When we first started demoing, orion Earlier this year, I was reminded of a line I often hear in Meta. In fact, it was even in our first letter to prospective shareholders in 2012. code win argument. We’ve probably learned as much about this product area from months of live demos as we have from years of work. There’s no substitute for actually building something, getting it into people’s hands, and learning from how people react to it.
Orion wasn’t the only example of that this year. our mixed reality hardware and AI glasses Both quality and accessibility have reached new levels. The stability of these platforms allows software developers to work faster on everything from operating systems to new AI features. This is how I see the Metaverse starting to gain more traction, and why I believe next year will be the most important year in Reality Labs’ history.
2024 was the year when AI glasses became fully popular. When we first started building smart glasses in 2021, we thought this might be a great first step toward the AR glasses we eventually wanted to build. While mixed reality headsets are becoming general-purpose computing platforms similar to today’s PCs, we saw glasses as a natural evolution of today’s mobile computing platforms. So we wanted to start learning from the real world as soon as possible.
The biggest thing we learned is that glasses are by far the best form factor for a true AI-native device. In fact, these may be the first hardware categories to be completely defined by AI from the start. For many people, glasses are where an AI assistant makes the most sense. especially, multimodal system It allows you to truly understand the world around you.
We’re at the beginning of an S-curve for this entire product category. There are endless opportunities ahead. One of the things I’m most looking forward to in 2025 is the tools that AI assistants will have to actively help you in your daily life, rather than just responding to prompts when you ask for help. It is to evolve into. At Connect, we showed how Live AI on your glasses can become a real-time participant in getting things done. This function is Early access rollout begins this month Discover the first steps toward a new kind of personalized AI assistant.
It won’t be the last. We are currently in the midst of an industry-wide development of AI-native hardware. You’ve probably seen cell phone and PC manufacturers scramble to reinvent their products to put AI assistants at the core. But the bigger opportunity is to make devices that are AI-native from the beginning, and I’m confident glasses will get there first. Michael Abrash, Principal Scientist at Meta, talks about the potential of personalized, context-aware, bespectacled AI assistants. for many yearsAnd building the technology to make that possible is a big focus of our research team.
Mixed reality is another place where getting the right products into the hands of many people is a major accelerator of progress. we have seen meta quest 3 We continue to iterate on things like core system passthrough, multitasking, and spatial user interfaces to improve them every month. All these benefits are quest 3s The moment it took off. This means the $299 Quest 3S is in many ways a better headset from day one than the $499 Quest 3 when it first launched in 2023. And the entire Quest 3 family continues to get better. every update.
This will be the next iteration in 2025, as the Quest 3S brings even more people into mixed reality for the first time. While the Quest 3 was popular among people excited to own the best device on the market, the Quest 3S Our Most Giftable Headset still. Sales over the Black Friday weekend were strong, with a surge in people activating new headsets expected over the holiday break.
This will continue the trend that formed last year: the increase in new users. People who want to do a wider range of things with their headsets. We want these new users to experience the magic of MR and stick with it for the long term. That’s why we’re funding developers to build the new types of apps and games they want.
There is a particularly strong influx of young people, who are drawn to freemium content as well as social and competitive multiplayer games. and a title like skydance behemoth, Batman: Arkham Shadow (Just won Best AR/VR Game at The Game Awards!), and Awakening of Metro It shows once again that some of the best new games our industry produces are only possible on today’s headsets.
As the number of MRs increases, so does the quality of the social experiences they can provide. This is at the heart of what Meta is trying to accomplish with Reality Labs, and where the Metaverse’s greatest potential will be unleashed. “An opportunity to create the most social platform ever” is how we describe it. I first started working on. We have taken two steps on this front in 2024. The first is extensive improvements to Horizon Worlds, including expansion to mobile, and the second is a next-generation meta avatar system that lets people express themselves across apps and headsets. is. And as the visual quality and overall experience of these systems improves, more people are getting their first glimpse of the social metaverse. We’re seeing similar trends, with new Quest 3S users spending more time in Horizon Worlds, ranking it in the top three immersive apps for Quest 3S, and people using new meta avatars across mobile and MR. continues to create.
Bringing mixed reality into the mainstream has helped reveal what’s next. One of the first trends we noticed after the release of Quest 3 last year was people using mixed reality to watch videos while multitasking at home, doing the dishes or vacuuming the living room. I was told that it was. This was an early sign that people liked big virtual screens that they could carry anywhere in the physical world around them. We’ve seen a rapid growth and acceleration of entertainment experiences of all kinds across the Quest 3 family. New features like YouTube Co-Watch It shows the potential for a whole new kind of social entertainment experience in the Metaverse.
That’s why James Cameron, one of the most technically innovative storytellers of our lifetime, is now working to help more filmmakers and creators. Create great 3D content for Meta Quest. 3D movies have been made for decades, but there’s never been a better way to watch them than with an MR headset. Next year more people will own headsets than ever before. “We are truly at a historic turning point.” Jim said we are We have started a new partnership this month.
This is happening in parallel with larger changes Mark Rabkin Shared on this year’s Connect: Our vision for Horizon OS is to build a new kind of general-purpose computing platform that runs all kinds of software, supports all kinds of users, and is open to all kinds of creators and developers. That’s it. Recent releases such as 2D/3D multitasking, panel positioning, hand tracking improvements, Windows remote desktop integration, and open store are starting to gain momentum along this new path. Horizon OS is set to be the first platform to support everything from immersive VR to 2D screens, mobile apps, and virtual desktops, and its developer community is central to its success.
The next big step towards the Metaverse is combining AI glasses with true augmented reality experiences like the one we announced this year at Orion. It’s not often that we get a glimpse into the future and see brand new technology that shows us where things are headed. Those who saw Orion immediately understood what it meant for the future, just as those who saw the first personal computers take shape at Xerox PARC in the 1970s (“10 (Within minutes, it was clear that someday all computers would work this way.”) Steve Jobs later said of the 1979 Xerox Alto demo:
Being able to put people in a time machine and show them what the next computing platform will look like was the highlight of 2024, and the highlight of my career thus far. But Orion’s real impact will be on the products we ship next and how it helps us better understand what people like about AR glasses and what needs to be improved. there is. We spent years conducting user research, product planning practices, and experimental research to understand how AR glasses should work. That effort allowed us to build Orion. But now that we have a real product for building intuition, the pace of progress will be even faster.
I have learned this lesson many times. Our work at Reality Labs over the past 10 years. The most important thing you can do when trying to invent the future is ship things and learn from how real people use them. They may not always be instant hits, but they always teach us something. And when you hit something that really hits the mark, like the mixed reality in the Quest 3 or the AI in the glasses, it’s time to step on the gas. This is what makes 2025 a special year. It’s time for the right device to hit the market, for people to experience it for the first time, and for developers to discover and accelerate all the opportunities ahead.
