Meta CTO Gives Update On Quest 3’s Long-Delayed Augments Feature

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth gave an update on the progress of the long-delayed Quest 3 ‘Augments’ persistent mini-apps feature.

While Quest’s Meta Horizon OS supports having multiple 2D window apps open and active, you can currently only have one mixed reality app running, and not while in a VR world. This is in stark contrast to Apple Vision Pro’s visionOS, where the ‘Shared Space’ architecture and RealityKit framework allow for both windowed and volumetric apps to run alongside each other, with either passthrough or a virtual environment as the background.

Quest 3 Augments tease at Meta Connect 2023.

At Meta Connect 2023, just under four months after Apple Vision Pro and visionOS were revealed, Meta launched Quest 3. And on stage, Mark Zuckerberg announced that in 2024 the headset would get a feature called Augments.

Zuckerberg described Augments as “persistent spatially-anchored digital objects” that could run alongside each other in your physical space. Examples shown in a library screenshot included a clock, music player, and portals to your favorite games.

Videos leaked in early 2024 revealed that Augments could even have interactive elements, such as a playable miniature pinball game, an interactive calendar, and a pet-like virtual plant that can be watered.

Then, halfway through 2024, with no sign of Augments or word from Meta, Bosworth revealed that the Augments feature was being rebuilt from scratch as the original approach “wasn’t good enough”.

In an ask-me-anything (AMA) response on Instagram at the time, Bosworth explained that the originally planned technical architecture “wasn’t good enough”, so Meta went “back to the drawing board” to rebuild it “from scratch”.

Now, in a new AMA session over a year later, Bosworth has again responded to a question asking about the progress of Augments.

“I get this question a lot, and I understand why.

When we announced it at Connect a couple of years ago, we had a program, we had a framework, we were building it out, and then when we finally had it in hand, it just wasn’t good enough.

It had huge trade-offs on performance in a bunch of ways that we didn’t like, and we realized that the whole architecture of the system that had built to support them was wrong.

It was a pretty big mess. A public one. And I’ve been pretty open about that. In January or February of that year, when we pulled it, I talked about that.

You hate to announce something on the stage and then not deliver the thing. And we have a pretty good track record of not doing that for the most part. But at the same time, a thing that is worse than that is shipping a thing that you think isn’t great, and has really negative tradeoffs.

So we went back to the drawing board on that and reared the whole system from the ground up. And it’s taken us years, is the answer.”

Bosworth’s new response.

The response, while relatively vague, at least confirms that the feature has not been canceled.

As to why Meta had to rebuild Augments from the ground up in the first place, the answer seems to be in the leaked videos from early last year.

One video revealed that the original architecture Augments would be created in Meta Spark Studio, a defunct Windows and macOS application for making smartphone AR filters and experiences for the camera in Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Spark Studio supported importing and animating 3D assets, and implementing advanced functionality with JavaScript. But it seems this JavaScript-based approach couldn’t deliver sufficient performance for standalone mixed reality.

Meta killed Spark Studio just under a year ago, deprecating the ability to make third-party AR filters for its social media apps.

Meta Connect 2025 is set for September 17, just under a month from now, and it seems very possible we’ll get a more specific update there on the timeline for Augments arriving on Meta Horizon OS.