This week, Meta hosted the Meta Connect 2025 event during which it announced a plethora of developments, most aimed at improving the virtual reality and metaverse experiences. Among key announcements, the Meta Horizon Engine seemingly stole the spotlight. As per Mark Zuckerberg, years of work have gone into creating this engine from scratch and its goal is to make the metaverse experience top notch for end users.
The brand new Meta Horizon engine has been created to replace the Unity game engine — that allowed developers work on Virtual Reality apps for Meta Quest headsets. Announcing the Horizon Engine, Zuckerberg said that Unity’s runtime was not enough to bring the metaverse to life.
Meta has claimed that the new engine is capable of delivering much faster performances with quicker loading abilities, better graphics, and easier tools to create with.
“You can just use your Quest headset to scan a room in just a few minutes and turn it into an immersive, true-to-life world. Eventually, you’re going to be able to seamlessly blend hyperscape and worlds into horizon and have them all be connected too,” the tech mogul said, showing an immersive experience rendered by the Meta Horizon engine.
The launch of this engine comes at a time when Meta is accelerating work around “superintelligence” as the next iteration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). With this Meta believes that AI could generate task results either upto the human mark, or better.
To align its AI efforts with its metaverse initiatives — Meta has also introduced the Horizon Studio. Together with the Horizon engine — the Horizon Studio has been called as Meta’s foundational infrastructure for the metaverse.
“Meta Horizon Studio is going to include an Agentic AI assistant that will stitch together all of these different tools and further speed up the creation process using just simple text prompts. The Horizon engine and studio are going to enable immersive and interactive worlds across all of our products, starting with virtual reality and then one day coming to your glasses and coming to social media as well,” Zuckerberg noted.
Among other products, Meta has unveiled a new lineup of AI-backed glasses, including the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and the Oakley Meta Vanguard.