Last year Meta announced the so-called Augments feature, planned for Quest 3, which would allow persistent mini AR apps to live in the world around you. Now, eight months after the headset hit store shelves, Meta’s CTO explains why the feature has yet to ship.
Augments was announced as a framework for developers to build mini AR apps that could not just live persistently in the space around you, but also run concurrently alongside each other—similar to how most apps work on Vision Pro today.
And though Meta had shown a glimpse of Augments in action when it was announced last year, it seems the company’s vision (and desire to market that vision) got ahead of its execution.
This week Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth responded to a question during an Instagram Q&A about when the Augments feature would ship. He indicated the feature as initially shown wasn’t meeting the company’s expectation.
We were playing with [Augments] in January and we decided it wasn’t good enough. It was too held back by some system architecture limitations we had; it ended up feeling more like a toy and it didn’t really have the power that we think it needed to deliver on the promise of what it was.
So we made a tough decision there to go back to the drawing board, and basically [it needed] a completely different technical architecture. Starting from scratch basically. Including actually a much deeper set of changes to the system to enable what we wanted to build there. I think we made the right call—we’re not going to ship something we’re not excited about.
But it did restart the clock, and so [Augments is] going to take longer than we had hoped to deliver. I think it’s worth while, I think it’s the right call. But that’s what happened.
We’re only two-and-a-half months out from Meta Connect 2024, which would be the one-year anniversary of the Augments announcement. That’s where we likely to hear more about the feature, but at this point it’s unclear if it could ship by then.
