system that's Dolby Vision certified. It's a system that has Dolby Atmos audio, so you can get the full immersive sound of being in these experiences. And we just were absolutely obsessed with every detail that we could get in terms of how to maximize the quality of the experience.
I think a lot of times with VR products, people are measuring the speeds and feeds so to speak, like what's the number of pixels? It's not just that. It has to do with the optics as well. It has to do with the lenses and the design of the lenses and how can we get them comfortable very close to your eye to be both this lightweight, about 100 grams, and also give you a really immersive feeling of cinema. So it was a tremendously important part of the product development from day one that this had to be a great display that you could build these wonderful cinematic experiences and be able to read text cleanly so you can do work in the headset. We really wanted to unlock those in addition to obviously gaming which is what VR has been known for from the beginning.
Can you talk a bit about what your plans are for expanding that entertainment because I mean even thinking about the IMAX sort of enhanced IMAX. I thought that's quite interesting because obviously the Odyssey was such a big hit this year and I haven't seen it because I haven't been able to get tickets to the IMAX and so this feels like a sort of workaround to that in a way.
Yeah, it's one of the things I think that the content creators are so excited about and you know, yeah, we're working with Lucasfilm and Disney and we're working with all these tremendous libraries of creative is that when they build something that's filmed in 3D or that's filmed immersively, there is a limited number of places that humans can experience that and a lot of times it isn't the same experience that you're going to get if you watch it on your TV at home. And there's something lost there from what the filmmaker intended, from what the story could be. And I think this is an opportunity to kind of restore that for people. And so yeah, does it give a second life to these productions that are better experienced kind of more in a richer environment?
So what do you think is going to be the main driver of people buying these? Because you mentioned earlier about gaming and it being so, you know, tightly associated with VR and I suspect Beat Saber alone was, you know, one of the main reasons why a lot of people bought Quest. I mean, certainly I've put hundreds of hours into Beat Saber. I mean, what do you think is going to drive people to buy these?
Yeah. Well, the gamers are going to be excited about it. You know, you can pair it with controllers for the entire library of games that exist. We've also got 75 hands-only titles, including Beat Saber Flux, a new hands-on version of Beat Saber, which is super fun to play.
I tried it earlier. I don't think I was very good, but it was fun.
It takes a little time getting used to it. Yeah, it's a trickier one. I'm going to do it on stage, and I'm a little bit nervous about how that's going to go. So we have, but in addition to the gaming, yeah, I think for me what was interesting is you kind of come for the gaming, the cinema is dynamite and the fact that they're so small and so portable, you know, suddenly it's the thing that you're absolutely going to bring when you travel. You know, it's the kind of thing I would have loved to have had in my dorm room as a college kid when we didn't have a TV or even just being in an environment where you don't get to control what's on the TV. This is a great option for those folks. The sneaky surprise will be people who use it for productivity. We've built, you know, surface touch typing and so it's just an incredible ability to control your kind of windows and productive environment with AI and also do it anywhere with almost no setup required.
The typing, I tried the typing and I was genuinely blown away because I type very quickly and I could type I would say almost full speed which shocked me because I was expecting it to be a bit, you know, sort of janky because it's sort of projected on a surface. It was incredible and I'm not just saying it, it was genuinely incredible.
