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After 5½ years, yesterday marked my last day at Meta.
For those who may not know, I joined via the acquisition of my previous company, where we set out to build a continuously-updating 3D model of the world, enabling devices to understand where they are and what’s around them.
Together with @hulahuub, we believed a unified frame of reference was key to unlocking the next generation of spatial computing applications, from augmented reality to robotics. While we may have been early, it's clear the Cambrian explosion is now beginning—driven by general-purpose AI and a growing network of context-rich sensors.
At Meta, we continued that mission with LiveMaps: a visually, semantically, and physically predictive model of the world, collaboratively built by the devices that use it. It’s a bold vision led by @rapideRobot, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to work alongside him, @mingfeiy, @jajuengel, and the broader Surreal team in Reality Labs Research.
Despite a rocky start (we joined in Jan 2020 👀), I’m proud of the impact we had—kickstarting the @meta_aria academic program, and leading open science efforts to accelerate AI and ML research.
I’m especially proud of our work on the Aria Synthetic Environments and Aria Digital Twin datasets, which pushed the envelope for digital twin research and highlighted the importance of both real and simulated data for Spatial AI. Our team’s work on SceneScript demonstrated the first method for auto-regressively predicting the structure of an environment using end-to-end learning—recently extended by SpatialLM: github.com/manycore-resea…
Last year, my family and I relocated to Redmond, Seattle, to spend time closer to Reality Labs Research HQ. While there, I had the chance to tick off a career ambition: delivering a “Mother of All Demos” to MZ and the board. This demo will stand among the defining breakthroughs in human-computer interaction and I’m bullish to watch how the company will execute over the next decade.
As for what’s next, my wife and I recently had our second child, and I’m taking some time to reset back in London—recalibrate my sensors, defrag my hard drive. As a colleague put it: “The grass is always greenest where you water it.” I’m looking forward to doing exactly that here in Europe— taking some time to spend with family and reflecting on the next big thing.
If you're a founder, researcher, or operator working at the edge, please ping me a message, I’d love to connect.
LFG! 🚀🇬🇧💪
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