Shachar Scott: Meta's Wearable Revolution

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast. Today I’m thrilled to be joined by Shachar Scott, VP of Global Marketing at Meta Reality Labs. Shachar plays a pivotal role in sharing Meta’s latest immersive technologies with millions of people and helping them to understand how these devices can become part of their everyday lives. From building on the groundbreaking Meta Quest headsets to stewarding the runway success of Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, which have sold over 2 million units since 2023, Shachar has been a key player in introducing wearable and immersive technologies to the world, all with a keen understanding of how these tools can enable more human and authentic connection. In our conversation today, we explore how wearable technology is reshaping the way we make and share stories, what it takes to market a product that asks people to literally change how they see the world and why authenticity is the key to building trust in a rapidly changing media landscape. Please join me in welcoming Shachar Scott to the FoST podcast.

Shachar, welcome to the podcast. It’s a delight to have you here.

 

Shachar Scott:

Thank you so much for having me, Charlie. I’m thrilled to be here.

 

Charlie Melcher:

So I thought I would start by asking you about 10 years into VR, right? Mark Zuckerberg invested $2 billion in Oculus in—2014, was it? The world of virtual reality took off because of that faith that he showed in it. How are you feeling 10 years in about the potential of that medium and where it is today?

 

Shachar Scott:

Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t here 10 years ago, but Mark is someone that clearly sees around corners and really saw the value of immersive technology and the ability to really experience gaming in another way that wasn’t just 2D and the value of creating experiences that didn’t just live in mobile gaming or on your television, but actually in the world around you. And so the evolution of what was Oculus, now Quest, and Meta Quest headsets that allowed you to become immersed completely in a universe that you were playing in, whether that was for fitness, whether you wanted to work out with your favorite trainer in Fit XR or in Supernatural, the opportunity to fully immerse yourself in a game. VR, virtual reality, allows you to do that in a way that no other device does. Rewind the clock a little bit to mixed reality with the Quest 3 headset that all of a sudden didn’t just immerse you but allowed you to be present in the environment that you were in and see LEGO Brick Tales on your own table and still see your husband walk through the door or your kids walk through the house.

And we’re continuing, obviously to invest in this space and we recently announced a pretty deep partnership with James Cameron and others in the space. And so you can kind of assume that we’re going to continue to invest not just in gaming and fitness and productivity, but also entertainment. How do we think about the medium as an extension of how you continue to experience the world around you, but in this full, medium immersive kind of way?

 

Charlie Melcher:

I guess one of the things that I found so interesting having been around for this whole run of the recent era of VR and its evolution to mixed reality was everyone understanding its incredible potential and yet some struggle, to be honest, to find the right footing. Like, a lot of the early story efforts, wonderful as they were, didn’t go on to create huge followings or be super lucrative or reinvent Hollywood, as I think we all sort of dreamt it was going to do. And you mentioned also games because of course there’s a world where people are already playing heroes and having agency and productivity—and now you’re mentioning coming back to storytelling. Maybe we were too early, maybe we hadn’t helped elevate the audience yet to understand VR. And you guys have just so led the way, obviously, where we are now with a Quest 3 versus where we were first generation, Oculus is tethered, heavy, expensive. We’ve made such progress in terms of a consumer product. Do you feel like we are at a place where we are now with a more mature market? Are you feeling the wind finally in your sails?

 

Shachar Scott:

Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that we were early and yet ahead, and I think that there was a tipping point and you saw companies like Apple reinforce the importance of this medium with their launch that didn’t go as they planned. But I think that what it allowed us to do is to really solidify our leadership in this space. What that also proved is that form factor really matters. Comfort really matters. The wearability really matters. And also price point matters. You need to make these things affordable and you need to make them wearable and comfortable. Something that Meta has always prioritized is access, democratization, making things affordable and available in as many markets as possible. We obviously reach almost 4 billion people through family of apps every single day, and we want to make things as available and accessible as possible to our consumers through that ecosystem. We do have the leading market share in terms of VR headsets today, and we’re really excited to continue to push the boundaries of that so that more people gain access to the hardware and experiences the two have to work together. So super excited about where that will continue to go. You’re right that what other companies have demonstrated is that this is not going anywhere and it’s going to be equally important to make that form factor comfortable and also affordable.

 

Charlie Melcher:

Tell me about the success that you’ve had with wearables, particularly glasses, right? That’s been a huge success for you. In case somebody’s been living under a rock, help them understand what’s been accomplished.

 

Shachar Scott:

The wearables have been a massive success. You are right. We launched in 2023, the first generation of Ray-Ban glasses. The glasses themselves allow you to take photographs, take videos up to three minutes, but they also just on a very basic level allow you to take phone calls, allow you to take Zoom calls, allow you to listen to your favorite podcast. We launched at a time really before AI picked up and right before the launch we brought AI on the glasses and the glasses were hit. Ray-Ban was definitely the right brand to launch with and it allowed people to feel really comfortable putting the technology on their faces. We had a massive year last year where we launched a number of limited editions. We had a really special moment with Ferrari. They have had a long history with Ray-Ban and we launched at F1 Miami and a limited edition that sold out within 24 hours.

And because of that success, what we were able to do this year is that we proliferated and we’ve launched with a new brand Oakley, what we were able to do with Oakley Meta. And what we will do is really more of a performance product. It allows you to work out, it allows you to do more than what you can do with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. And we’re super excited about that. And from a storytelling perspective, it will allow us to reach more athletes who are interested in really kind of pushing the boundaries of what they can do with sport and ai. So super excited about that and the success of that.

 

Charlie Melcher:

I see you as a company coming at this from both ends, right? You had Oculus, which was this very powerful virtual reality headset, and then you have super light and easy to wear wearable glasses and been very bold in both and successful in both. But maybe again, the killer product is probably somewhere in the middle. But it just feels to me like there’s a vision there at Meta to come from these two different ends and work your way towards this kind of ultimate consumer product that is a wearable that’s not too heavy, has very comfortable form factor that’s not too expensive and is a real popular platform for all sorts of uses: productivity, sports, maybe gaming, maybe all sorts of storytelling. I mean, that’s what we had all sort of dreamt about was to be able to take the power of our imaginations that is fueled by the digital world, by everything we can do in special effects and with bits, layer it onto the world. So am I right that you’re sort of coming for either end, working towards the middle?

 

Shachar Scott:

Yeah, I mean I think similarly with the glasses, the AI glasses, there are different use cases and there’s different reasons to want to wear the glasses. You can actually use your prescription in them. You can take ’em to any LensCrafters or any optical store and you can swap out the lenses to have your prescription in them. So they are functional, but they also have all this technology baked into them. The headset does not have that, right? And so the glasses are for a different use case, they are literally meant to be your everyday all day wearers, whereas the headset is not. The headset—the battery life alone is three to four hours and then you have to recharge it. So I think that in of itself is different than where we are today with the AI glasses. Of course, the software does work together in that Meta AI works across both devices, Instagram, WhatsApp, all of the family of apps work across both, and that is a very consistent part of that user experience. My glasses have become my, like—I can’t travel without them. I can’t leave the house, I can’t take a phone call without them. That’s pretty different than I want to watch a movie or I want to have a workout. Very different use cases.

 

Charlie Melcher:

So it can be hard to get people to adopt new technologies, right? They’re not comfortable, they don’t know how to use it. How do you as a storyteller try to communicate to get people to try these things?

 

Shachar Scott:

I mean, I think two things are really important. Number one, demo. When you are trying to create a new behavior or introduce people to something that has never been done before, you’re essentially starting from scratch and demoing is a key part of that. Hardware is just different. You have to actually try it to believe it. And what we see time and time again when you try it instantly, people are like, oh my God, I get it instantly they hear for the first time the audio and they’re shocked at how good the speakers are on the glasses or they’re shocked at how crisp the optics are. People just don’t understand it until they see it. So demo is the number one thing that we try to do and we try to do that in a number of different ways. So we show up in retail, we show up at events, we show up where people are already going so that we can, I interface with them in a very white glove, high touch in-person way where they can experience the product and demo it in a way that feels easily accessible and also gets them to try it where they can then say, okay, I get it.

So that’s number one. I think number two, we really put the product in people’s hands to understand how they use it. And once we see how they use it, then we can easily tell stories of why that’s so exciting to them that authenticity is real. And it also really changes that piece of collateral or marketing to feel, not like marketing or advertising, but feel like a story that you really connect with. And so that to me is I think the magic that we’ve really unlocked that’s important.

 

Charlie Melcher:

The other thing that I love about the opportunity of these new technologies is that they are more human. They’re more organic to who we are as a species. We didn’t evolve to hunch over our phones and type things out with our fingers. We evolved to look and to see and hear and move and dance and run and jump and all those wonderful things. And I guess these are evolutions of the technology getting more advanced, which means that it gets in a way more invisible, less obtrusive and more organic and naturally used. So—big fan, and have long believed that we were heading in that direction. And this is just big step forward in that way. So let me ask you about where you see the potential for storytellers. Should people be racing out to try to create for these platforms? Are these a platform?

 

Shachar Scott:

I mean, I think so. I think that they are an amazing storytelling device. There’s a couple of different ways that content creators can really be more in the moment and be more creative and also create content for their communities. I’ll share a couple examples. We worked with Tyla. She was shooting “Water” at the time, a new song that she had launched and she wanted to shoot the whole music video through the glasses and we were like, great. We worked with Winnie Harlow—brilliant. She’s an entrepreneur, she’s a stylist. She cares a lot about putting looks together. She put together a bunch of looks using AI, but also again, hands-free going into her closet, being able to feel, touch, textures, colors, put together a bunch of looks without having to have her phone all these things down, have a bunch of lights, have a bunch of things together. And so I do think that these are a tool that creators should adopt in terms of how they can create maybe not all of their content, but in a way that feels authentic to them. And yeah, is it a way for chefs, DJs, producers to be able to create content for their communities without having to have this giant setup? Totally.

 

Charlie Melcher:

You’re inspiring me to do this myself. We go see all these amazing immersive experiences. We’re following them all over the world, and we’ve been thinking about how do we capture this and we should share it back through social media—time for me to get a pair.

 

Shachar Scott:

We will definitely help make that happen.

 

Charlie Melcher:

Okay, great. Thank you. How about the Ferrari pair? No.

 

Shachar Scott:

I know that one’s sold out. It’s gone, but we’ll see if we can make that one come back.

 

Charlie Melcher:

So let me ask you this now. As a marketer and somebody who’s worked at a lot of different companies and learned a lot along the way, what are the big challenges from a corporate marketing perspective today as the landscape has changed that you are facing and how do you overcome those challenges?

 

Shachar Scott:

Everything that we do needs to be measured and measurable. I think that we are living obviously in a very unique time when not only is attention limited in terms of the number of messages that each of us are bombarded with, but the information and the time that we have with our consumers is so valuable that we have to make each moment that we have with them count. And so I think being measured, being very efficient and with every dollar that we are spending, those are the things that are keeping me up at night. I think also just being very real. I think that people see through bullshit, and if you’re not using real people or real stories or real authentic ways that people are interacting with your products, consumers are so savvy, they’re so smart, they’re going to see right through it. So I think that’s something that I have really held our teams to, to really make sure that we are just being super authentic and real with our marketing messages and our campaigns. We cast real gamers, we cast real people that use our products every single day. I think those are the things that really matter. Authenticity is the most important thing that I would say every marketer should care deeply about for their brand. Given how little time consumers have connecting with brands, the best thing that you want your consumers to become are advocates of your brand, and they’re not going to do that if they don’t believe in your brand. They can’t love your brand if they don’t believe in it.

 

Charlie Melcher:

One thing I’ve heard you reference a few times seems to be marketing inspired by fashion. Some of the ideas of branded drops or limited runs, are you taking a page from the world of fashion?

 

Shachar Scott:

Yeah, I mean absolutely. I think consumers love things that feel exclusive and special and that are kind of insider, but I also think that it allows us to tap into more audiences that have affinities for different brands. So I think doing more of those will be something that you should expect from us. I also think it is an opportunity to keep the base line that we’ll keep on, in stores and obviously online, fresh and interesting, and it will create excitement in that kind of always-on availability. So yeah, I do think it is something that we have learned from in fashion. I also think is something that consumers love. They love collabs. People wait in lines for them. There’s obviously a very deep consumer behavior there that we’ve tapped into that we’ll continue to do.

 

Charlie Melcher:

In the book that I’ve recently written that’s coming out this fall called “The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences are Transforming Our World,” I put forward this idea that we’re moving to this age where we want to be the heroes in our own adventures. We’re tired of being the passive consumers just sitting back and watching and listening, but instead want to have these embodied, agentic, immersive, social, responsive experiences because that’s ultimately how we evolved as a human species. We are all of those things. The media that has us sitting quietly in the dark and not talking, not moving and just watching is not natural to us. Do you have a kind of overall philosophy, do you think, at Meta to help move us to this kind of immersive storytelling where we really are enabling people to play a more active role, to be embodied and multisensoral, to be social, to be able to create and succeed and play and story together? Is that aligned with where you think Meta’s vision is?

 

Shachar Scott:

I do. I mean, I think it’s the DNA of the company. I mean honestly, I think it has always been about fostering that human connection from the very beginning of when Mark launched Facebook and through the evolution of it, with the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Literally what you just described, I think is enabled by a lot of the technology, both the hardware and the software that we get to work on every single day. So I think the beauty of what you just described is not just the future, but it is the present. Being able to do that and do it at scale, being able to do it where we also get to do it as a force for good partnerships like the one would Be My Eyes, where the glasses have actually become an AI assistant for low vision community where you’ve been able to replace the ability for low vision community to have that AI assistant next to them that can help them read, see what’s in front of them, cross the street safely. There’s just a lot that AI can do and that the glasses can do. So I feel very, very lucky that we get to work on the technology that has kind of pushed the boundaries of that in a good way and also really has helped us figure out what is possible. But I think to your point of immersive storytelling, I think we’re just in the beginning of that.

 

Charlie Melcher:

This is a good segue into what role do you think AI is going to play in all of this? Will it be a really powerful tool to enable this type of next generation immersive storytelling? It’ll allow for intimacy at scale and personalization at scale, or is it going to do just the opposite and no one’s going to interact with each other anymore? You’re just going to be in some bubble with your love interest, which is an AI like Her?

 

Shachar Scott:

Yeah, definitely not the latter. I think Mark just shared kind of his vision for Meta Superintelligence Labs, which he’s really incubated with some incredible new talent that he’s brought to Meta. And so I think that we are figuring it out. But I would say that I think AI and what Mark’s vision is for the company is that we’ll be able to put it in the hands of people to create that personalization and also leverage it as a tool more than anything to help people create better stories. It is definitely not meant to replace human connection. That is definitely not the intent of it. We’re leveraging AI in our hardware as a utility in terms of helping people have that accessibility to information when they need it the most, whether that’s turn by turn directions or how to fix a flat tire if you need to do that hands-free. So I think we are still learning, but I think hearing from Mark that it is really important to put that technology in the hands of people and what it means for them in terms of whether that’s storytelling or information gathering is important, and seeing how they use it is going to be important too.

 

Charlie Melcher:

I really appreciate that there are these new media that you’re helping to invent and that creators can use them in interesting and innovative ways. Are there new technologies that you’re bringing out that you can talk about?

 

Shachar Scott:

Not yet, but I would say that tune in to connect September 17th. There’ll be some fun announcements that Mark will make on stage that I think the world will be excited to hear more about. So tune in for sure, September 17th.

 

Charlie Melcher:

I always try to think about: if there was a young person in our field who’s listening to this podcast and looking for inspiration or thinking about where they’re going next… if there’s some advice that you might lend to them, whether as a marketer or as somebody in the world of immersive technology. What would you say to a young person today in terms of how to evolve their career?

 

Shachar Scott:

I’ve been in my career 26 years now, and I certainly never imagined I’d be sitting here right now 26 years ago. I could not have predicted. And I think the beauty about technology, and I am so lucky to sit at the intersection of marketing and technology and why I love where I am is because technology has changed in marketing. If I could give advice to my younger self or if I could offer any sort of career advice to people just starting their careers, I would say don’t try to predict everything or think of your path as linear. I think that these things are meant to be stepping stones almost like a lily pad is, and you go from one to another, not necessarily knowing where the next one is going to lead to. And there’s so much that is changing because of the rapid scale of innovation and the beauty of things like technology that is evolving and changing the way that consumers are also adopting technology, but also how the market is then adopting the way that technology’s in shaping other industries that we just can’t predict everything. Give yourself grace. Be really open to what the future is going to hold and be an experienced student. Never stop learning because the future is going to change so much and much faster than you can predict, and there’s no way to know what you’re going to do 25 years later. So I think being really open to what the possibilities are will allow you to not hold back or also prevent yourself from trying something that you never could have predicted you would’ve landed in.

 

Charlie Melcher:

Shachar, my sincere thanks for joining me today. It’s been such a pleasure to speak with you. I so appreciate sharing your unique insights and look forward to continuing to follow the incredible innovation that comes from Meta.

 

Shachar Scott:

Thank you so much for having me, and I look forward to seeing you soon.

 

Charlie Melcher:

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been the FoST Podcast. Thank you for listening.

At FoST, we’re always following the latest developments in immersive technology, and we’re thrilled to be able to share our learnings with our community. To become part of the FoST community, please visit our website at fost.org to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, find more episodes of this podcast and pre-order your copy of my forthcoming book, “The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World.”

The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.