Hey, everyone, and welcome to Connect. Last year, we shared our vision for the metaverse, a future where you can be present together with the people you care about, where you can teleport into any experience from anywhere, where your devices just get out of the way, and you can focus on the people you're with and the experiences you're having. I think that this is some of the most amazing technology of our generation. It's going to open up opportunities to build incredible things. We believe in this vision so deeply that we renamed our whole company after it, and we're in a moment now when a lot of the technologies that will power the metaverse are starting to take off. There are more people in VR than ever before, more creators building worlds, more developers building apps, more brands getting into virtual goods, and more companies getting into the metaverse. This is great to see. It's a sign that the future isn't so far away. I know a lot of you are excited about this future. You're already living it, building new worlds, hanging out in VR, exploring what's possible, and we've been with you since the start. Look at what we've announced at Connect over the years. The first modern VR device. The first standalone headset, no wires, no external sensors. The first developers to make millions of dollars in revenue. The first hands in virtual reality. Today, we're gonna take another big step forward. This one is for you, the believers, the people who always thought that this was where technology should go, but who know that the future doesn't just happen. You have to build it with your bare hands. The people who'd rather be early than fashionably late. Well, we've got something to share with you today, and I think you're gonna be really excited. Before we get to that, let's take a look at the progress that we're seeing across the ecosystem. To do that, here's Boz, Meta's CTO and the head of Reality Labs. Hey, Boz. Ooh, pretend you didn't see that. Yeah. We'll get to that a little later, but first, let's talk about some of the progress that we're seeing across the ecosystem. You know, Quest 2 is the first virtual reality device to go mainstream, and it's opened up a lot of opportunities for people to build. Yeah. The ecosystem is growing nicely. About one in three apps in the Quest Store are making revenues in the millions. 33 titles have made more than $10 million in gross revenue, and that's up from 22 just this February. The number of apps making over $5 million has doubled since last year. This is what it looks like when a whole new platform takes off. Yeah, it shows that there's real demand for high-quality VR experiences. Yeah. Those experiences are gonna keep getting better with all the new things that we're announcing today. I mean, developers have been pushing the boundaries on Quest 2 using tools like hand tracking and Presence Platform. Yeah, the creativity that you're all bringing to this is pretty awesome. You know, as the platform grows, we're focused on making it even easier to develop for, and philosophically, we're focused on making the ecosystem more open. Part of this means giving developers different options for reaching their audiences beyond the Quest Store so people can stream apps over Link from PC or sideload them. Some of the best apps on Quest 2 today started in our App Lab, our open distribution channel. Great titles like Smash Drums, Ancient Dungeon, Puzzling Places, and more. Yeah, we expect that the opportunities here are just gonna keep growing as more devices come on the market and more people get into VR, and we're gonna keep pushing to make the next computing platform more open. Now, in terms of what people are actually building, beyond games, a lot of the most interesting work that we're seeing is around social experiences. This has been a big change. I mean, at first glance, many people assume that virtual reality is a fundamentally single-player experience. You know, something that you do on your own, kind of away from the rest of the world, but we've never looked at it that way. From the very beginning, a decade ago, when we first started on this journey, we believed it would be a great social platform. That's why we got into it. Yeah. I mean, back when we started working on this, we believed that over time, social experiences would become the main way that people would use VR, and that's coming true. Today, the top apps in the Quest Store are social metaverse apps, and, you know, this is pretty much the same thing that we've seen with every other computing platform. A lot of the most compelling use cases for new technology come when you build things that help people connect, and that's the whole reason why we're in this space. Yeah, this has been the story of every computing platform we've seen so far, whether that's email on desktop, instant messaging on laptops, or video calls on the phone. Every technology platform has brought great value to my life, but what I value most is the ways they keep me more connected with the people I care the most about. I think this will be especially true for VR and eventually AR because they deliver a deep feeling of presence, right? It's that sensation that you're actually with another person or in another place, and that's what's so powerful about this platform compared to everything else that's come before. Every other computing platform is built around apps, and now we have the chance to change that. For the first time, we can build technology centered around people and how we actually experience the world. That's because the metaverse is first person, right? You feel like you're in it, right? You should be able to teleport anywhere with the people you want to engage with and bring all your stuff with you. It should be less siloed than a traditional app model and fundamentally more about feeling present with other people. We're gonna have Vishal here to talk more about that. All right. Hey, Vishal. Hi. Why don't you guys take it from here? All right, sounds good. Thanks. See you, Mark. See you. Hey, Vishal. Hey, Boz. Yeah, this social shift has been one of the biggest changes we've seen over the last couple of years. When Quest 2 first launched, the vast majority of time spent in VR was spent alone. Today, the majority of time spent is in multiplayer apps. The most popular apps on Quest are social. I mean, that's a huge deal. Apps like VRChat have established these new places for people to spend time together in virtual reality, and they're thriving. That's right, people are doing all sorts of things together. They're playing games, they're hanging out, they're learning new hobbies, they're showing up as avatars who represent who they are and maybe who they wanna be. There are so many new things you can do once you get beyond the limitations of the physical space that we live in. This social shift is happening everywhere. YouTube VR is a great example. It's one of the most popular apps on the Meta Quest 2, and the YouTube team's working to make the experience even more social. In the future, when you're together with friends in Horizon Home, you'll be able to watch and share YouTube videos just like you might do together in the physical world. Watch videos together, share content from your favorite creators, or experience something completely new, like a underwater manta ray adventure off a private island in Southeast Asia. When you look at where the internet is going, there's this big move towards creation and shared experiences, and we're seeing the same impulse to build and explore together in VR. Absolutely. Some of the best experiences in Horizon Worlds right now are hanging out with your friends in Nope's Haywood Ranch or recording a podcast on Rooftop 42. There are worlds to celebrate the Lunar New Year, to make music together, worlds to roast marshmallows in or just to get a party started. We're seeing all sorts of people build worlds like these, from first-time creators to world-class entertainers. Today, we're announcing a multi-year collaboration to bring NBCUniversal's iconic content to life through experiences in the metaverse. Starting next year, Meta and NBCU will co-create experiences around The Office, Universal Monsters, DreamWorks, Blumhouse, Halloween Horror Nights, and so much more. Fans will be able to engage in these experiences in Horizon Worlds at Universal Studios theme parks and customize their avatars. Last but not least, the Peacock app is coming to Quest. There are so many worlds out there to see, more than we could ever show at an event like this. What's more important is what's in those worlds, and the feeling you get when you're with other people. That's why we're so excited about building out Horizon Worlds as a next-generation social platform where the connection happens in real time. It always comes back to wanting to feel connected. If we really want the metaverse to feel social, we need to open these worlds and experiences to everyone. They can't be limited to VR. Yeah. The metaverse should be accessible across all kinds of screens and devices, and you should be able to jump in and join your friends from anywhere. That's why we're developing Horizon Worlds on the web, so that you can access it from a computer or any mobile device. If you're watching a comedy show, for example, you can send the link to your friends, and they can join without a headset, no matter where they are. It's just more fun when the gang's all together. Making these virtual worlds accessible through any device takes their ability to connect people to another level. This is gonna be the first way a lot of people around the world experience a virtual world. For sure. While the web doesn't give the full VR experience, it opens it to an entirely new population of developers, creators, and people. Absolutely. We want everyone to be able to have the most immersive experience, but it's gonna be a while before there are enough headsets out there, so this'll be a huge step for helping people experience it for themselves. Especially when we think about creators. For people and businesses building virtual worlds, this means your potential audience will become so much bigger. Right now, there's a growing metaverse economy that only VR users can access. That's about to change. When you see something amazing in a virtual world, you'll also be able to capture and share it, just like you would if you were in the physical world. Yeah. This is actually a place where Meta's apps are going to play a huge role. We have these deep ecosystems for creators to connect with audiences and share their work, and virtual worlds will become just another place where great content can be made. We're now testing a way for you to take a video in Horizon Worlds and easily share it straight to Instagram as a Reel. This will be one of the very early connections between Meta's apps and Horizon Worlds, and there'll be a lot more to come. We're also connecting some of the best creators on Instagram with some great builders in Horizon Worlds to see what kinds of things they can make together. Keep your eyes on the feed for that. The ways people can experience these virtual spaces are evolving fast, but the tools you need to actually build them also matter. We've got some great news for creators here, too. This is another big expansion in what's possible. It used to be that you had to build everything in headset, and now we're seeing some incredible worlds being built by everyday users outside of VR in Crayta, a game and world-building platform available on Facebook. We're expanding the creative toolkit beyond VR, too. You'll be able to use TypeScript, a powerful scripting language, to make more dynamic and interactive worlds. We're making it so you'll be able to import tri-mesh items into Horizon Worlds and build parts of your world using 3D content creation tools like Maya, Blender, and Adobe Substance 3D. These are high-quality tools that professionals use to build in 3D. One of the main benefits of supporting them is the graphics quality they produce. Now, it will take a while to integrate all of these tools, but the result will be things looking a whole lot better. This is one of the most important pieces. We started with simple graphics, and we're doing a ton of work to meaningfully improve how Horizon will look and feel over the next year. The metaverse needs to feel inspiring. There's some really awesome stuff coming here. We're working with Epic Games to bring Creative Commons-licensed content from the Sketchfab library to Horizon Worlds. Our ultimate goal is for the metaverse to feel just like any other social experience, big or small. The virtual spaces you build and share don't always need to be huge worlds that are open to everyone. One thing we're thinking about a lot is your home in the metaverse. Right. There are public spaces for everyone, but it's just as important to think about the personal spaces that are yours. Your home in the metaverse should be accessible no matter what device you're using, and it should be a social space where you can invite your friends no matter what devices they're using. You should feel the same level of comfort and ownership as you do in your home in the physical world. That's right, and this means that nobody should enter without your permission. You're in control of who stays and leaves, and what's said in these spaces is personal. You can also share them if you want. Here's what this personal space looks like right now. Ideally, it's like the physical world. Your personal space is where you should feel most like you. This is all great stuff. Thanks, Vishal. I can't wait to see what's next. The social platform of VR is still taking shape. At the other end of the spectrum, you have probably the most established part of the ecosystem, gaming. Let's talk more about all the incredible things happening in that space. Here's Melissa Brown, our Head of Developer Relations. Hi, Melissa. Hi, Boz. Hi to everyone joining us for Connect. This part of the VR ecosystem is truly thriving. It feels like every week developers ship another amazing game for Quest 2. Titles like Little Cities, GOLF+, or Red Matter 2, which look beautiful and are so much fun to play. If you want an example of just how fast this platform is growing, take a look at The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners from Skydance Interactive. It's now surpassed $50 million in revenue on Quest alone, nearly double its revenue from all other platforms. Look at Zenith: The Last City from Ramen VR. It took only 24 hours for it to make its first $1 million in revenue on the Quest Store. Resident Evil 4 from Capcom and Armature Studio made $2 million its first day. Blade & Sorcery: Nomad from WarpFrog made its first $1 million in just two days. A number of other devs have also done so in as little as three days. This kind of velocity is why I'm so optimistic about the future for VR developers. To date, $1.5 billion has been spent on games and apps in the Quest store. It's hard to believe when you see what's already dropped this year, but there's so many more still to come, and today we're gonna share a few of them with you. What are you most excited about, Melissa? How about we start with a trailer from the latest team to join Oculus Studios. Your past has caught up with you. Why'd you stop selling weapons, Tony? You can't change the past. I wanna change the world. All systems back online. Look alive out there, Stark. The world needs you, Tony. The world needs Iron Man. Marvel's Iron Man VR has been one of those dream projects for us. We've been fans since it launched, and we could not be more excited for the talented teams at Camouflaj and Endeavor One to bring the game to Meta Quest 2 this November, along with our partners at Sony Interactive Entertainment and Marvel Entertainment. Next is the multiplayer phenomenon, POPULATION: ONE, which is evolving in a big way this December. With the debut of POPULATION: ONE Sandbox, a robust user-generated map creator, you can take the action anywhere, limited only by your imagination. A moon base, a Viking village, or a fight with swords in zero G. If you're not a creator, no worries. You can discover and play through new or featured community maps with your friends. The team at BigBox VR is excited to bring endless replayability to POPULATION: ONE. That looks awesome. I'm pumped for the next title, though. Yes. Calling all crew mates. You know you've been waiting for an Among Us VR release date ever since it was announced at The Game Awards. Well, wait no longer. Innersloth, Robot Teddy, and Schell Games will release Among Us VR for ages 13 plus on Meta Quest 2 on November 10th, and pre-orders open today. Soon you'll be betraying friends from a first-person perspective. This next title is also fun, but in a more terrifying way. It's time to check the itinerary for our upcoming trip to New Orleans. Now, we promised folks the next installment in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners series would be out later this year. Let's take a look at Skydance Interactive's Chapter 2: Retribution. Well, look at you, tourist. The living getting more desperate. Guess you ain't the only one who thrives on creating havoc. Gonna take nothing short of a miracle to survive what's coming. Wherever the tourist goes, death ain't far behind. It's two years in the making, and new faces, places, weapons, gear, and loot await you as you head towards a final showdown that will decide the fate of New Orleans. All right, we have one more to show, right? Right. Our friends at Skydance have also been working on something new. Here is your first sneak peek. This is only possible because of the developers on this journey with us. It's a testament to the things that you've built and the people you've delighted and inspired with your work. You continue to push the boundaries of what's possible time and again, and you show us that there's a lot more ground to break. When we launched the original Quest in 2019, we could not have imagined that just a few years later we'd have games like Red Matter 2 and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond running on a mobile chipset, but you've made it happen. The pass-through modes and apps showed us the early promise of mixed reality, and we're so excited to see how you will revolutionize this space the way that you did with VR. Totally. The best experiences also incorporate some kind of unique movement, which brings a really different dimension compared to our other gaming platforms. That's been the key to fitness apps, which have turned out to be some of the best experiences you can have in virtual reality. Developers have hit on the winning combination of a physical workout and the virtual immersion of a headset to make something completely new, and people love it. Come on, lift that leg. Users globally return to Quest 2 for fitness every month, and VR fitness apps can be just as intense as a regular workout. They're great for when you can't get outside or want to get in a quick session in between activities. Some of the stories coming out of the fitness community are just awesome. One of my favorites is Linda, a grandmother of seven. When my son came home with a Quest, I fell in love with it the moment I put the headset on. When I first opened the app for Supernatural, the scenery is just so beautiful. You're just moving to the music. I was having fun. I was hooked. Whoo. Dodging those lasers and feeling good. Moving with a purpose gave me purpose to move. Deliberate fitness apps enjoy remarkable retention. I think it's because they're fun, and you have the support of real communities out there cheering each other on. There are a lot of VR titles that bring the burn, such as Les Mills BodyCombat, FitXR, and Supernatural. They're always getting better, bringing on new instructors, classes, and moves. Speaking of which, at the end of this month, Supernatural is launching knee strikes to better activate your core and work your lower body. That's right. People are going to be pumped for that one. Now, we've got one more fitness experience that's making the move from App Lab. Get your jump shot ready because Gym Class is coming to the Quest Store later this fall. Let's do this. Shoot. Jimmy let's go. Let's go. Let's run it back. My jump shot is most definitely not ready, but I can't wait to try. In fact, I think I've tried pretty much every fitness app out there, and one thing you learn is that when you work out in VR, you're gonna work up a sweat. To help people stay active with confidence while keeping their headsets clean, later this month, we're releasing the Meta Quest 2 Active Pack, available online in the Meta store on October 25th. This is our fitness accessory bundle with a wipeable facial interface, wrist straps, and adjustable knuckle straps to provide the perfect combination of comfort and control. People have also been building some really neat fitness accessories for Quest, like extension grips and custom handles. It's great to see this secondary market emerging, and this is just the beginning. As part of the Made for Meta program, formerly Oculus Ready, we're working with leading hardware makers to bring more accessories to Quest starting next year. Yes, there's more we can do to unlock the power of the platform for fitness overall. This year, we shipped one of the features a lot of you were asking for, fitness tracking on the Meta Quest companion app and the health app on iOS. We've seen how important these kinds of foundations are for developers, and we know fitness is a space with a ton of opportunity right now. This fall, we're releasing the Fitness API beta for select developers. It lets people share real-time fitness data and unlock things like custom stats or new levels based on the progress that they're making. In case you're the kind of person who needs some external motivation, next year, we're also releasing a new way to share your fitness progress with selected friends so they can support you along the way. That's sweet. Do you think real VR Fishing counts as an upper body workout? Yeah, good luck with that. It's so exciting to watch fitness find its footing on Quest. When you can tie physical interaction and digital objects together, the possibilities are really endless. They extend way beyond fitness. This is only the first step. It sure is. Thanks, Melissa. Thanks, Boz. As you've seen so far, you can have a lot of fun in VR. You can hang out with friends, do a workout, play a game. Sometimes you can do all three at once, but you can also get work done. While games, social, and fitness are already here, work is really the next major category of experiences that we wanna unlock to bring VR to the next level. If we're talking about work, let's get my boss back in the picture. Hey, Mark. Hey. You know, the potential here is pretty huge. You know, like a lot of companies, we're planning for a future where work is more distributed, but as in-person work ramps up, we want everyone to have the ability to feel like they're present even if they're not physically there, and there are definitely things that could improve the way that distributed teams actually work together. I mean, no doubt. There are parts of being around other people that you just can't replace with video calls. It's true for hanging out with friends too, and it's true for work. Yeah. I mean, the feeling of presence that you get from VR, even today, can already be better than video chat. The clearest benefit is for communication itself, but it's also great for creative work that's best done in a shared space. Companies are already discovering that VR is uniquely good for this type of stuff. I mean, it's amazing what's already being done. For example, companies are using VR to plan large-scale in-person events. At Logitech, they used ShapesXR, a collaborative creation app on Quest to quickly explore different kinds of layouts and different designs together in real time. Yeah, I mean, this is where VR just lets you do things that aren't even possible on a 2D screen. It's a whole new kind of creative tool. Puma and New Balance have been designing shoes in VR using Gravity Sketch, one of my favorite 3D design apps on Quest 2. Novartis uses Nanome, a VR molecular design and collaboration app in their drug discovery workflow. ITC, a part of the United Nations, are running trainings and workshops in Arthur, a virtual office space on Quest 2. Yeah, you can really collaborate at a distance in a completely new way here, and there's a lot more that we can do to unlock this for teams across all kinds of industries. We build Horizon Workrooms as a first step towards a virtual office in the metaverse, and it feels more like being there than any video call. You see more of people's body language, and the spatial audio gives you a sense of each person's place in the room, and you can have side conversations with the people sitting next to you or gesture without physically being there together. It's hard to fully wrap your head around this until you get to experience it. We've been holding a bunch of our team meetings in Workrooms over the last year, and it's amazing how much better it can be. There's just something magical about creating that feeling of being around people. Once you've experienced it, you know it's the future. We're continuing to improve the Workrooms experience, and starting early next year, you're gonna be able to join Workrooms through Zoom too. We're also introducing breakout groups so your team can shift from a big group presentation into smaller discussions in the same room, and with sticky notes for whiteboarding, you're gonna be able to have group discussions and brainstorm in ways that you just can't do on video alone. We're also working on a new feature to import and review 3D models in a Workroom, which is gonna be really helpful for design and architecture and all kinds of other creative work. We want this to be more than virtual meeting rooms. It's about the beginning of a virtual office in the metaverse, and that's why we're launching your personal office in Workrooms today. This is where you can focus and get things done. One of the best things about VR is that you can create environments that go beyond what's possible in the physical world, and of course, that goes for productivity setups too. You have instant access to your perfect workspace that's set up just how you want, no matter where you are. You might only have a 13-inch laptop in your physical space, but in your virtual office you can line up three huge monitors. This is great at home or at work, and even better when you're traveling. Eventually, we think your Quest could be the only monitor that you'll actually need. That'll be awesome. You know, we're still early in the shift to working in the metaverse, but the way people can collaborate in Workrooms shows that there's an opportunity for a VR headset designed from the ground up to be great for work, as well as playing games and hanging out. All right, Boz. I think it's time. What do you think? Oh, it's definitely time. Take it from here, Mark. All right. This is an important moment. Virtual reality isn't some obscure hobby anymore. Millions of people use it to play games, work out, collaborate, or just to have fun. Everyone from the newest indie developers to the most established tech companies are getting into this space. For virtual reality to really reach its full potential, we need to get to the point where the 200 million people who buy new PCs each year for work can do some or all of their work even better in the metaverse. At Meta, we're focused on building the fundamental technology that will help bring the metaverse to life, whether that's in virtual reality, augmented reality, or the social presence layer across both. What if you could collaborate with colleagues as if you were right there together, even if you were far apart? What if you had that perfect work set up and tools to design new things integrated right into the world around you? What if you could overlay your work and the people you're interacting with right on top of the physical world? This device would help you be more present, more productive, more you. To deliver this, you'd need better quality graphics and tech that seamlessly works in both virtual and physical worlds. You can interact with people around you, be fully immersed when you want, and flow between states effortlessly. You need something comfortable with much richer ways to communicate, technology that lets you do things that aren't possible with a laptop and go far beyond what you can do on a phone, and you'd need to be able to really express yourself, react to things naturally, show up in a way that feels authentic to you. I think that this is one of the most exciting technical challenges of our generation, building technology to deliver that feeling of really being present with people, really being in another place. We've taken everything we've learned from Quest 2 and designed an all-new headset to do just that. This is Meta Quest Pro. Quest Pro is the first in our new line of advanced headsets, built to expand what's possible in VR. It takes what people love about Quest 2 and adds a bunch of new technologies to help you do more in the metaverse. It's made for collaboration and creativity. It delivers more expression and a deeper feeling of connection than any other technology. With mixed reality built in, it lets you do things that just haven't even been possible before. It's all in a beautiful design that's comfortable to wear. Whether you're looking to work in a new way or if you just want the very best experience that's available today, Quest Pro sets the standard. To get into the details, let's check in with Angela Chang, who leads our Quest product team. Since this is a big day, let's go somewhere a bit special. This is the new Quest Pro home environment. When you put on your headset for the first time, this is where you'll be. Hey, Angela. Hey, Mark. All right, you finally get to show everyone what was in that briefcase at last year's Connect. Finally. I'm so thrilled we get to bring Quest Pro to everyone. We have completely reimagined the VR headset as a powerful device for productivity, creative work, and multitasking. Quest Pro is our sleekest form factor yet, with a super thin set of lenses at the front and our first ever curved cell battery at the back to give it a perfect balance. Yeah, it feels great from the moment that you put it on. Right. We wanted to ensure a seamless transition from the physical world to the virtual, so our new headset design with its open periphery lets you see the physical room you're in. You can quickly jot down a note, grab something on your desk, or just be aware of what's happening around you. You can also use Quest Pro's magnetic light blockers for a more immersive experience whenever you like. We've also redesigned the whole optical stack to make it better than anything we've shipped before. The new pancake lenses work by folding light over several times and let us make the display 40% thinner compared to Quest 2. The new lenses aren't just thinner. They also put more pixels in the center, giving you sharper, clearer visuals, which makes reading text a whole lot easier. Yeah, the LCD displays have 37% more pixels per inch than Quest 2, and thanks to our new local dimming technology, 75% more contrast, with richer and more vibrant colors that just make VR even more engaging. This is also our first device to use the new Snapdragon XR2+ processor that we worked on with Qualcomm. It's optimized for VR, so Quest Pro runs at 50% more power with better thermal dissipation, which gets us significantly better performance. This is the first new chip from our deep partnership with Qualcomm. Don't forget, the touch controllers are also new. Yeah, the controllers are now basically their own computers, which is a bit ridiculous. We've re-engineered them to track themselves and also work a bit more like extensions of your hands. Yeah. The new sensors track their position in 3D space all on their own without using the headset, so you can get a full 360-degree range of motion. They include our new TruTouch haptics, which give a wider and more precise range of feedback effects. When you pick them up, they also feel a lot more balanced and natural in your hands without that LED ring. You can even add a stylus tip on the controllers, turning them into tools for writing or sketching. You can try this on the whiteboard in your Workrooms, or you just flip them around and write directly against your own physical desk. Yeah, it's a good example of how this device unlocks entirely new things, like much better collaborative and creative virtual meetings. Speaking of meetings, we also thought a lot about how to help you keep the headset charged and ready to go the moment you get an incoming call or just wanna get something done. We're including an all-new charging dock that fits great on your workspace and keeps both the headset and controllers charged at the same time. Another key technology for enabling collaborative meetings virtually is mixed reality, where we have to account for both the physical and digital elements in the environment. Yeah. Being able to blend the world around you with the virtual world and bring all the creative and expressive power of digital to your physical surroundings, this is a big step forward. Mixed reality is going to power some of the most interesting experiences you can have with Quest Pro. It's the next major step for VR and an important milestone on the path to building the metaverse. We began the journey to mixed reality when we released Presence Platform, our family of AI-powered tools that help developers build VR experiences that incorporate the physical world. We built mixed reality into our SDKs for Quest 2 to make it easy for developers to start experimenting. These experiences are so compelling that you really want a device that's designed from the ground up with them in mind. Absolutely. Quest Pro uses high-resolution cameras that capture four times as many pixels as Quest 2, and an additional RGB camera to turn pass-through into full color, along with a depth system made to understand your environment and work with it. Yeah, you can see the people around you, and with scene understanding and anchoring, objects in your room can become part of the virtual experience. This is gonna unlock some really interesting new uses. This is just the beginning for mixed reality. As more developers explore the capabilities in Presence Platform, you're going to see entirely new categories of things getting built. Definitely. Another big part of Quest Pro is how much more expressive you can be. You can see here how people's avatars reflect their expressions and reactions. This makes your shared social experiences so much stronger. It's powered by our Movement SDK, our newest addition to Presence Platform. Wait, what are you doing? I'm eating toast. I'm really hungry. Movement SDK enables avatars to mimic expressions in real time using Quest Pro's inward-facing cameras. This is really important for that feeling of social presence. When we communicate, all our non-verbal expressions and gestures are often even more important than what we say, and the way we connect virtually needs to reflect that too. Just think about all the little things you pick up when you're with other people, like the moment that they begin to break into a smile, or when they raise their eyebrow as someone says something interesting. Your avatar should be able to express all of that and more. Today, our avatars rely on spatial audio and immersive graphics to help create a sense of social presence, but facial expressions and body language will be total game-changers for remote meetings and virtual performances in the metaverse. This is another reason why Quest Pro is a big step forward for communication, including for work. More people work in distributed teams now, and being able to share a space with your coworkers and feel like you're really together is something that's still missing. We spoke a bit before about how Workrooms on Quest 2 is already unique for virtual meetings. It's going to be even more powerful when people's avatars can show more of their facial expressions and body language. Yeah. One of the challenges for distributed work is how to bring people together to interact in a shared space. If a few people are in a conference room and a few more are dialing in, the experience is just never really that great. We're building a better way using everything Quest Pro brings to the table, and we call it Magic Room. It lets you meet in mixed reality and share the same space. You can use a whiteboard. Bring in 3D objects. Everyone is present and has the same tools. Whether they're in full VR or in mixed reality. We think that this will help hybrid teams collaborate, and we're hoping to ship this next year. Now, these are just some of the things that are gonna be possible with Quest Pro. This is a high-end device designed for work and for people who want the best experience that we can build today. We're really excited to get this into your hands, and it's available for pre-order starting today for $1,499, and it ships on October 25th. Now, we built Quest Pro to be the best device we could make for getting things done, and our hope is to use this product to introduce some of this new technology, so that we can get it into our consumer devices over the coming years. What you can see here is the start of a whole new way of working in the metaverse. This will go beyond VR, because people work on all sorts of devices, and you should be able to collaborate and feel present with anyone, no matter where they are or what device they're using. We've updated Workrooms so you can join a virtual office from whatever supported device you're on and still get some of that feeling of social presence in a shared space. It's also going to work with Meta's other main work products, Workplace and Portal, to create a unified digital office we think can make distributed work so much better. We're not the only ones who are optimistic about the future of work in the metaverse. Over the last year, we've been working with dozens of partners to create new experiences for people who are looking to get things done in VR and beyond. At Connect last year, we spoke about the potential for creative people to work in true 3D, and next year, we're going to have a great option for that. Autodesk is updating their collaborative design review app to take advantage of the new possibilities unlocked by the Quest Pro. Adobe is also working to help people get more done in VR. Next year, they'll begin releasing a suite of apps for professional 3D creators, designers, and artists, from collaborative design reviews to Substance 3D Modeler using Quest Pro's controllers. There's one more partnership that I wanna highlight today that I think is gonna be really important to the future of the metaverse. Yeah. I know you've got a special guest lined up to talk about this one, so I'll leave you to it. Have fun. All right. Yeah. I'm excited for this. Thanks, Angela. Microsoft has been at the heart of work and computing since the earliest days, and they're one of the many companies across our industry that are now building the future of the metaverse. As Quest Pro makes new kinds of work possible in VR, I'm really excited to be able to work with them. To talk more about this, I'm here with Microsoft's Chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella. Hi, Satya. Hi, Mark. It's great to be here with you, and congrats on the Meta Quest Pro. Thanks. I'm glad we can finally share this with the world. Now, we knew early on that we wanted this to be a great device for getting work done, and working with Microsoft is a big part of making that happen. Do you wanna share a little bit more about what we're working on together? Sure. I mean, as you said, at Microsoft, we're incredibly excited about the metaverse and how digital and physical worlds are coming together and transforming everything from telehealth to remote maintenance to gaming, and of course, the way we do work. We're taking an approach to ensure that our software can benefit users on all their favorite devices, and that's why I'm so thrilled about what we're announcing today and how we're bringing together the power of many of our most popular productivity tools with the new VR devices you're announcing. Yeah. The main reason that we're in this space is that we think that VR can be very powerful for social connection. With the Quest Pro, we wanna bring more of that into the work context as well, where Microsoft already has some incredibly successful products in the market. Why don't we start there? No, absolutely, Mark. Microsoft Teams is the most ubiquitous, advanced platform for work today, and it's becoming essential to how hundreds of millions of people meet, call, chat, collaborate, and do business. We're clearly going through a once-in-a-lifetime change in how we work, and every organization today is looking for new ways to reconnect, reenergize their workforce at home, in the office, and everywhere in between. That's why we're bringing Microsoft Teams' immersive meeting experience to Meta Quest in order to give people new ways to connect with each other. You can connect, share, collaborate as though you were together in person, and in the future, you'll be able to use other avatars, including Meta Avatars, in immersive experiences in Teams meetings too. Just think about how powerful whiteboarding or brainstorming or even Teams meetups can be in this space. Another piece of this is that we're working on enabling Horizon Workrooms for Teams, so people will be able to join a Teams meeting directly from Workrooms. We think that this kind of cross-device, cross-screen experience will be the foundation of the virtual office of the future. This goes beyond Teams. Another big piece of your work platform is coming to Quest, right? No, that's absolutely right. We've been thinking about how to bring the power of Microsoft 365 and Windows 365 to 3D spaces to really help drive productivity and enable you to create, communicate, and collaborate in completely new ways. With Microsoft 365 coming to Quest, you'll be able to interact with sort of content from all your favorite productivity apps, right, whether it's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, giving you even more flexibility in how you collaborate and get work done. With Windows 365 coming to Quest, you'll have a new way to securely stream the entire Windows experience, including all the personalized apps, content, settings to your VR device, with the full power of Windows and Windows applications. This is gonna be great for anyone who wants to build out their virtual office on Quest Pro. You'll have a great Microsoft Teams experience through VR, a way to join Teams meetings and Workrooms, and you'll have the whole Microsoft 365 suite available too. For bigger companies who wanna roll out VR devices to their employees, we've also got some great news. Yes, absolutely. Being able to manage and secure all devices connecting to your network is absolutely crucial for any business, and that's just as true for a VR headset as it is for a smartphone or a laptop. Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune in combination will support Meta Quest and Meta Quest Pro. This means companies that want to provision these devices can be confident that all security and management options they expect from PCs and mobile devices will carry over to VR. Now, there's one final aspect of our partnership that I wanna talk about, and that's gaming. That's absolutely right, Mark. I'm really excited about gaming. When you step back, one thing we have learned is how immersive experiences in gaming can help create real community and connection. In fact, many people are already playing our most popular games, like Microsoft Flight Simulator and Minecraft in VR today. With Xbox Cloud Gaming, you can stream hundreds of games to any device, allowing you to connect with gamers in all-new ways, whether they're right next to you or sitting on the other side of the world. We're partnering to bring the service to Meta Quest Store. You'll be able to play 2D games with your Xbox controller projected on a massive screen on Quest. It's early days, but we're excited for what's to come. Who knows, the next time we talk, maybe we'll be playing Flight Simulator together in VR. I'm down for that. All right. Thanks so much for joining us today, Satya, and thanks for the partnership. Thank you, Mark. There's another element of this relationship that we wanna talk about today that's gonna play a big part in how businesses begin deploying VR. Accenture has spent the past few years changing how they work. They've been rolling out new technologies, like virtual reality, to their workforce to accelerate the shift, and they're helping other businesses make this change too. In fact, they work with three-quarters of the companies in the Fortune Global 500, so they have a pretty big impact on how many businesses work. Now, Accenture's Chair and CEO, Julie Sweet, is going to join me to talk more about what's coming next. Hey, Julie. Hi, Mark. It's great to be here. It's great to have you. Accenture is one of the world's biggest employers, and you've been growing rapidly over the last few years. It's been a transformative period for us. We now have more than 700,000 people around the world. Even prior to the pandemic, we were probably the largest global company with a truly remote workforce, and we saw the potential for new technology to support the way we work. In 2019, we started working with Microsoft to imagine a virtual space where our people could get together. Obviously, this became even more important in 2020, and since then, we've deployed 60,000 Quest 2 headsets, and we have transformed our onboarding process, welcoming over 150,000 people onto our virtual campus that we call the Nth Floor, which we believe is the largest enterprise use of the metaverse. This provides a more dynamic immersion for our new team members, and our research shows a far more memorable one. People retain up to a third more information when it's within an immersive experience. Watching what you've been doing at your scale has been impressive. Now, we think that working in the metaverse will let you do things that aren't possible with distributed teams today, and bringing together hardware, software, and services is gonna be the first step. Absolutely, Mark. We believe that the metaverse will not only change how people work, it will also profoundly change every part of every business, reinventing how you interact with customers, what products and services you offer, how you make and distribute them, and how you engage with your people, from employee onboarding and training to collaboration and personal productivity, and VR will play a huge role. Yeah. VR has been especially useful for training, and that's gonna get even better with mixed reality, and we're excited to work with you on more use cases and to talk about the next stage of our partnership. We're excited too. After what we've learned, we know there's a huge opportunity for our clients. Now we'll be partnering with Meta and Microsoft to help businesses create new experiences in the metaverse at scale. This is a perfect trifecta. The advances in Meta's visionary hardware and software, coupled with the integration with Microsoft's market-leading technology and Accenture's unmatched expertise, bringing the best of tech to industry to create practical real-world uses and unlock tangible value. This will be game-changing for scaling the metaverse in the enterprise. The future of work is starting now. Yeah. We want our devices to be easy for companies of all sizes to buy, deploy, and use. Next year, we'll launch Quest for Business, which is currently in beta. It's a subscription bundle for Quest 2, and now Quest Pro, that includes a suite of features like work accounts, device and application management, premium support, and more. Quest for Business will also unlock access to integrations like we just announced with Microsoft, as well as others in the future. It's gonna be priced to suit the needs of different businesses, and we're gonna be sharing more details over the coming months. This is exactly what companies want and need to make the metaverse and VR for work a reality. As one of the largest users of Microsoft technologies and Quest 2 headsets for business, we've seen firsthand the impact on how they can change the way you do business, and we're looking forward to further integrating and shaping the many ways enterprises adopt them at scale. This collaboration is a very exciting opportunity for our three companies to bring the future to life for enterprises, businesses, and our customers. This is just the start. This has the potential to accelerate the future of work for so many enterprises. Thanks so much for joining us, Julie. Thanks, Mark. Now, we've spoken a lot about how Quest Pro opens up new possibilities for work, but that's far from the only thing it's going to enable. Now, we can't wait to see what kind of experiences developers will be able to build with mixed reality. Take Beat Saber. It's already one of the most popular VR games of all time, and now imagine what it'll be like when you can turn wherever you are into a Beat Saber arena. The Beat Games team put together a little demo. Look out for yourself. I wake up to the sound of the silence that allowed. For my mind to run around. With my ear up to the ground. I'm searching to behold. The stories that are told. When my back is to the world. I'm smiling when I turn. Tell you you're brave. Now, this gives you a glimpse of what's possible. Because we want everyone to be able to create things for the metaverse, not just professional developers, we're working on creator tools as well. Hundreds of thousands of creators already use Spark AR to build AR effects on Facebook and Instagram. They have years of experience blending the physical and digital worlds, which is a core part of the metaverse. Starting today, we're giving creators the ability to build interactive 3D objects in Spark Studio and begin testing them in mixed reality with the Spark Player. With virtual worlds becoming accessible across all your devices, with Quest Pro bringing mixed reality to the world, and with the future of work emerging in the metaverse, we have a lot to build in the coming years. Now, to find out what's next on the roadmap, we're gonna need to shift gears. If you're joining us in VR, hold tight, and I'll see you in a sec. Hey. We're here together in Horizon, and this is the first time that we've done this at Connect. This is a preview of our next generation of avatars. They're so much more expressive and detailed than anything else today, and they have this unique Meta style to them. Now, it's a lot of work to build AI to auto-generate these for billions of people and then give everyone the tools to make sure that your avatar feels like your own. I'm excited to start rolling these out later next year on phones, VR headsets, and more. While I'm excited for this next generation of avatars, we are also seeing a lot of developers and partners building great experiences with our current generation of avatars as well. Now, let's meet up with Aigerim, who leads our avatars work, to discuss the latest on our avatars and what you can do with them. Hey, Aigerim. Hey, Mark. Hey. Wanna update everyone on the latest with the Avatars ecosystem? Yes. We have so many exciting things going on. Our first milestone is making it so you could use your avatar across all of our apps and in VR. The new Meta Accounts Center, it already allows you to have one or multiple avatars, so you could show up however you want. If you have one avatar you really like, you can now easily sync it across all the apps and in Horizon. Nice. All right. Let's talk a bit more about the integrations that we're building for the apps. Already see avatars showing up in stickers, stories, comments, and more across Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, and in the future, WhatsApp. We're working on bringing them more to life through animation and to more places like, for example, Reels. We want you to be able to use avatars anywhere you want to express yourself. We're also bringing avatars to video chat. That's right, starting with Messenger and WhatsApp. If you want, you'll be able to show up as an avatar. It's going to add a whole new dimension to video chat. Yeah. I think avatars in video chat are gonna be like this third mode between video on and video off. You can still express yourself and react, but you're not on camera, so it's kinda like a better camera-off mode. Yeah. We're working on this now and expect to launch it next year. In virtual reality, there's already head and hand positions, so your avatar moves and sounds like you, and now we wanna bring that to phones and computers too using cameras and microphones. If you wink at your phone, your avatar on your phone should wink too. Making your avatar work across all kinds of devices and apps truly creates continuity across experiences. Yeah. You should be able to take your avatar and virtual goods everywhere that you go. Absolutely. There are already dozens of apps on Quest that support Meta Avatars, and we're building partnerships so you can use your avatar across lots of different experiences. In fact, today we're announcing partnership with Zoom that will let you show up as your avatar on Zoom calls. To make this easier, we're extending the Meta Avatars SDK to iOS and Android on Unity. I'm also excited to share that the Meta Avatars SDK will soon support Unreal Engine and virtual reality too. These expansions will make it a lot easier for more developers to start building Meta Avatars into your apps. Yes. We're testing this with a small group of partners now, and plan to release this more broadly next year. Yeah. Right now, a lot of developers are building their own avatar system, since the tools that you can import are pretty basic. Over the next year or two, as all these new tools and styles become available, and as the hundreds of people that we have working on avatars keep improving the system, I just think that more and more developers are going to find building with our interoperable avatar stack will offer a much simpler and better experience. Speaking of making it easy to add new styles, we have some news about the Avatar Store too. The Avatar Store is launching in VR later this year, so you'll be able to shop for virtual clothing in VR. We're joining with a bunch of partners across sports, entertainment, and more. You're gonna start seeing a lot more of your favorite familiar brands. These integrations, they're gonna be pretty awesome. Later this year, keep a lookout in the Avatar Store for new outfit releases from Netflix. Giving people more ways to express themselves through digital clothing will help kickstart the marketplace for interoperable digital goods. If you buy a sweater, you're gonna wanna be able to wear that on your avatar, no matter what app you're using. We're gonna see more creators, developers, and brands experimenting with this. Beyond clothes, we're also improving the core avatars themselves across the whole family of apps. Mark, I'm sure you've seen the new face shapes we introduced earlier this year, as well as cochlear implants, over-the-ear hearing aids, and wheelchairs. Yeah. We have some big improvements to representation coming too, with more options for body types, as well as shaders for more realistic skin. There's one more feature coming soon that's probably the most requested feature on our roadmap, legs. Legs. I know you have been waiting for this. I think everyone has been waiting for this. Seriously, the legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don't have them either, and the perceptual science behind this is actually quite interesting. We discovered early on that your brain is a lot more willing to accept a rendering of a part of you, as long as it's accurately positioned. If it's rendered in the wrong place, then it just feels terrible, and it breaks the whole feeling of presence and immersion. That's why we started off showing just controllers, but not your whole arms. Yeah. If the system showed my elbow in the wrong place, it would feel like my arm was broken. Yeah. As we got better at tracking and predicting your arm position, then we can add your whole arms to the avatar stack in addition to your hands, and now we're doing the same with legs. Now we're getting ready to launch the first full-body avatars. Yeah. With standalone virtual reality headsets, understanding your leg position is surprisingly difficult because of occlusion. If your legs are under a desk, or if your arms block your view of them, then your headset can't see them directly, and you need to build an AI model to predict your whole body position. This really needs to work reliably so it just feels natural. Yeah. That's why we're gonna bring legs to Horizon first, and we're gonna keep bringing them to more and more experiences over time as we improve our technology stack. We will bring new tech that lets developers implement custom avatar actions and behaviors for the experiences they want to create. That's coming next year too, and I'm looking forward to seeing what all of you will build. All right. Thanks for stopping by, Aigerim. We have a lot to do, so I'll see you in the next review. Great. See ya. Avatars are gonna be central to how we express ourselves in the future, and this is a unique opportunity to build some really interesting things at the intersection of expression, social interaction, creation, and commerce. With Horizon Worlds and Workrooms, we're already starting to see early glimpses of what this social metaverse could look like. Just check out some of the things that are happening already. Creators are building social spaces like the Soapstone Comedy Club, The Stu, a hip hop recording studio, Nope World, and a whole lot more. As this social-first platform takes shape, we're thinking about the virtual space that you will call home. When you first put on your VR headset or open Horizon, you're gonna land in your own personal space, somewhere that you can design and decorate and make your own, invite your friends to hang out, get work done, or just relax and use it to jump into any experience. All right. Now let's take a look at what's next. With Quest Pro, our next generation avatars, and Horizon Worlds, we're making good progress on two of the most powerful windows into the metaverse, virtual reality for full immersion, and mixed reality for blending physical and virtual worlds. Looking towards the future, the last set of experiences that need to get built is augmented reality, where you see digital objects overlaid perfectly on the world around you. Now, the fundamental technologies across the stack to build full augmented reality glasses are coming together, the waveguide displays, sensors, silicon, AI, and more. I've seen a lot of these pieces working in the lab, and it's awesome. Now, I think that this is some of the most amazing technology in existence right now, and it's gonna be really neat to see it come together into products over the next few years. Other pieces are coming along nicely too, like our Spark software that's already being used by creators to build AR experiences that more than 750 million people engage with monthly in our mobile apps. Developers are gonna be able to start building a lot more mixed reality experiences on the path to full AR using Quest Pro. Now, one thing that makes AR so hard is that the form factor needs to be something that you wear outside around other people, and potentially all day long, and that's different from where VR is today. Glasses need to be relatively small to look and feel good. We're approaching building augmented reality glasses from two different angles. The first is building out all the technology we need for full AR glasses, and then working to fit it into the best glasses form factor we can. The second approach is starting with the ideal form factor and working to fit more and more technology into it over time. Now, we took our first step forward on this last year when we partnered with EssilorLuxottica to introduce Ray-Ban Stories. Ray-Ban Stories are our first-ever smart glasses. You can take photos and videos, share them to Instagram, listen to music, or even take phone calls. But what sets them apart is the design of these glasses that people already know and love. Now, this is just the first product to come from our partnership, and to talk more about what's coming, let's catch up with Rocco Basilico, the Chief Wearables Officer at EssilorLuxottica. Hey, Rocco. Great to see you again. Great to be back, Mark. Ray-Ban Stories had a fantastic first year. With Meta, we introduced a beautiful pair of glasses with superpowers. We keep launching new software updates to make the product even better. Soon, we are launching the ability to call or text on Ray-Ban Stories with your existing phone number so you can stay connected and stay in the moment hands-free. We are also rolling out Spotify Tap playback so you can listen to music on your glasses more easily. You can tap and hold on the side of your glasses to play Spotify. If you want to hear something else, tap and hold again, and Spotify will recommend something new. You also keep launching new designs. Yes. We have added more style, lens, and color combination, including transition lenses for all the users that go from clear to dark in seconds. This is the first product that we've built together, but we've got bigger plans. Do you wanna give a hint of where we're going? Well, we are working together on a new set of glasses to build a portal to the metaverse. It's an exciting multi-year project. This is different from what we're already doing with Project Nazare. We view our partnership with Meta as a deep long-term partnership. Together, we will help bring augmented reality to life with beautiful design. All right. Thanks, Rocco. I'm really grateful for our partnership. A lot of the underlying technology for the future of computing is still in the research phase, but we have working demos of this stuff, and it's pretty mind-blowing. It wouldn't be Connect if we didn't share some of that with you. Let's start with one of the technologies that we think is gonna be really important for the future. I've talked a lot about neural interfaces and our research on EMG before, and we now have a working demo that lets you control an AR or VR device with motor neuron signals. Now, I'm not gonna show you the headset this year, but here's what I'm seeing while I'm using this. Just the gentlest flick of my thumb to check my messages, and with another quick movement, I can answer while I'm on the move, or I can even take a photo. Now, the goal here is to make these interfaces faster, higher bandwidth, and a lot more natural. All right. To close us out today, let's check in with Michael to talk about our progress here and what still needs to get solved. Hey. Hi, Mark. The future that all that new technology is creating is one that will change the world every bit as much as personal computing and mobile did. Yeah, a big part of this is gonna be building next-generation interfaces, like the neural interface EMG demo that we just showed. That's right, and there's an important lesson to be learned from personal computing. What we saw there was that the interface to the digital world, the graphical user interface, was what defined the user experience and opened up new possibilities. Our challenge is that GUIs just can't do the job for glasses that have to work in all the situations we encounter in the course of a day, so we need something radically new. In addition to new interfaces, we're also going to need a whole layer that can sense and reconstruct the world around you, understand the context in which you're using these devices, and also just help you get things done when you have these digital capabilities mixed with the physical world, and this is really the job for AI. Yes. In the long run, I'm confident that the most powerful way to interact with the metaverse will be through personalized AI. Thanks to the glasses, AI will be able to understand your context and will use that to help you proactively, ideally so seamlessly that you won't even notice. Now, combine that with electromyography technology, EMG, which uses the neuromuscular signals through your wrist directly as inputs, and you have an intuitive, almost frictionless interface. This will be the first truly human-centered interface, and a big part of that is that you won't have to learn how to use a rigid control scheme. Instead, the machine will learn and adapt to you as you use it. In neuroscience, this concept is known as co-adaptation, and what that means to all of us is that by combining machine learning with neuroscience, this future interface will work with each user to adapt to their unique differences in physiology, sizes, preferences, and expectations. Here, you can see two people playing an arcade game with EMG. They're both using the same gesture, but because no two people are exactly alike, they do it in slightly different ways. The neural interface continuously gets better over time at understanding each person. The potential for co-adaptation extends beyond normal gestures into some truly novel territory. Here, the algorithm is learning in real time how to respond to the EMG signals the person is sending with only the slightest of hand movements. The system is recognizing the actions the person has decided to perform by decoding those signals at their wrist and translating them into digital commands. Now the person is able to communicate their intended actions to the computer with almost no hand movement. This is a genuine transformation in the way we interact with the digital world. Yeah, this has the potential to redefine a lot of how we interact with computers. If you think about the step change in capability that came with the mouse and graphical user interface, this should be another big step beyond that in speed and the bandwidth of our interfaces. You know, this is one of the wildest projects I think that we're working on. These future interfaces will be truly life-changing. An example that I love is Carnegie Mellon University's NavCog project to help the visually impaired. Our Project Aria research glasses can 3D map their surroundings, so CMU used them to build phone maps that enable the visually impaired to navigate more confidently indoors where GPS signals often don't reach. Here's a look at how this works. For years, I've gotten around with the assistance of my guide dog, Flirt. I love and depend on her dearly, but a guide dog is not a navigation system. Juice bar is on your right. NavCog can change that. There is a ramp, 140 feet. What we're working on is a turn-by-turn assistive technology. A charging station on the right. that we've developed at Carnegie Mellon University. We teamed up with Reality Labs and Meta and started using their Project Aria research glasses to build a 3D map of the Pittsburgh International Airport. The maps help the user figure out where they are without having to rely so heavily on external beacons. This is huge because it makes NavCog scalable. NavCog gives me the freedom to go where I need to go. You have arrived. It really helps me regain my independence. All right, this is a great example of how, you know, when you're building these systems that are oriented around people and how we experience the world, it opens up all of these new avenues to help us do more. It turns out that the things that you need to do to model reality, like being able to sense the world around you and understand the context for how it all fits together, you know, that's the same thing that you need to augment human capabilities too. Macular degeneration runs in my family, so I may actually be using the fruits of this research myself one day. Helping the hearing impaired is also on the horizon, and that's another thing that runs in my family. I didn't set out to build glasses for my future self, but it does seem to be working out that way. There's so much more that the interface of the future will bring us, like the ability to right-click on a real object to find out information about it, control our devices without looking down, and get proactive assistance from a personalized digital assistant. We will one day be using this interface to do everything we do now, but more easily, plus a ton of things we haven't even thought of that we'll consider indispensable. Yeah, one example is being able to build and manipulate complex 3D objects. You know, this is central to the metaverse, but it's hard to build 3D objects from scratch. It's much quicker and easier to just use physical objects as templates. Today, there's no easy way to do that, so we're researching two different technologies to solve that problem. The first one uses machine learning-based neural radiance fields to reconstruct the appearance of a 3D object from multiple 2D images taken at different angles. This method can reproduce even the finest details of an object. All right, we're gonna scan Teddy, not just because he's super cute, but also because he's got the right dimensions and level of detail for what we're trying to replicate. Here's how it works. We just scan him on the phone, and that's about it. Right now, this takes some processing time, so we got it ready beforehand so we could check it out. Oh, wow. The level of detail on this is impressive. You can kind of see all these fine elements of it, like each individual strand of its hair, and you can even see through the semi-transparent bow tie that he has on. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. It's just a beautiful reproduction. The second technology captures geometry and appearance directly. Here we used a different technique called inverse rendering to scan an object into its digital twin and then bring it into augmented and virtual reality. It responds dynamically to the lighting in the VR environment. You know, when you throw it in the air, against a wall, or if you bounce it off the ground, it's gonna respond the same way that the physical object would. We used Spark to put the virtual object next to the physical one here. They're almost identical. Neither approach is real time yet, and each has its limitations, but the goal is to let you quickly and easily make physical objects a part of your virtual world. Of course, the most interesting virtual elements of all are other people in the form of avatars. As you mentioned earlier, avatars will come in a variety of styles, but one thing I know for sure is that avatars that are photorealistic representations of users would be the most powerful remote connection technology that has ever existed. They would create genuine social presence in the sense of making you feel at a gut level like you are literally with other people and would span personal distances in a way video conferencing can only dream of. This is one reason we believe the metaverse is going to be by far the most social computing platform. It's fundamentally about people and about being with people. We're gonna be able to teleport anywhere and be with anyone, no matter how far apart we physically are, and I think that this is the ultimate goal of social technology. You're right, one of the keys that will unlock this is avatars that truly represent us. Last year we showed you early progress on full-body Codec Avatars. Yeah, what sets Codec Avatars apart from other high-quality avatars that you might have seen is that they're fully drivable. That means that they're not limited to preset movements or expressions. This is an avatar that you can control live in real time with no need to render or export video. It can photo-realistically reproduce individual people rather than just, you know, generic characters that artists designed. Of course, securing your avatar will be critical. We're already thinking about things like encryption and tying your avatar to an authenticated account. Beyond privacy, we've continued to develop this technology. For example, it's now possible to change your virtual outfit whenever you want. Cool as that is, it's the face, expressions, eye contact, slight motions that is most quintessentially human. We're putting a lot of research into making the faces of our Codec Avatars truer to our physical forms. Mark, do you wanna show us the latest in Codec faces? Yeah, definitely. You know, last year during our visit to the lab in Redmond, I saw the second generation of our Codec Avatars. These second generation avatars are pretty amazing. Right? They're much closer to how you might wanna show up in a setting like a work meeting. I made one of myself. Now, we've made them a lot more expressive, and not just simple things like looking left, right, up, down, but also the non-verbal cues that we rely on to communicate with each other and understand tone, things like raising an eyebrow, squinting, widening my eyes, or scrunching my nose. You know, these avatars are way better at capturing those subtleties that define physical interactions. They're just much more natural. Being able to control the lighting on the avatars adds another dimension of life to them. When we move the light around, you can see how it interacts with my hair, it reflects on my skin, and you can even see it in my eyes. Now, these are awesome, but they also take a really long time to generate, so we're working on something that's a lot quicker for people to use. We've made a lot of progress with what we call Instant Avatars. Here's Autumn from our Reality Labs team doing a demo of the process to show exactly what goes into this. These are much quicker and easier to make. All you need for the scan is your phone, and you can pretty much do this anywhere with reasonable lighting. She scans her face from different angles with a neutral expression for about 30 seconds, then spends another 1.5 minutes making a variety of expressions, and that's really all there is to it. Hi, guys. My 3D avatar is ready for use in my phone or VR. It just took a few hours to generate after my scan, and the team's working on making that processing a whole lot faster. Now, obviously, this isn't the same quality as you just saw with the 2.0 Codec Avatars. However, they're still pretty expressive and realistic. We're putting a whole lot of effort into developing these so anyone can easily create their own high-quality, realistic avatar for themselves. All right. Thanks, Autumn. Now, this is some of the most inspiring stuff that I feel like we get to work on, so it's great that we're at the stage now where the research foundations that we've laid over the past years are really starting to show up in real products. For sure. There's still plenty left to do, and everything we've just talked about is still research. It may or may not end up in our products, but it's definitely a glimpse of where technology's headed. Thanks, Mark. All right. That just about wraps Connect 2022. Last year, we laid out our vision for the future, and this year, we're taking another big step on the path to get there. What we shared today is the first move towards the 200 million people who get new PCs every year one day working in the metaverse. We're still early in this journey. The products that we showed today are a part of a roadmap that extends far into the future. Quest for consumers, Quest Pro for work and people who want the best VR experience that we can build today, and Ray-Ban Stories for smart glasses. There are gonna be more releases in each of these lines in the years to come, as well as whole new categories of products built for augmented reality and neural interfaces. This is an exciting time to be working on the metaverse. We're investing in this because we believe that there's massive potential here, and we wanna bring the best engineers, developers, artists, and like-minded partners together to help build this future. We're at the beginning of a new era in computing. Major shifts like this don't come around that often, but we're starting to see one now, and it's gonna shape how people connect for decades to come. I wanna discuss two values that we believe in deeply that you can expect us to bring to this work. The first is putting people at the center of everything we build. We believe that the next computing platform has the potential to be more social and more human than anything that's come before if we build it correctly. That's why so much of what we've shown today is about improving how we connect and interact, building out Horizon as social infrastructure for the metaverse, prioritizing hardware that supports facial expressions and eye contact, creating new ways for people to meet and collaborate at work, designing new avatars and photorealistic avatars. These are things that you prioritize if you're focused on helping people connect. While the underlying technology is pretty inspiring by itself, the reason that we're in this is because it can bring you closer to other people. This is our company's DNA. It's in every service we build. Your friends on Facebook, your followers on Instagram, your family on WhatsApp, it's always about people, and that's how we hope to build the metaverse too. The second value is openness. In every generation of computing, there's been an open ecosystem and a closed ecosystem. There was Windows and Mac, then Android and iOS. Closed ecosystems focus on tight control and integration to create unique experiences and lock-in, although most of that value ends up flowing to the platform over time. Open ecosystems create value and grow through many companies working together, developers having lots of choices, and ultimately, more people sharing in the upside of what is created. An interesting thing about the history of computing is that different models have won out in different periods. It's not predetermined which will be the primary one this time around. As someone who has experience building under both models, I strongly believe that an open, interoperable metaverse built by many different developers and companies is going to be better for everyone. As you can see today from all of the different partners that we're working with, I see our role as not just helping to build this open ecosystem, but making sure that the open ecosystem wins out in this next generation of the internet. Philosophically, we've always been about building in the open. We'd rather show the progress we're making and talk about the challenges we're still working through. We don't have all the answers because some of them just don't exist yet. We're all on this journey together. If you care about technology and how it can help us connect, if you wanna help build a world where we can all experience things that haven't been possible before, if you believe in a future where we can all do more and be more present, then I hope that you're just as excited as I am. Thank you for being a part of this journey, and we'll see you again soon. It is my pleasure to welcome you once again to Meta Connect. Thank you, our passionate community of creators and developers, for joining us today as we celebrate a year of innovation and take a look at all of what lies ahead for all of us. I'm Melinda Davenport, Internal Comms Director at Meta, and I'm honored to help guide you through all of the exciting announcements, sessions, and speakers still to come today. Stay tuned for our developer state of the union and nearly 30 technical sessions covering the topics you care about most. Plus, Reality Labs Consulting Chief Technology Officer, John Carmack, will share his unscripted thoughts on the future of technology. You definitely don't wanna miss a minute. This is also the first time you can experience Connect from inside Horizon Worlds. Now, many of you have been watching right now from Meta Square. Hello to everyone in the Metaverse. To everyone else, you can always grab your Meta Quest 2 to jump in and start exploring for yourself, because today is all about this community, everyone watching, building, creating, discovering, collaborating, and innovating together. Now, in the spirit of collaboration, I invited one of your very own to join me. She is a creator whose viral hits have racked up 500 million views and counting. Her ingenious step-by-step tutorials have caught the attention of several Hollywood powerhouses, and she often collabs with iconic global brands. If that wasn't enough, she is one of Inc.'s 30 Under 30, thank you very much. Please help me welcome award-winning director and one of the star creators featured in today's keynote, Karen X. Cheng. Hi, Karen. We're so excited that you're here. Wow. Hi, Melinda. Thank you so much for that. I am so excited to be here today and spend the day learning with this creative community of builders. For my cameo in the keynote, I actually got to try out the Meta Quest Pro, and it was just such a surreal feeling, like, putting on the headset and then being able to also see my physical space. It's just, it's mind-blowing how far this tech has come. Oh, I so agree. Totally agree with you, and it's so awesome to be amongst people like you, who are actually using and doing these things on our platform. It's very, very cool. Before we get to other things, you have to tell me, how did you get started in all of this? Yeah. I got started really just shooting and editing everything by myself. After about a year, I noticed I hit the limit of my own technical abilities and what I could do by myself. I started reaching out to this community and to other Instagram creators to collaborate, and that's when it really clicked, you know? When you can tap into the talents of others, it's almost like you get to try on their superpowers and then create something far beyond what either one of you could've done on your own. I feel the same way about new technology, you know? I've really been interested in three areas this past year, so artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality. I know a lot of people watching today who are just constantly pushing the boundaries of these technologies. I really think that in the next few years, with more tools like Meta Quest Pro, we're gonna revolutionize how creatives work, and we're just gonna empower so many people who never even considered themselves artists to create amazing art. I really can't wait to hear what's new in AI from the Reality Labs team coming up later today. It's very cool. It's really awesome also hearing about how this is changing your everyday work, and I know I speak for everyone watching, we definitely cannot wait to see what you work on next. That's really the goal of today too, is to focus on how our incredible community combined with emerging technology can create magic. Yeah. Let's chat about what's next. Oh, so exciting. Absolutely. Just minutes away is the Developer State of the Union. Whether you are a new developer or a seasoned pro, you just cannot miss this unique opportunity to spend some quality time with our Reality Labs team. You'll also get the very first look at brand-new and updated tools that can help you take action now and set up your business for success in the future. Please join me in welcoming the team of innovators who, in close partnership with all of you, are enabling the creativity of today and shaping the social experiences of tomorrow. Here's Director of Metaverse Content Applications, Anand Dass; Director of Product VR, Yardley Pohl; and Director of Content Ecosystem, Chris Pruett. Welcome to the Connect Developer State of the Union. This session is designed to give you, developers, a view into our current state of our platform, cover major updates and upcoming features that are relevant to you, as well as to builders, working in Meta Horizon Worlds. Now, I'm gonna talk about the state of our VR ecosystem, after which Yardley Pohl will discuss new features, technologies, and improvements we've made for developers in the last year. Finally, Anand Dass will cover our efforts to push VR forward as a platform for work, creator tools, fitness, and learning. Later today, there are many more sessions on specific topics devoted to all aspects of developing for the metaverse, so please stay tuned. Now, usually when Meta Connect comes around, you know, I get up here and I talk about how the Meta Quest platform is developing into a viable ecosystem for developers. I show some graphs, and I talk about how well the market is doing, and I talk about some trends, and, you know, I'm gonna do that today also. I think that's important. Like, developers need this information to operate their business. This year, I kinda wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanna take a step back and just look at how far we've come. You know, I took over the management of third-party VR content at Meta in 2018. When I did that, I had one goal: to produce an ecosystem that produces great software for our customers. I ran an independent game studio for several years, you know, what I learned is that there are some platforms that, you know, go to really great lengths to ensure the success of their developers. Then there are other platforms that don't do that. Our team's goal was to build a software ecosystem on Meta Quest that makes, you know, the business decision to build software for VR just one that was very obvious. I wanted to build a platform that, you know, my former studio would've wanted to ship to. I think that, you know, developers don't have a reason to support any platform unless it's profitable for them. Our team, you know, we focused on user trust and revenue generation as our North Star goals. Fast-forward to earlier this year, we made an announcement of a major milestone, which is that sales of VR titles in the Quest store have surpassed $1 billion. That's a lot of money. When I talk to developers, particularly developers who aren't currently building for VR, they're universally surprised that we've grown our platform so significantly. Actually, I think that Quest has grown so fast since 2019 that there's many folks out there who haven't realized that VR is no longer an enthusiast niche product. The best news is, you know, our growth is accelerating. We've now surpassed $1.5 billion. These numbers are material to companies of any scale, and they translate directly to developer profit. In our quest to create a viable VR ecosystem, we've ended up building one of the largest publishing programs for independent games in the entire world, and we've done it by, you know, working very closely with developers and sometimes funding the titles that they're building. We've helped fund hundreds of games and apps that are in active development today. Like, hundreds of games. That's an incredible pipeline of titles, you know, particularly for a platform that's as young as ours. We know that, you know, there are thousands of developers out there that we don't have a direct engagement with that are building for Quest and the Quest platform. I mean, just looking back over the last 12 months, we've been able to launch some fantastic titles like Resident Evil 4, Blade & Sorcery, Red Matter 2, Moss: Book II, The Tale of Onogoro, After the Fall, Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, Zenith: The Last City, Green Hell, Demeo, and there are a ton more coming soon, including Ghostbusters, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Chapter 2, as well as Behemoth, just to name a few. Look, it's not just video games either. Fitness apps like Les Mills BodyCombat and productivity apps like Arkio have also found a home on our platform. What I'm trying to say here is that the Quest platform is growing really rapidly, and it's already returning material revenue to VR developers. That's translating directly into higher quality software for our audience. You know, the platform we have today is exactly the type of platform I wish I could have shipped to when I ran my own studio. You know, to quote the great LeVar Burton, "You don't have to take my word for it." Let's take a look at the numbers. Of over 400 apps on the Quest store, roughly 1/3 are making revenue in the millions today. 33 titles have made over $10 million in gross revenue, which is up $ 11 million since February. The number of apps that have made over $5 million in gross revenue has doubled since last year, up to $55 million. Walking Dead's a great example. Walking Dead has surpassed $50 million in revenue on Quest alone, and that's nearly double the revenue on all of the other platforms it ships on. It's not just that, you know, developers are finding success on our platform, they're actually finding it really quickly. I can give you some examples. Resident Evil 4 and Zenith: The Last City. You know, the first is a classic. It's one of the best games ever made. It's one of my personal favorites. It was completely rebuilt from VR. The other is, like, a brand-new title from a small independent team. Both of these titles made their first $1 million in revenue on the Quest Store in less than 24 hours. Actually, Resident Evil was able to double that number by the end of their first day of sales. Like Blade & Sorcery hit a $1 million milestone in 2 days from its launch. We have some devs that have done it in as little as three days as well. As our ecosystem for professional developer studios has expanded, so has the community of small independent developers. The broader community of developers is absolutely critical to push innovation and experimentation forward on our platform. We're seeing incredible innovation from developers who are shipping on App Lab, both in content and in business model. There are over 2,000 apps shipped on App Lab so far, and we consider this a huge success. We've continued to invest in improving the experience for developers who are shipping to App Lab. I'm happy to say that the average turnaround time from submission to response is now less than three days. Now, I know that there are some of you out there who are wondering, you know, okay, I hear you about this game stuff, but, you know, what does that have to do with the metaverse? I think the answer to that question is, you know, that as we've seen over the last several years, it's games and game developers that are pioneering the principles and core technologies that ground the metaverse. You know, the goal of a truly social, persistent, co-present experience, I mean, that's gonna be achieved by games first, and so this innovative work is absolutely critical to our long-term mission. We're also constantly delivering new technology to our headsets, whether that's passthrough MR, hand tracking, or as you heard about this morning, face and eye tracking. The developers that write the rule book for these new features are gonna be, again, the small independent developers that can move really quickly and feel out the grammar of new technology. You know, they often will discover things that we've never even considered. Just take a look at how the developer of Cubism has been using our Presence Platform or how Magic Keys is making it easier to learn the piano with MR. I mean, these are really cool on Quest 2, even in black and white, but they're gonna absolutely shine with color pass-through on Meta Quest Pro. It's developers like these that are teaching us and you, and the rest of the world, you know, what this technology can do. Of course, we are continuing to develop Meta Horizon Worlds, and continuing to invest in growing the amazing community of technical builders and that are designing immersive worlds, and we're seeing incredible innovation from this group. It's a very early builder community. As we said, you know, many times, we're at the beginning of a journey, and the technology that we're discussing today, both with the announcement of the Meta Quest Pro and through all of the sessions that we're going to show today, it's foundational to the future of the metaverse, and for you who are joining us in its creation. The Meta Quest platform, you know, well, we feel great about how strong it's become, and we are continuing to invest in making it even better. Now, to detail some of the new features of the Meta Quest Pro, as well as great new tech we're building for you, please let me introduce Yardley Pohl. Thanks, Chris. In today's keynote, you heard Mark and Angela talk about our latest VR device, Meta Quest Pro. This is the start of our Pro line and a major step towards VR expanding from a gaming device towards a general computer. Developers can build new types of apps and experiences that take advantage of Meta Quest Pro's unique capabilities. Such as color Passthrough, sensors to support more natural avatar expressions, and more extensive multitasking capabilities. We'll have a number of sessions covering Meta Quest Pro today, starting with our Meta Quest Pro and Presence Platform overview session. Apart from Meta Quest Pro, we announced two new ways for users to interact with your apps. First is the Meta Quest Touch Pro controllers. These premium controllers are self-tracked, meaning you can support a variety of new movements in your app regardless of where the headset wearer is looking. They also support brand-new TruTouch haptics, unlocking new ways to provide user feedback. Now, if your user doesn't have a controller in their hands, you can take advantage of the hand-tracking API. This improved API brings step-change improvements in tracking continuity, gesture support, movement, and performance. A year ago, we announced a Presence Platform, which is a collection of machine perception capabilities that will help power the Metaverse. Since then, we've seen hundreds of developers building experiences leveraging our platform. This year, Presence Platform has added more capabilities for mixed reality, enhanced interaction with hands and voice, and is adding a new pillar for social presence with the launch of Movement SDK. We're also bringing Presence Platform capabilities like passthrough, mixed reality, scene understanding, and anchors to web developers through WebXR. We're committed to bringing the capabilities that make it easier for you to develop and ship more immersive experiences at scale. As VR moves towards general computing, it's important to support a variety of use cases. Today, we're excited to share that Microsoft is bringing VR versions of Teams and Windows 365 to the Meta Quest Store for productivity users. Quest also supports progressive web apps with rich 2D multitasking capabilities, so you can easily access the top productivity, communication, and entertainment apps in your life while in VR. New for Meta Quest Pro, you'll be able to open up 2D apps in an overlay without leaving the VR destination you're in, thanks to an expanded 12 GB of RAM. This makes bringing your 2D apps to VR even more valuable. Over last year, developers have added a number of progressive web apps, or PWAs, to the Meta Quest Store, and even more are on their way, like Dropbox, LastPass, Coursera, and Peacock. Building PWAs for Quest is now even easier than before thanks to our partnership with Microsoft to add Quest support to their popular PWABuilder developer tool. We're excited to see what you do with the new capabilities and what you can build with them. Now, I want to share some updates from the overall Meta Quest platform. Our teams are listening to your feedback to help drive our roadmap and priorities, so please keep it coming. We're creating new ways to help you, one, build apps faster, two, realize your app's potential, and three, find new ways to make money and grow your business on the Meta Quest platform. We'll start with building faster. We know there's a lot to do to build a great app, and we want to help you maximize your time making your app amazing versus just making it work. First, Meta Quest Developer Hub, the product formerly known as the Oculus Developer Hub, is getting several new features that'll make switching between your engine and your headset much easier. We're launching input forwarding to minimize the time you have to put on your headset to test a change. You'll be able to control your Quest with a mouse and a keyboard and see the results on your PC via casting. We're also releasing scriptable testing to help automate parts of your workflow. For example, with scripts, you can factory-reset your device and sign in with a new test user and disable system features that could impact your test, all without human intervention. Next, for Unity developers, we're making improvements to your Unity plugin. We'll be offering distribution via Package Manager to simplify and streamline the installation and update process. Finally, we'll be launching our Meta XR Simulator in early 2023, which simulates our XR devices and features on an API level, allowing for fast iteration when developing Quest apps. Learn more about how you can build faster in a later session called VR Development at the Speed of Light. Next, let's talk about new ways to realize your app's potential. We want to help build a performant and fun experience that's well-attuned to your audience. Last year, we launched a Meta Avatars SDK for Unity to simplify development for you. Since then, the number of apps with Meta Avatars has tripled. Now, with the release of Meta Quest Pro, you can use the Meta Avatars SDK to leverage the full eye and face-tracking capabilities of the hardware. By bringing personality to VR with avatars that mimic users' natural facial expressions, we think that more people will feel more present than ever in your apps. We have many sessions dedicated to Meta Avatars SDK, so if you wanna hear directly from any of those devs who are successfully integrating the SDK, check out those sessions. Now, we know that you wanna squeeze every drop of compute out of our hardware, so we've improved our performance tools, like adding support for Simpleperf and Vulkan Shader Stats to RenderDoc. Now you can really level up the immersiveness of your games by optimizing graphics, compute, and memory. Apps like Red Matter 2 have already used these capabilities to deliver stunning graphics on a standalone headset. Everyone loves playing games in VR with family and friends, and so we're improving multiplayer services to help you engage with your communities. Destinations are a great way to highlight fresh, relevant experiences on the platform, so we're adding them in more services such as Explore. Look out for the new app-to-app travel API at the end of this year so that users can travel from one store app to another, allowing you to cross-promote between apps. Lastly, we're shipping a new multiplayer demo and update to Shared Spaces. Find out more in the session Bringing People Together later today. Now, I know you've all been waiting for this part. Once you've built a great app that delights your users, we want to make sure you have the means to effectively market it and help grow your business. We want you to succeed. We've unlocked a variety of new self-serve promotional and sales tools to help you to do just that. Here are the four tools. First is A/B testing, which recently launched and has already helped developers drive double-digit improvements to the conversion rate on their app store page. You can test new trailers, key art, and descriptions. We're also adding new testable options like keywords, screenshots, and immersive assets. These only take a few minutes to set up. You'll also now have an option to automatically test new changes to your product details page. Next is Try Before You Buy, a new way for you to offer a free time-bound trial to users before they pay. We're testing this feature right now and seeing really promising signs. We'll continue to iterate on the product, such as allowing you to choose how long the trial lasts and A/B testing it with your audience. Third, we've heard you ask for more flexibility around when and how you offer sales and bundles, and we'll soon be making them self-service. You'll be able to propose sales for your apps via the developer dashboard. Finally, immersive promotions are new assets allowing you to add depth to your store landing page promos and on your app's product details page. You can use these assets to highlight your app's aesthetics as it appears in headset and ultimately drive more purchases for your app. We're also launching more ways to monetize your IP. Meta Avatars Store that launched on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in June will be coming to VR later this year. The store will be available to people in Quest Home and in third-party applications that have integrated with Meta Avatars and an entry point to our avatar editor. Over time, we plan to release creator tools so that you can design custom avatar items and sell them. Lastly, you told us that reviews on the store are really important to how you show up to your customers, and that they reflect the latest and greatest updates from your app. This fall, we'll be making improvements to reviews and updates, ensuring that recent reviews are more prominent. You can learn more about these areas in our session on marketing your Meta Quest app. We appreciate your feedback and ongoing partnership to help us deliver products that are most vital for you and your business. Now to discuss new opportunities for app developers on Meta Quest, please welcome Anand Dass. Hey, thanks, Yardley. Chris began by talking about building a software ecosystem on Meta Quest that makes the developer's business decision to support VR an obvious one. Thanks to the incredible game developers and the technology platform that Yardley presented, we're well on this journey, but now it's time to expand that journey. Over time, we believe it's inevitable that other categories of experiences will emerge on Quest, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Working alongside developers, we've invested in building an ecosystem around all the new technologies that Quest brings over time. With new Presence Platform capabilities, like mixed reality and social presence, new kinds of apps will be created and businesses will be born that could exist only because of the superpowers of virtual reality and mixed reality. Experiences that go beyond gaming and entertainment, starting to transform VR into a tool for productivity, collaboration, and getting things done. Today, I wanna talk about some of these new categories and experiences, and spotlight some incredible developers who are blazing the trail for all of us and inspiring us along the way. While it's still early days, here are four categories that we find are really resonating with customers. One, work and productivity tools. Two, creator tools. Three, fitness, wellness, and sports. Finally, learning and exploration. Just as more people are working from different locations, developers are recreating the very foundations of how we work and collaborate together. For example, developers such as vSpatial, ENGAGE, Immersed, and Arthur are helping people work without the limitations of their physical environment, eliminating computer screens, workstations, and even rooms altogether. For example, Immersed allows you to add up to five virtual screens and easily move from one to the other to work or program in focus mode. Immersed has taken this a step further with their addition of Passthrough. Want to create a circular portal to easily find your mouse? Now you can. You can see your real desk, your keyboard, and customize Passthrough to your liking. With Immersed on Meta Quest Pro, you can stay in the headset longer for more productive work sessions. 3D design and modeling is creating yet another category in changing how we work. Developers are creating applications to serve designers, architects, prototypers, game developers, researchers, and more. Historically, designing 3D products or buildings or objects had to be done on 2D screens. What we're seeing now is developers augmenting specific areas of this workflow that can be done even better in a headset. Arkio, ShapesXR, Gravity Sketch, Nanome, and Resolve are great examples of experiences that enable builders to get a sense of size and shape with a virtual design against a physical space and review things collaboratively with their teams. Imagine you're an architect or a designer. Arkio augments your workflow by overlaying your design onto the real world so that clients can more easily understand your vision. Want to see a window where there isn't one, or a fully furnished room? You can do that. Arkio uses scene understanding in Passthrough to help you understand space and place in whole new ways. The architect can then hop into the room with a client for a live review to finalize the design. With ShapesXR, a designer can prototype their ideas in mixed reality, make notes and sketches on a real surface, and then share that with others. Oh, thanks to spatial anchors, it will stay exactly where they placed it. Or take Nanome, for example, where researchers can model and analyze molecular structures for general chemistry or for pharmaceutical drug discovery with other scientists collaboratively. We know that businesses of all sizes are looking to build their virtual office experiences, and over the past year, we've heard from many of you looking for easier access and distribution of both our headsets and your applications to business customers. To lay the foundation for this, next year we will evolve our distribution model so that any headset bought anywhere will have access to device management and business-grade features. That means any Meta Quest 2 or Meta Quest Pro headset can add business services, opening up accessibility and control that businesses of all sizes need in building their virtual experiences. These services will begin rolling out via Quest for Business in open beta starting later this year. Now let's turn to creator tools. This is one of my personal favorites. If you're a hobbyist, a gamer, or a student, developers are making tools to make art, music, immersive media creation better, faster, easier, and way more fun. Here are some incredible examples. With Tribe XR, you can learn to DJ on realistic decks and then jam with others and broadcast your set to Twitch or YouTube, like leading producer and DJ Dillon Francis did on Instagram. Check it out. Turn your room into an art studio with Painting VR. Paint with others on your virtual easel, and then show your art in real-world rooms and invite others to admire or critique your work. Are you a physics nerd? Well, with Figmin, you can import assets into a virtual sandbox with GIFs from Reddit or GIPHY, then remix all of that by adding physics to it, like that virtual tennis ball that bounces off of your real wall. You can create a virtual scene in your real space and publish your collection for others to use and enjoy. We think apps like these are the future of immersive experiences, blending physical and virtual reality. Our third category is fitness, sports, and wellness. In the opening keynote, we talked about the superpowers of Quest, infectiously fun, social, and immersive. That makes exercise feel more like a pleasure than an obligation, and frankly, that's a game changer for me. Developers like FitXR and Les Mills Bodycombat are doing incredible work here, and I can't wait for Gym Class to launch on Quest later this year. Let's look at fitness in greater detail. Developers are building sports and skill-based training apps for football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and other sports that also offer community-building experiences. These users represent serious players who spend significant time and resources training and may have the appetite to purchase training tools in VR that are economical or otherwise just geographically inaccessible. A great example of this is WIN Reality, which launched in June. Players use the app to practice a variety of drills, including batting practice, situational hitting, occlusion, and pitch recognition training, all helping them become better athletes. Within professional sports, developers are incorporating an impressive array of interactive features that allow fans to experience sports in whole new ways. Take developer YBVR and their Xtadium app. Xtadium allows fans to experience live and on-demand sports as if they were right there in the arena, with live camera switching, 8K streaming, and private viewing rooms for watching alone or with friends. Xtadium launches on Quest later this year. Now, we know that physical health is only one aspect of well-being. We know that mental health and wellness is essential to living a full life. On wellness, we're seeing alternate mechanics and modes emerge, whether that's staying seated, standing on a floor, that promotes balance, stretching, and mindfulness. Now, you may not consider your workspace to be an ideal place to practice mindfulness, but take TRIPP, for example. Their mixed reality experience enables users to wind down after work by converting their workspace or living room into a serenity garden, one that evolves and changes with user practice, so now more people can reap the benefits of mindfulness, resilience, and stress reduction. Finally, our fourth category is learning and exploration. This represents a significant opportunity for developers. To help build it, Meta Immersive Learning is investing in an ecosystem. By training the next generation of metaverse creators together with partners such as Coursera and edX, we will continue to help build the highest quality immersive content possible. We are also increasing access to learning through immersive tech and headset donations with other industry-leading partners like Unity. Learning also happens when you explore and wander. Now, you can do that, too. Take BRINK as an example, which is multiplayer and supports Meta Avatars. BRINK is an exploration travel app that takes users of any age to a journey to a wide variety of photoreal locations across the globe, allowing them to interact with their surroundings and learn about the areas that they explore. BRINK highlights native and indigenous cultures in each location by showcasing historical artifacts as well as educational hotspots focusing on topography, folklore, and preservation. Look, making something that people love is hard, really hard. You have to look past the hype and get to the heart of why it deserves to exist, for whom, and what form should it take. You believe, and you are building those experiences that pave the way for all of us to make the metaverse real. The opportunity is proven, and the community is real, built and sustained by you. Thank you for continuing to delight and surprise us with your creativity and for taking us on this journey with you. I hope you can tell that you are key to the success of the metaverse. The products and technology we're building, the ecosystem that we've nurtured, these are all in service to making you successful. Ultimately, I mean, that's what it's gonna take to make the metaverse a reality. Hey, everybody. I'm Melinda Davenport, back with my amazing co-host, Karen X. Cheng, and we just wrapped up the Developer State of the Union. I have to ask you, any initial thoughts so far? Yeah. There are so many exciting things to try, and, you know, I think a lot of creators and developers can worry about running out of ideas or feeling like you've already done your best ones or struggling to come up with new ideas. But I think the thing with ideas is that they don't just come out of thin air, you know? They come when you're exposed to new tools or new technology. For me, seeing what the new Meta Quest Pro can really do, it's just got me itching to work with it and see what I can come up with. Oh, I love that. We all need to keep things fresh, and of course, everybody wants to keep constantly learning. Yeah. I'm just excited about all the possibilities, and I also really liked what Chris said just now about creating a platform that developers would want to build on. From what I've heard today, I'm just excited to jump into it and see what I can build next. I love it. It's super inspiring, too. Also, huge thanks to Yardley, Chris, and Anand, and I can't imagine what 2023's gonna bring, and we're all so excited about it. Okay, listen, don't go anywhere. There's still so much more to experience today. Up next, time for some fantastic developer sessions. This year, you can choose your own adventure, with five concurrent tracks made up of 29 sessions and 89 speakers. It's really the most robust lineup we've ever had. Don't worry if you can't decide. All of the content will be made available after the event through metaconnect.com and on the Reality Labs Facebook page. Whether you're interested in design, augmented reality, growing your business, or all of the above, there is something for everyone. I have to ask you, Karen, you plan on catching anything? I was checking out the schedule, and there is a session called Metaverse Beyond Gaming, and that I wanna check out because I feel like VR, it's just best known for gaming, but I see so much potential in education and work and in learning new skills. That session is gonna be on the Grow Your Business track, but honestly, there's so many good sessions. You can't go wrong. The speakers here are so impressive. I feel like they're just living in the future. I love that. I love that so much. Let's get right to it, then, shall we? To those that are watching on desktop or mobile, scroll down and pick your desired track. They'll begin shortly. For everyone in Meta Horizon Worlds, you'll head over and choose the track that interests you the most. Go on, enjoy the sessions of your choice, and we'll see you right back here in just a bit.