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Comment by llmthrow0827

7 months ago

All the VR/AR/XR demos are so insanely trivial and yet still manage to be much more difficult than current methods of doing things. Like, really, cooking?

Normal method:

* Search for a recipe

* Leave my phone on a stand and glance at it if I forget a step

Meta glasses:

* Put glasses on (there's a reason I got lasek, it's because wearing glasses sucks)

* Talk into the void, trying to figure out how to describe my problem as well as the format that I want the LLM to structure the response

* Correct it when it misreads one of my ingredients

* Hope that the rng gods give me a decent recipe

Or basically any of the things shown off for Apple's headset. Strap on a giant headset just so I can... browse photos? or take a video call where the other person can't even see my face?

64 comments

llmthrow0827

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hdjrudni  7 months ago

I dunno, if these worked perfectly I don't think it'd be awful to be able to open my fridge and say "what can I make with this" and it could rattle of some suggestions based on my known preferences and even show me images in their new display.

Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy hands) is not a bad thing either.

  • vasco  7 months ago

    I touch my phone with messy hands all the time. They are water resistant now, just wash it after

  • hattmall  7 months ago

    It sucks now, no idea why, but a few years ago, with the Google Home mini, I could just yell out all kinds of cooking related questions with "Hey Google" and it would always give me a good answer, was great for doing stuff hands free when cooking, like when I just don't want to get raw chicken or whatever on my phone.

    But yeah, it doesn't give me good answeres any more, usually trys to start an unrelated YouTube video or email me something about Youtube plus or w/e

jackbrookes  7 months ago

This reads a bit like like a pre-PC take: "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"

Imagine it’s 1992:

Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

PC: Turn on tower, wait for DOS, fiddle with floppies, pray the printer works, hope the shareware recipe isn’t weird.

Not saying you're wrong but its easy to miss the big picture

  • aembleton  7 months ago

    > "Why use a computer when a cookbook works fine?"

    I still feel that way. I have cookbooks because I find the UX better than searching for recipes.

    • wpm  7 months ago

      So I can read the 20,000 story about how the author was told this recipe by their brothers husbands step-grandmother while vacationing at the lake house with their golden retriever named Max before I can get to the recipe.

      1 reply →

  • pavel_lishin  7 months ago

    Right, but we're in the 1992 of these glasses. Maybe they'll be good eventually. They aren't now.

    And frankly, even the online recipe experience leaves much to be desired. Skip past the blog post. Skip past the list of ingredients. Skip past another blog post. Find the single statblock on the bottom that lists ingredients & amounts, & instructions - hoping that it exists.

    Like other commenters, I've also started going back to paper cookbooks.

  • rs186  7 months ago

    Not the same.

    Internet and recipe websites solve a real problem: accessing recipes was expensive and not easy

    AR headsets don't solve any problems. If anything, they make up a nonexistent problem, attempts but fails to solve the problem, during which the experience becomes even worse.

    • aylmao  7 months ago

      I mean, depends on how you describe it. One could easily say:

      Phone method:

      * Find phone

      * Search for the right app, before finding the right recipe

      * Leave my phone on counter, constantly having to move it as I move plates, pans etc.

      * Wash and dry hands after each step, before unlocking phone

      * Clean it every time gunk gets to it

      Meta glasses:

      * They're already on, just ask for recipe

      * No need to ever wash/dry hands, move a device around, or clean it since one can easily unlock it without touching it

      Right? Similarly with cookbooks, the best case is great and the worst case is terrible. There's a reason there's a market for recipe websites, cookbooks, etc.

  • 48terry  7 months ago

    Okay. Now: Imagine it's 2025:

    Cookbook: Open book, follow steps.

    New gadget from mult-billion dollar company: showcases on a live demonstration that it's a broken piece of crap that doesn't work.

    Like, are we forgetting that it didn't work? It sucked at the job! Let's not what-if or have some imaginary "okay, but pretend it's actually good," deal here. It was bad!

  • 0x457  7 months ago

    No? Because traditional cookbook (paper or digital) is deterministic and LLMs are not.

  • endymion-light  7 months ago

    honestly cookbooks genuinely are better

    i got the art of italian cooking recently and it's genuinely far easier to get a recipe than trying to scroll through a 50 page monologue about the intracicies of someones childhood before even listing the ingredients

    • rhetocj23  7 months ago

      Indeed. There is an element of trust with an actual cookbook - it signals quality.

      The internet over time has been riddled with junk, especially since the cost of production of information is just your opportunity cost of time. Even that is going away with the use of LLMs....

      2 replies →

    • makeitdouble  7 months ago

      To note, you can buy the recipes and skip the dumpster internet or register to a site like cookpad. At this point even YouTube is a decent place for that.

      I agree random recipes are hell on the internet, but it's also not something we're forced into if we care any bit about recipes in the first replace.

twalichiewicz  7 months ago

Watching the announcement, every feature felt like something my phone already does—better.

With glasses, you have to aim your head at whatever you want the AI to see. With a phone, you just point the camera while your hands stay free. Even in Meta’s demo, the presenter had to look back down at the counter because the AI couldn’t see the ingredients.

It feels like the same dead end we saw with Rabbit and the Humane pin—clever hardware that solves nothing the phone doesn’t already do. Maybe there’s a niche if you already wear glasses every day, but beyond that it’s hard to see the case.

  • Gareth321  7 months ago

    If executed well I think this could reduce a lot of friction in the process. I can definitely unlock my phone and hold it with one hand while I prepare and cook, but that's annoying. If my glasses could monitor progress and tell me what to do with what while I'm doing it, that's far more convenient. It's clearly not there yet, but in a few years I have no doubt it will be. And this is just the start. With the screens they'll be able to offer AR. Imagine working on electronics or a car and the instructions are overlaid on the screen while the AI is providing verbal instructions.

  • 01100011  7 months ago

    I'm oldish, so maybe I'm biased, but this sort of product seems like something no one will want, outside a few technophiles, but that industry desperately needs you to want. It's like 3d TV, a solution in search of a problem because the mfgs need to make the next big thing with the associated high margins.

    To me the phone is a pretty good form factor. Convenient enough(especially with voice control), unobtrusive, socially acceptable, and I need to own one anyway because it's a phone. I'm a geek so I think this tech is cool, but I see zero chance I would use one, even if it were a few steps better than it is.

hombre_fatal  7 months ago

On the other hand, having to constantly consult a recipe on my phone while I cook is the main quality of life aspect of home cooking that could be improved.

You're missing the part where I'm reminded that my phone autolocks so I have to go into the settings in the middle of cooking to make it never autolock (or be lazy and unlock it every time I need it). And then I have to find a clean knuckle to scroll the ingredient list and the recipe steps every time I'm trying to remember what step I'm at.

You could do some killer recipe UX with a HUD on some glasses.

SchemaLoad  7 months ago

These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying to push AI slop cooking help.

  • bayarearefugee  7 months ago

    As a gamer, in my experience people don't want to play VR games either.

    Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero.

    If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.

  • thepryz  7 months ago

    In my experience, the biggest obstacle to broader AR and VR adoption beyond reducing the price, size, and weigh of the hardware will always be the lack of good content creation tools.

    I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.

  • bee_rider  7 months ago

    VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals.

    I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.

    • ubb_server  7 months ago

      I agree that VR gaming is a niche, but I think it could be explosively improved if we had the kind of all-in idealism that the previous commenter referred to. I think because VR gaming IS niche, we haven't yet delved into what VR/AR could do in non-gaming.

      An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.

      10 replies →

  • jayd16  7 months ago

    Well it's clearly a first gen product. They could ship Snake and Tetris on it, probably, but I'm certain they're thinking about how to get apps and games on it.

  • numpad0  7 months ago

    No offense, but there it this chart, and what this tells me, maybe just me, is that gaming is a niche within VR, not even majority use case. Zuck is probably right about VR/AR being the next big social media, only he's wrong that it'll be like Facebook/Instagram type of social media; it's old Twitter type of social media.

    [1]:

    Most played VR games

      Rank Name          Curr   24h pk All-time
  1.   VRChat        33,032 46,652  66,824
  2.   War Thunder   26,388 65,589 121,318
  3.   PAYDAY 2      23,513 31,619 247,709
  4.   No Man's Sky  22,509 46,010 212,613
  5.   OBS Studio    11,434 22,388  27,334
  6.   Phasmophobia   7,716 22,789 112,717
  7.   Forza Hz 5     4,940 13,617  81,096
  8.   Assetto Corsa  3,885 13,598  19,796
  9.   OVR Adv. Sett. 3,030  4,299   6,418
  10.  Tabletop Sim.  2,902  7,755  37,198

    1: https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=21978

    • croes  7 months ago

      To me the chart shows that VR is mainly used for games. And the steam chart don't include the games played directly on the Quest headsets.

      1 reply →

  • tempodox  7 months ago

    Games are not a prolific spy tentacle for hoovering up all kinds of data. They may have changed their name, but this is still the facebook company.

jayd16  7 months ago

Voice input is just too annoying but with the display and wristband I think the dream is there. Your hands are deep in messy food prep, you have a recipe up, you can still pause your music or take a call with the wristband and without stopping to wash up or getting oil or batter on everything.

dyauspitr  7 months ago

I wear my glasses all the time. If I could just talk to the void and get help with things I’m directly seeing reliably that would be a game changer. I’ve used Gemini’s video mode and we’re not all that far away.

rhetocj23  7 months ago

People dont realise how amazingly efficient touch interfaces already are.

THere is no need for these stupid glasses. Some refuse to accept it - especially Zuckerberg who relies on folks like Apple to make his money. Thats really whats driving this project if you tear away all the BS.