Meta builds social reality space Horizon Worlds
Facebook’s parent company Meta has released its first social reality space, Horizon Worlds, after a year of testing.
The app lets users build mini-games and activities on top of the base game, and comes after Mark Zuckerberg announced his plans to “build the metaverse” in October.
Meta has put $10m (£7.6m) into a “creator fund” to reward community creators who win competitions and there is no way that users can make money in Horizon Worlds.
To access Horizon Worlds, users will need to buy a Oculus Quest 2 headset sold by Meta, which you can pick up for around £299.
“Our vision for Horizon Worlds is to bring to life a creator-friendly VR space with best-in-class social world-building tools,” Meta said in its announcement. “And we’ve spent the past year developing those tools and improving them based on creator feedback.”
The creation tools are built directly into the virtual reality game, so players can access them directly without any extra downloads or steps, and float around as their own avatar. Meta said it will hire 10,000 people in Europe to build out its concept for the metaverse.
However, as CNN pointed out, Horizon Worlds is not the first time Meta and its subsidiary Oculus have tried to popularize social interaction via VR. The company launched virtual hangout apps Oculus Rooms and Facebook Spaces in 2016 and 2017, respectively, which let small groups of users gather in VR. The company shut down both VR apps in October 2019, however. It then announced a virtual social world, which at the time was called Facebook Horizon.