Meta Horizon: New Tools & Incentives for Creators + More Mobile Worlds to Explore
On mobile or in-headset, Meta Horizon is your ticket to fun with friends. You can explore new worlds, go on epic adventures, and experience front-row action at live events. More and more creators and developers are building compelling experiences for everyone to enjoy, and our growing suite of tools are making it easier than ever before. We’re empowering creators to build worlds for mobile and VR faster and more easily by giving them a comprehensive suite of advanced generative AI tools, plus more ways to monetize their work.
Today, we’re highlighting some new generative AI tools that are helping to accelerate the ecosystem and announcing the results of our recent $1 million Meta Horizon mobile creator competition.
Fast & Easy Ways for Creators to Earn
We launched mobile milestone rewards in May, which help creators earn earlier on in their journey. Creators can now start earning right away with one-time rewards as engagement with their mobile worlds grows. It’s a simple way to earn some cash with milestones that you can hit quickly and easily. And you can earn more rewards as you go—the more players engage with your mobile worlds, the greater your rewards.
Of course, before you can earn those rewards, you’ll need to create and publish your world. Luckily, we’ve got a ton of tools to help you do just that! Whether you’re a creator who’s just getting started or a seasoned developer who’s short on time, generative AI can help dramatically reduce the time it takes to prototype, iterate, and ship.
Breathing New Life Into Worlds
We’re introducing the ability to create voice-only AI-enabled NPCs (think of it like an interactive AI-powered voice that’s part of your story arc) to help make your worlds feel more vibrant than ever before. And this is just our first set of tools for NPCs, with more sophisticated capabilities coming soon. With a few simple clicks, you can now add a memorable AI-enabled voice-only NPC to your world.
We’ve also added eight new asset bundles to the public asset library, which creators can use to create new NPC characters (with bodies) in their worlds. These asset bundles come alongside a typescript wrapper for the locomotion API. This enables creators to add character movement, so your NPCs move through your world and trigger built-in animations to interact with players.
Better Generative AI Tools: Improved Audio, More Complex Game Logic, and Expanding Access
We’ve upgraded Ambient Sound Generation and Sound Effects Generation, so they generate output even faster and with higher sound quality. We also updated Typescript Generation with Llama 4 under the hood, which lets you quickly generate more complex and advanced game logic. And our generative AI creator tools are now available for all creators in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand and coming soon to the European Union, so even more people can build richer worlds and engaging experiences with ease.
We’ll also be adding Environment Generation to our suite of generative AI creator tools very soon! Environment Generation will let creators build an environment based on several different themes to further accelerate the creation process. For example, you can create an island environment and add trees, decide what shape you want the island to be, and choose if you want it to be a desert island or tropical. Environment Generation will let you do all this with simple prompts or using granular controls for different parameters. It’s another important step toward our goal of eventually letting you build an entire world from just a few simple prompts.
Check out this handy table summarizing the generative AI-enabled toolkit available to you now (with even more tools coming soon):
But wait—there’s more! Meta Horizon Creator Partners can now upload custom textures or use generative AI retexturing tools to design bespoke avatar clothing in the Horizon Creator Portal. Choosing from a set of default 3D clothing meshes, they can use custom textures to tailor unique, thematic clothing that blends seamlessly with their worlds and enhances the user experience. They can sell their avatar clothing as exclusive in-world purchases, and players can then sport their new looks wherever Meta Avatars appear across the Horizon Platform, Facebook and Instagram. Thousands of clothing items have already been generated, and in-world sales have more than doubled since the rollout of creator-made clothing. We’re optimizing these tools further and expect to roll this functionality out to all creators later this year.
Announcing the Winners of Our $1M Meta Horizon Creator Competition
By expanding access to Horizon on mobile, we’re helping to create new markets for the creator community. As part of our $50 million Meta Horizon Creator Fund, we recently hosted a $1 million Meta Horizon mobile creator competition specifically aimed at mobile world development. The theme was “Mobile Genre Showdown,” and today, we’re excited to announce the winners.
First place recipients in each genre category will take home a cool $100,000, while second and third place recipients will take home $30,000 and $25,000, respectively.
Nearly a quarter of competition winners were first-time world creators. And overall, approximately a third of the creators who submitted worlds—including collaborators—were net-new creators. Of submitted competition worlds, we estimate that almost 70% used the Horizon desktop editor’s generative AI tools to support the creation process.
These new competition worlds join a growing library of mobile-first experiences—like Chicken Tag, Jabu Jabu, and The Last Exit—recently launched by top creators. With a steady influx of new content in Horizon, there’s always something to explore.
The Horizon ecosystem continues to grow, and with that growth comes change. Our newer consumer cohorts are driving greater demand for quick, snackable, and social content, and creators are rising to the challenge. They’re leveraging our new generative AI tools to monetize faster and ship new, engaging social experiences to delight players with every day.
So what are you waiting for? Download the latest version of the Horizon mobile app on iOS or Android and kickstart your summer today.
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