Acelerar o futuro

When we first began giving demos of Orion early this year I was reminded of a line that you hear a lot at Meta—in fact it was even in our first letter to prospective shareholders back in 2012: Code wins arguments. We probably learned as much about this product space from a few months of real-life demos than we did from the years of work it took to make them. There is just no substitute for actually building something, putting it in people’s hands, and learning from how they react to it.

Orion wasn’t our only example of that this year. Our mixed reality hardware and AI glasses have both reached a new level of quality and accessibility. The stability of those platforms allows our software developers to move much faster on everything from operating systems to new AI features. This is how I see the metaverse starting to come into greater focus and why I’m so confident that the coming year will be the most important one in the history of Reality Labs.

2024 foi o ano em que os óculos de IA atingiram o seu auge. Quando começámos a fabricar óculos inteligentes em 2021, pensámos que poderiam ser um bom primeiro passo em direção aos óculos de realidade aumentada que eventualmente queríamos construir. Embora os auscultadores de realidade mista estejam a caminho de se tornarem uma plataforma de computação de uso geral muito semelhante aos PCs actuais, vimos os óculos como a evolução natural das actuais plataformas de computação móvel. Por isso, queríamos começar a aprender com o mundo real o mais rapidamente possível.

The biggest thing we’ve learned is that glasses are by far the best form factor for a truly AI-native device. In fact they might be the first hardware category to be completely defined by AI from the beginning. For many people, glasses are the place where an AI assistant makes the most sense, especially when it’s a multimodal system that can truly understand the world around you.

We’re right at the beginning of the S-curve for this entire product category, and there are endless opportunities ahead. One of the things I’m most excited about for 2025 is the evolution of AI assistants into tools that don’t just respond to a prompt when you ask for help but can become a proactive helper as you go about your day. At Connect we showed how Live AI on glasses can become more of a real-time participant when you’re getting things done. As this feature begins rolling out in early access this month we’ll see the first step toward a new kind of personalized AI assistant.

It won’t be the last. We’re currently in the middle of an industry-wide push to make AI-native hardware. You’re seeing phone and PC makers scramble to rebuild their products to put AI assistants at their core. But I think a much bigger opportunity is to make devices that are AI-native from the start, and I’m confident that glasses are going to be the first to get there. Meta’s Chief Research Scientist Michael Abrash has been talking about the potential of a personalized, context-aware AI assistant on glasses for many years, and building the technologies that make it possible has been a huge focus of our research teams.

Realidade mista has been another place where having the right product in the hands of a lot of people has been a major accelerant for progress. We’ve seen Meta Quest 3 get better month after month as we continue to iterate on the core system passthrough, multitasking, spatial user interfaces, and more. All these gains extended to Quest 3S the moment it launched. This meant the $299 Quest 3S was in many respects a better headset on day 1 than the $499 Quest 3 was when it first launched in 2023. And the entire Quest 3 family keeps getting better with every update.

In 2025 we’ll see the next iteration of this as Quest 3S brings a lot more people into mixed reality for the first time. While Quest 3 has been a hit among people excited to own the very best device on the market, Quest 3S is expected to be heavily gifted in 2024. Sales were strong over the Black Friday weekend, and we’re expecting a surge of people activating their new headsets over the holiday break.

Isto dará continuidade a uma tendência que tomou forma no último ano: o crescimento de novos utilizadores que procuram uma maior variedade de coisas para fazer com os seus auscultadores. Queremos que estes novos utilizadores vejam a magia do MR e se mantenham por muito tempo, e é por isso que estamos a financiar os programadores para criarem os novos tipos de aplicações e jogos que procuram.

Tem havido um afluxo significativo de pessoas mais jovens, em particular, e estas têm vindo a gravitar em torno de jogos multijogador sociais e competitivos, bem como de conteúdos freemium. E títulos como BEHEMOTH da Skydance, Batman: Sombra de Arkham (que acaba de ganhar o prémio de melhor jogo de AR/VR nos The Game Awards!), e Metro Awakening mostrou mais uma vez que alguns dos melhores jogos novos que a nossa indústria produz só são possíveis nos auscultadores actuais.

As the number of people in MR grows, the quality of the social experience it can deliver is growing in tandem. This is at the heart of what Meta is trying to achieve with Reality Labs and where the greatest potential of the metaverse will be unlocked: “the chance to create the most social platform ever” is how we described it when we first began working on it. We took two steps forward on this front in 2024: first with a broad set of improvements to Horizon Worlds including its expansion to mobile, and second with the next-generation Meta Avatars system that lets people represent themselves across our apps and headsets. And as the visual quality and overall experience with these systems improve, more people are getting their first glimpse of a social metaverse. We’re seeing similar trends with new Quest 3S users spending more time in Horizon Worlds, making it a Top 3 immersive app for Quest 3S, and people continue creating new Meta Avatars across mobile and MR.

O facto de a realidade mista ter entrado na moda ajudou a iluminar o que virá a seguir. Uma das primeiras tendências que descobrimos após o lançamento do Quest 3 no ano passado foi o facto de as pessoas utilizarem a realidade mista para verem vídeos enquanto faziam várias tarefas em casa - lavar a loiça ou aspirar a sala de estar. Este foi um sinal precoce de que as pessoas adoram ter um grande ecrã virtual que podem levar para qualquer lugar e colocar no mundo físico à sua volta. Vimos esta tendência descolar com todo o tipo de experiências de entretenimento a crescer rapidamente em toda a família Quest 3. Novas funcionalidades como o YouTube Co-Watch mostram o potencial que existe para um novo tipo de experiência de entretenimento social no metaverso.

That’s why James Cameron, one of the most technologically innovative storytellers of our lifetimes, is now working to help more filmmakers and creators produce great 3D content for Meta Quest. While 3D films have been produced for decades, there’s never been a way to view them that’s quite as good as an MR headset, and next year more people will own a headset than ever before. “We’re at a true, historic inflection point,"Jim said when we launched our new partnership this month.

This is happening alongside a larger shift Mark Rabkin shared at Connect this year: Our vision for Horizon OS is to build a new kind of general purpose computing platform capable of running every kind of software, supporting every kind of user, and open to every kind of creator and developer. Our recent releases for 2D/3D multi-tasking, panel positioning, better hand tracking, Windows Remote Desktop integration, and Open Store have started to build momentum along this new path. Horizon OS is on track to be the first platform that supports the full spectrum of experiences from immersive VR to 2D screens, mobile apps, and virtual desktops—and the developer community is central to that success.

O próximo grande passo em direção ao metaverso vai combinar óculos de IA com o tipo de experiência de realidade aumentada que revelámos este ano com o Orion. Não é frequente termos um vislumbre do futuro e vermos uma tecnologia totalmente nova que nos mostra para onde as coisas estão a ir. As pessoas que viram o Orion compreenderam imediatamente o que significava para o futuro, tal como as pessoas que viram os primeiros computadores pessoais a ganhar forma no Xerox PARC na década de 1970 ("em dez minutos tornou-se óbvio para mim que todos os computadores iriam funcionar assim um dia", disse mais tarde Steve Jobs sobre a sua demonstração do Xerox Alto em 1979).

Poder colocar as pessoas numa máquina do tempo e mostrar-lhes como será a próxima plataforma de computação foi um dos pontos altos de 2024 - e da minha carreira até agora. Mas o verdadeiro impacto do Orion será nos produtos que lançaremos a seguir e na forma como nos ajuda a compreender melhor o que as pessoas adoram nos óculos de realidade aumentada e o que precisa de ser melhorado. Passámos anos a trabalhar em investigação de utilizadores, exercícios de planeamento de produtos e estudos experimentais para tentar perceber como os óculos de realidade aumentada devem funcionar, e foi esse trabalho que nos permitiu criar o Orion. Mas o ritmo do progresso será muito mais rápido daqui para a frente, agora que temos um produto real em torno do qual podemos construir a nossa intuição.

This has been the lesson time and again over the last decade at Reality Labs. The most important thing you can do when you’re trying to invent the future is to ship things and learn from how real people use them. They won’t always be immediate smash hits, but they’ll always teach you something. And when you land on things that really hit the mark, like mixed reality on Quest 3 or AI on glasses, that’s when you put your foot on the gas. This is what will make 2025 such a special year: With the right devices on the market, people experiencing them for the first time, and developers discovering all the opportunities ahead, it’s time to accelerate.