Meta’s announcement of text-to-3D is an obvious next step in the company’s mixed reality goals. For a few months, I’ve used an AI tool named Meshy that allows you to create 3D assets and export them as USDZ files. Once in this format, it’s easy to grab and manipulate these 3D assets on Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest as real-world AR objects.

This announcement is just the start of some cool social media capabilities in Meta’s Horizon environment, allowing you to create virtually anything from photos or text and transform them into 3D objects you can wear.

Imagine uploading a favorite dress, pair of shoes, or a weapon from a cartoon and instantly converting that object into a 3D object you can mount in a 3D environment or place on a virtual avatar. It’s early days, but bit by bit, the groundwork is being laid to make all of this possible.

Meta shows off ‘3D Gen’ AI tool that creates textured models faster than ever.

Meta’s AI research team has a new system to create or retexture 3D objects based on a text prompt. It combines text-to-3D and text-to-texture generation models to go beyond AI-generated emoji or still images, Their paper (pdf) claims 3D Gen’s output is “3× to 60× faster” and preferred by professional artists in comparison to alternatives.