Meta is still spending billions of dollars a quarter on metaverse technology. One example that CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off at the Meta Connect event today was using generative AI to create a game in less than 10 minutes.
That’s part of the message to show that Meta is still hard at work advancing the state of the art in augmented and virtual reality. Where those technologies meet AI — that’s where you’ll find the metaverse, Zuckerberg said.
“We want to bring about a future where anyone can just dream up an idea and create it,” Zuckerberg said.
The Meta Horizon Engine is powering this to replace the Unity runtime, fully giving you the ability to create a game environment in a matter of minutes.
The company’s vision for the future is a world where anyone anywhere can imagine a character, a scene, or an entire world and create it from scratch. There’s still a lot of work to do, but Meta is making progress. In fact, it is not far off from being able to create compelling 3D content as easily as you can ask Meta AI a question today. And that stands to transform not just the imagery and videos we see on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but also the possibilities of VR and AR, too.
Foundational Infrastructure: Meta Horizon Engine & Meta Horizon Studio
Meta Horizon Engine has been built from scratch and optimized to help bring the
metaverse to life. It powers better graphics, faster performance, and more advanced
worlds. Developers and creators will be able to use it to easily generate nearly infinite
connected spaces with realistic physics and interactions.
Meta also introduced Meta Horizon Studio, a new editor and hub for creator capabilities. It
includes the generative AI tools we’ve added over the last year that let creators generate
mesh, textures, TypeScript, audio, skyboxes, and more with simple text prompts, so they
can make high-quality worlds in a fraction of the time.
And soon, Meta will add an agentic AI assistant to stitch together different tools and make the creation process even faster and easier. This means you’ll be able to build a world in mere minutes vs. months or days. It will dramatically lower the barrier to entry for creation without lowering the ceiling of what’s possible – meaning more engaging worlds for people to explore, and a chance for everyone to build the metaverse together.
Using Horizon Engine, we built a new Immersive Home for VR. You can customize it by
pinning apps in different spots. And you can jump straight from your home to a series of
interconnected worlds. Thanks to Horizon Engine, it’s four times faster to load and render new worlds, so it takes just a few seconds.
Horizon Engine also enables much greater concurrency, so more people can enjoy the
same world at the same time. We can now support five times more people in a single space than the previous engine could handle. Now the vibes match the experience, whether you’re catching a concert with a huge crowd in Meta’s new Arena or meeting up with friends in the new, re-designed Horizon Central to explore new worlds.
And with Horizon Engine, eventually, you’ll be able to seamlessly incorporate
photorealistic spaces in worlds, too. Last year at Connect, Meta introduced a demo of
Hyperscape, which uses Gaussian Splatting, cloud rendering, and streaming to make
these types of spaces viewable on a Meta Quest 3 headset.
And today, we’re rolling out Hyperscape Capture in Early Access, so you’ll be able to use your Quest to scan a room in just a few minutes and then turn that into an immersive, photorealistic world of your own.
Entertainment on the Horizon
Quest continues to have the best slate of VR games, and it keeps getting better. Marvel’s
Deadpool VR, ILM’s Star Wars: Beyond Victory, and Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons:
Battlemarked are all launching this fall, and Reach recently announced it’s shipping
October 16.
And entertainment all-up continues to grow in popularity. That’s why Meta is launching a new entertainment hub called Meta Horizon TV. We’re partnering with some big names to bring the best in movies, TV, live sports, music, and more direct to your headset.
Disney+ is coming to Horizon TV, along with ESPN and Hulu. And we’re partnering with
Universal Pictures and iconic horror company Blumhouse, so you can watch movies like
M3GAN and The Black Phone with immersive special effects you won’t find anywhere
else.
Horizon TV supports Dolby Atmos sound, with support for Dolby Vision coming later this
year. That means rich colors, crisp details, and spatial sound for a more immersive
experience than any traditional TV could ever deliver.
Finally, as an extension of our partnership with James Cameron’s Lightstorm Vision,
we’re thrilled to share that an exclusive 3D clip of Avatar: Fire and Ash is available now in
Horizon TV for a limited time — so go check it out now! This is just the beginning of how
fans can experience Pandora like never before in Quest, following its theatrical release
this December.
Future Focus
The next computing platform continues to come into focus. VR headsets let us immerse
ourselves in interactive worlds and experience best-in-class entertainment on a larger
than life screen. AI glasses connect us to real-world superpowers as we move throughout
the day, tapping into a wealth of information while staying present in the moment. And
AR glasses will overlay rich digital content on top of our view of the physical world,
opening up the door for new adventures we haven’t even dreamt of yet, Meta said.