Meta Spark

Meta Connect 2023 Roundup

The biggest Meta Spark announcements and event highlights from Connect.

By: Dan Logan, Danielle Erb, and Amanda Le
September 28, 2023
Meta Spark

Meta Connect 2023 Roundup

The biggest Meta Spark announcements and event highlights from Connect.

By: Dan Logan, Danielle Erb, and Amanda Le
September 28, 2023

The Meta Spark Community

Over the last year, Meta Spark has continued to thrive, with over 750 million1 users engaging with mobile AR experiences monthly. This would not have been possible without you, the Meta Spark community.

Connect

People of all different cultures, backgrounds, and experiences are able to learn, share, and express themselves through their Meta Spark creations. Whether it’s the creators and developers who have been with us since the beginning or those who are just joining us on this journey, we are continually impressed by the endless creativity, mentorship, and camaraderie of this group.

For this year’s Meta Connect, we’re focusing on enabling you to build the augmented layer of the metaverse, with everything from new tools and capabilities, to new monetization opportunities. Join us in paving the way to an AR future.

New Tools and Capabilities

Our mobile offerings this year are focused on two areas: improving realism and accelerating creation and iteration.

When it comes to creating Meta Spark experiences, 3D models and animations are key. Our first set of new capabilities and tools aims at improving this process, helping you create seamless and realistic animations.

For those who are more inclined to use coding tools, we’re introducing a new and improved Meta Spark command line interface (CLI) and VSCode Extension that will make it easier to manage multiple projects simultaneously, execute common commands through UI shortcuts, and debug your scripts.

Even with all these new tools and capabilities, we know that getting started on a project can be tough. Templates are a great way to speed up the creation process, so we’re introducing a new catalog of 20 templates. These are aimed at helping you understand how multiple capabilities can come together to build interactive games and world facing experiences.

Once your project is up and running, you’ll also be able to run our new Meta Spark profiler, which will provide you with performance metrics and tools to help you debug and optimize your project. We’re also restructuring the Meta Spark .arproj file into separate components to make it easier to manage and collaborate on projects.

We hope that this new set of tools and capabilities can bring on a new wave of mobile AR experience and look forward to releasing even more throughout the rest of this year, so keep an eye out.

Monetization through AR Ads

Watch the video by clicking on the image above.

We began testing AR Ads on Facebook Feed back in 2018. Since then, we’ve expanded the product to Instagram and additional placements across stories and reels. Their immersive nature has emerged as a way for brands to create deeper, more engaging connections with people that drive meaningful results at lower costs.2 With Ads Manager, AR becomes a full funnel tool that can drive Discovery, Consideration and Action across multiple surfaces and placements such as Feed, Stories, and Reels. In fact, we’ve seen that campaigns that include AR regularly outperform those that don’t, with a 3x boost in brand lift and average 5.05 pt increase in ad recall.2

These AR experiences are a way to help new and experienced developers to monetize at scale.

We’re excited to announce AR Ads is moving from open beta into broad availability for creators and advertisers. This offers creators an incredible opportunity to help them to monetize through partnerships by building AR Ads with Meta Spark. AR Ads are simple to build and can increase the ways in which creators can partner more deeply with their favorite brands. And with app install campaigns and age gating solutions for several verticals coming soon, we’ll continue to unlock new solutions for creators and advertisers.

Learn more about AR ads and start building today.


  1. Meta internal data, Sept 2022
  2. Internal Meta Analysis, BR, CA, DE, UK, MX, US, 2022,2023