Meta Horizon Engine at a Glance

• Scalability from cloud to mobile: The engine automatically scales from high-end cloud rendering to running on mobile phones. It can support crowds of live avatars in a single shared space, expansive environments that can be streamed as sub-levels, and automatic management of object quality through automatically generated LODs.
• Speed and performance: Worlds load and run quickly whether you’re multitasking in Horizon OS, exploring new worlds with friends on Meta Quest, or playing games on your phone via the Meta Horizon app.
• Familiar tools: The engine supports the formats and middleware developers know and love. It introduces powerful composition primitives—such as templates, inheritance, and overrides—to streamline world-building and customization.
• Platform evolution: The engine was designed to ensure a technical foundation that can grow and change over time without requiring updates to published content. It's also been designed from the ground up with user safety in mind.

The new platform aims for the best of both worlds – fast local authoring with ecosystem primitives for creators, and optimized delivery technology for players.

So What’s Under The Hood?

• Assets: A robust, data-driven, and creator-controlled asset pipeline that supports modern local workflows with standard tools and familiar middleware like PopcornFX for effects, FMOD for sound, Noesis for UI, and PhysX for physics.
• Audio: A spatialized audio system that stitches together experience sound, immersive media formats, and hybrid-mixed VoIP into a single immersive experience.
• Avatar: First-class integration of Meta Avatars, providing consistent embodiment and interaction behavior across the platform, and networked cross-instance crowd systems.
• Networking: A secure and scalable actor-based network topology that allows for low latency player-predicted interactions with server validation and creator-defined networked components.
• Rendering: A mobile and VR-first forward renderer, with a physically based shading model, built-in light baker, probe-defined lighting for dynamic objects, and a creator-defined material framework through a powerful, extensible, and stackable surface shader system.
• Resource Management: A resource manager, streaming system, and multi-threaded task scheduling framework to maintain the user experience by balancing quality and cost within the variable performance envelope of Quest and other platforms.
• Scripting: An extensible Typescript authoring environment to unify logic and control flow in worlds, with creator-defined components and clear entity lifecycles.
• Simulation: A data oriented ECS-based simulation system capable of efficiently simulating millions of networked entities.