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Quest 3 can be paired with Meta Ray-Ban glasses to personally download videos and photos anywhere.

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg spent $3 billion on Oculus VR and $19 billion on WhatsApp. A decade later, you can take Meta’s glasses out into the world and take photos and videos with them for up to three minutes at a time. While they’re charging in their case, you can take out your VR headset to download those videos and share whatever you want with friends on WhatsApp. I successfully tested this.

The $22 billion Zuckerberg spent acquiring these companies was just the beginning of his investment in creating that future. It then had to spend an additional $100 billion or more over the past decade to build core technologies to enable a new kind of digital nomad. Zuckerberg now faces the need to spend tens of billions of dollars more to secure that future.

Digital nomads without phones or laptops

In the long term, we should expect services such as music, calls and media streaming to flow seamlessly from a pair of comfortable glasses to powerful headphones and back again.

In this case, I successfully downloaded videos and photos from my Ray-Ban Meta glasses into the Meta View app running on the Quest 3 headset. Meta hasn’t built any file management tools yet, so it’s not very useful, but the headset offers a much larger screen to view captured media on than any phone.

Proving that this time works is starting to make Zuckerberg’s vision for the future a little clearer. Physical Android and iPhone are currently best for working with Meta View and controlling Ray-Ban glasses on Meta. Importantly, though, the phones here are technically optional hardware. Yes, it’s absurd to run an app designed for a phone on a headset to download pictures from glasses. In 2005, the idea was that you would be hopping into cars driven by strangers who had signed up for the job on their phone.

If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a particularly nomadic person, follow me in a thought experiment as we consider the idea of ​​leaving your laptop and phone at home and taking only your glasses and headphones for a long journey on foot, train or bus.

What would that look like?

Headphones for personal focus

Meta’s way of taking photos and videos from glasses to headphones is perhaps more personal than any other personal computing device ever made.

Since the Quest 3 is a VR headset, it only produces light for its user. It’s an infinite canvas on which you can display any amount of media for exactly one person. The idea that others can just look and see what you’re looking at is foreign to him. On a multi-city trip, you can enjoy any number of books, movies, videos, songs or games using panels of side-loaded apps with media folders on the Quest 3, all powered by USB-C cables and batteries . In a scenario where this is your only media device, the 512GB model offers a small but workable storage space for content, media and apps to get you through without streaming.

Glasses for public filming

For those times when you’re not wearing headphones, the glasses can record video of what you’re seeing for up to three minutes at a time. This is where real-world travel planning gets really interesting.

Mark Zuckerberg floats across the ocean in his sunglasses, and the Ray-Ban Meta account on Threads demonstrates the idea that you can switch between viewpoints at a multi-shot concert.

I filmed a cat walking its people through Central Park.

I met a dog named Henry who yelled at me as I walked away. I miss him even now but you can watch his video and we can both enjoy what a good little boy he is.

I caught a family of raccoons at dusk. There were the drummers in the subway station and the band on the train to Brooklyn. I wore the glasses to my wedding and to a concert to capture a clip of hundreds of phones turning on to capture videos from their shaky handheld perspectives in Madison Square Garden. And is that Natalie Portman in my New Year’s ice skating video?

These are very strange and interesting things I’ve seen and captured in such vivid detail since living in New York and hitting the shutter button on the glasses in public. When I was in California, I also used the glasses for work and ran into my first robot with them while doing the cart problem.

In this hypothetical cross-country trip without a phone or laptop, every bus change is an opportunity to put the headphones in a bag and explore the host city while taking in the sights and exploring the area with the Meta glasses as a notebook of sorts.

The next bus is the perfect time to download those videos and photos to your headphones. If there is Wi-Fi available in a cafe, hotel or on the bus itself, it is quite possible to send your views to friends and family on WhatsApp or Messenger directly from your Meta glasses.

Horizon, Meet View

Phones were removed from this thought experiment for several reasons.

First, there are many travelers without the budget or desire to pay for data plans in multiple countries or a cellular subscription everywhere. Second, phone vibrations and notifications are an active distraction from whatever you’re doing.

It’s almost unimaginable to imagine a nomad in 2024 without a cellular connection to keep him online all the time. It’s really quite magical to engage in a WhatsApp conversation with a phone that transmits your goggle-eyed gaze to a distant caller. While a cellular connection keeps you connected to the world around you almost all the time, being disconnected is also completely liberating in a way that some people haven’t experienced in decades. For Facebook, born into this century’s always-online era, that’s where Meta’s biggest opportunity lies.

We’ve gone more than 15 years from Apple’s visual voicemail, which made it easy to listen to your voice messages, to an era where cellular carriers must flag spam calls before you accept them to gauge the extent of abuse, which is now built into this communication system. All those notifications on your phone about ad services you don’t really want? The Meta has the ability to make all of that go away, and this trip I just described without an iPhone or Android will free you from potentially hundreds of interruptions you don’t necessarily need that would pour into your phone during this trip.

Essentially, ditching the cellular connection in your handheld glass tablet effectively unsubscribes you from the 20th century’s primary method of communication—telephones—while allowing you to start over in the new era of wearables.

The year is 2024, yes, but by the end of the decade people should be able to travel the world with a cellular-capable wristband that connects to glasses with headphones in their bag to pull out for private media viewing and online socializing everywhere and with everyone.

Zuckerberg predicts Neural Wristband will surpass keyboards by 2028

Meta recently showed the press its first in-person look at progress toward a wrist that can sense your intentions. In 2019, the company formerly known as Facebook acquired a startup called CTRL-Labs, which was working on a wrist-wearable device to read the electrical activity directed at your hand. It does this with EMG or electromyography,

Meta has been working on this for over a decade, and while the battle between the Gear VR, Oculus Go and Rift has been tough, their work has paid off in the Quest 3 and Ray-Bans. For established tech giants, they will have to rethink everything they do from the perspective of someone who is more than willing to develop a new relationship with technology.

For Meta, the glasses and headphones allow Zuckerberg to build this new connection with billions of people.