Today we are sitting down with Andrew Bosworth, Boz, the CTO of Meta. Today was a huge day at Connect. We got to see some of the coolest stuff like the Quest 3S launch and the announcement, and we are getting to see some of the prototypes of Orion, the AR glasses that Meta has been developing. So without further ado, I have Andrew here. It's nice to meet you. I'm super excited to chat about everything that's going on at Meta and what you guys have been up to. I guess to start off, obviously the 3S got announced today. We'll be launching here pretty soon.
Super well kept secret. Obviously, no one knew, no one saw that coming. That's what I pride myself on.
Yeah. For you guys, how important was it that you came down in the price from the three to make it more accessible for people?
Yeah, I mean, if you think about what we're trying to build with Quest, we talk about the Quest ecosystem, not the Quest product line. It's the ecosystem. What is going to get developers to build great experiences, more people using the headset? The best way to do that is to make it more accessible to more people. So for us, all the engineering that went into the Quest 3, let's call that some amount of engineering, it takes just as much to then get it into an affordable price point with the 3S. What we hope is that brings the consumers in, makes developers feel confident that they can build this ecosystem, that in turn brings more consumers in, and you got the flywheel going. We've been seeing great growth in the VR industry over the last several years, especially with a big bump with mixed reality in the last year. I think this has a chance to really put it over the top.
That's awesome. And from a developer's perspective, is there a certain demographic that you think that price point will hit? Is it going to be a lot more kids coming onto the platform, or people trying to do more lifestyle things like fitness? What demographic are you hoping to attract?
All of the above. Teen and young adults are tremendously eager users of the platform. If you look at experiences like Gorilla Tag, Rec Room, VR Chat, people are spending tremendous amounts of time, and these are really meaningful experiences for them. For a fitness enthusiast, maybe at the Quest 3 price point it was a little tougher to pull the trigger. Now at 299, you say, 'Hey, this is something I could really use in my daily fitness routine.' So for all those use cases and a bunch more that we haven't even gotten into, now that the mixed reality APIs are going to be made available, hopefully we're just scratching the surface of what's possible with a larger audience.
Awesome. With that, I think the next accessibility point is with the glasses and with everything with Ray-Ban, and even just things with the Horizon OS. To stay on the Quest, the Horizon OS has a lot of announcements about streamlining for devs. From a consumer perspective, if you're someone who just picked up the headset and is excited about the next two years of cool apps, what are some of the things that devs are now going to be able to create?
Two answers for me. The first one I hinted at a minute ago: we are going to provide access to developers who want to develop mixed reality apps where they have camera access and the ability to understand and analyze the images coming in from the sensors. I think that's a potentially huge game changer for a bunch of use cases, some very fun and entertainment-oriented, but some much more practical. For me, if I have home repairs to do, don't just show me a YouTube video, but show me something that takes the image of what I'm looking at, the oven part that needs repair, and show me what I need to do. I think that's a huge unplumbed area that will go big once the headset is not only capable in terms of the APIs being available, but also affordable. The second one is really pushing harder on the social APIs we've done, making it easier for people to have avatars, making it easier for developers to use those avatars and our social systems to build software that's fundamentally social. It's not a mistake that I mentioned those titles earlier that are very social, and those are the biggest revenue opportunities. Gorilla Tag at 100 million, and the biggest time spent are social. That's not trivial to build if you're a developer, and we want to take that off people's hands and make it easier. So we've got a couple really promising areas where hopefully developers say, 'Hey, the thing I wanted to build is now possible, or at least much easier and cheaper to build.'
Absolutely. Shifting into the AR glasses, the rare clear plastic ones that we used to show off.
Yeah, you can't even tell the difference.
That's right. We're getting close. Can you give a 30-second synopsis of the development that you guys have put in all these years?
The research started 10 years ago. The product effort started five and a half or six years ago. When it started, we really thought it was a moonshot. We probably had less chance of this than launching something to the moon. That's how we thought of it. It was a tremendous effort over a huge period of time, and we're super proud of it. 70 degree field of view, full color, incredible interaction design using a neural interface wristband. It also does hand tracking, uses eye tracking, but you can have your hands completely at your side, even out of view of the cameras, and still be able to interact with it. It's not just a hardware prototype. It works. We've got an operating system that runs. You can scroll Instagram, like your Instagram reels, browse the web, watch videos, do video calls. It uses Codec Avatars to render really realistic looking avatars, even just wearing the glasses. You can see the person you're talking to in full fidelity. Nothing like this has ever existed. It's really crazy to say that, but it's true. You'll forgive me if I seem a little brash about it, but we just didn't know if we could do it. We just didn't know if it could be done.
