I used Meta Ray-Ban and Apple Vision Pro glasses to cover the added world exposure

The Augmented World Expo in Long Beach is the first conference I’ve attended fully equipped with Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Apple Vision Pro as part of my reporting toolkit.

I made plans to attend the Augmented World Expo this year in Long Beach without a schedule in mind. Here, there are people I wanted to see and talk to in the physical world. I have taken many of those meetings off the record or in the background with discussions that inform my long-term reporting. However, some of what is on record was streamed directly from Meta Glasses to an iPhone and then back to Apple Vision Pro for compositing in the Safari web browser. I’m typing these words on the iClever pocket keyboard on a giant screen that seems to extend to the ceiling of my hotel room.

I’ve attended various tech conferences as a reporter for over 15 years and, now with Meta glasses and an Apple headset, this is exactly how I’d like to cover the future. When I started this career path, I was writing by hand in a paper notebook that could only be deciphered by me, and this capture process meant going back to a desktop to turn those notes into a coherent article in a Management System of Content (CMS) where, usually, a photographer takes separately a group of photos on the same subject.

Here in 2024, I’m recording a face-to-face conversation in my sunglasses and then taking it back to the media room where I’m turning a dial on my VR headset for complete solitude, completely blocking out the noise with AirPods, putting the keyboard on the table and focusing everything on composing words, images and videos in a Safari window until the task is done. You can see my first attempts at this workflow in action in my articles on Sony, Ultraleap and Doublepoint headphones.

Conferences like these are opportunities for mixing ideas and creating partnerships. I went head-to-head with Palmer Luckey, Amanda Watson, Darshan Shankar, Nima Zeighami, Blair Renaud, Ashley Huffman, Bernie Yee, Tipatat Chennavasin, Aidan Wolf, Sonya Haskins and many others.

As I type this, T-Mobile texted me to say I’ve used 48 of my 50GB of data for the month. I’m trying to put about 30 minutes of space video into iCloud showing the entire keynote discussion between Shankar and Luckey from my seat as I watched from the second row in my Vision Pro. I Air dropped the videos on my iPhone because T-Mobile already shut down my data connection earlier in the day.

And as I write this, the water covering the beach in Bora Bora, I’ve been warned that I’ve reached 20% battery on my Apple Vision Pro. I went as light as I could on this trip, with three high-powered Anker batteries and a couple of MagSafes to plug into my iPhone.

There’s a lot more to explore in the glasses-to-headset workflow. Right now, I’m using the last few percentage points of battery on the Vision Pro here tonight to note that photos and videos will be added to this article illustrating my text as all my hardware and my head will have a chance to rest and reload.

I went back on Thursday to AWE one more time and called Don Hopper on WhatsApp from my iPhone. I switched to my look for the Meta Glasses with a double tap of the capture button and gave it a tour of the scene on whatever T-Mobile would let through. I walked down to the show floor with the Apple Vision Pro in one hand and my suitcase trailing behind me in the other.

The glasses got disconnected from my phone in the middle of it all, I assume from Bluetooth interference, and anyway it was time to try phase two of this little experiment. On the show floor, I put on the Vision Pro and continued the same WhatsApp call via iPhone Mirroring, watching Don on his computer in Missouri from a VR headset in the middle of Long Beach, though even that experience seemed strained. of overwhelming wireless interference.

I’m writing this on a laptop connected to hotel Wi-Fi in another area of ​​Los Angeles that does me no more favors in uploading videos and photos from this event than T-Mobile in Long Beach.