Welcome back for another episode of Boz To The Future, a podcast from Reality Labs. In today’s episode, the host, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, is joined by Reality Labs Research Chief Scientist Michael Abrash.
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The impact of Abrash’s decades of work can be seen across the industry. He developed some of the first games for the IBM PC back when games had to run on 64k of memory and four colours. He also worked on Windows NT and led graphics for its first two versions. “That’s still the operating system that gets used by over a billion people every month, so 30 years later, that’s pretty cool,” he says.
Most people will know him by way of Quake, which he co-wrote with John Carmack and is seen by many as a major inflection point for immersive 3D gaming. He’s also the author of several books, including Michael Abrash’s Programming Black Book.
Abrash came to work at Meta (then Facebook) because he believes that AR and MR will be the next real leap in how humans interact with the digital world.
Together, Abrash and Bosworth cover a range of topics, from the incredible progress Reality Labs Research has made through a decade of exploring and prototyping novel ideas to the technologies it’s brought to Meta’s products in-market, like hand tracking, pancake lenses, and spatial audio. They take a look back at some of the biggest developments of the last 10 years—including Touch controllers and inside-out tracking—and look ahead to the next decade on the horizon. The most exciting as well as the most surprising development for Abrash has been the sudden rise and relevance of compelling smart glasses. The ability to pair always-available contextual AI with a first-person perspective on the world and a stylish form factor should equate to a digital assistant that genuinely understands your goals and needs and is thus able to proactively help you as you go about your day.
They discuss the difficult but exciting challenges that lie ahead in building the next generation of computing devices, including full AR glasses with an immersive display. There’s a need to work within compute, power, thermal, and weight constraints, all while pioneering and miniaturising new technologies to fit in a socially acceptable form factor. As Mark Zuckerberg recently noted, listeners will learn more about Meta’s AR glasses prototype later this year.