The owner of Meta talked about Horizon Worlds, a world that looks like a video game from more than 15 years ago.
Last Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced via Facebook that Meta would launch Horizon Worlds, the company’s social metaverse platform, in France and Spain. But the announcement was loaded with controversy: the image that went up showed a metaverse precarious enough to come from a technology company billionaire.
The Facebook post was accompanied by an image of Zuckerberg’s avatar, with pale eyes, without any lighting, in what looked like a screenshot taken from a video game 20 years ago. For this, Zuckerberg came out to answer the criticism.
In the background were two models of the Eiffel Tower and the Basilica of the Tibidabo Cathedral so basic that no one could believe it. The image became a trend of “Second Life” for a while on Twitter, with people saying that it somehow looked “worse than the Sims game from decades ago.”
To make matters worse, Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement left his metaverse even more exposed by coinciding on the same day that Fortnite presented its special event with Dragon Ball Z, reinforcing its much more fun and attractive version of the concept.
Faced with these reactions, Zuckerberg came out to respond. This Friday, he shared an update on Horizon Worlds complete with a new version of his avatar and a rendering of an ancient Roman-style environment. In the post, he admitted, “The photo I posted earlier in this week was pretty basic: It was taken very quickly to celebrate the launch”.
In these pictures, it looks better. There’s lighting this time, and his avatar’s face has a real expression. The curious thing is the similarity of the new photo with the art of Fortnite.
Horizon Worlds, the Facebook metaverse
Horizon Worlds is one of the worst looking offerings seen, especially when you consider that Meta spent something like 10 billion dollars going after his Horizon, the VR-focused version of the metaverse, even embarrassingly changing his company name to reflect that.
The app, which has been available to users in an invite-only closed beta form since 2020, opened its services in the US and Canada last December and followed this release by opening its platform to customers in the UK, Ireland and Iceland this year.
It is accessed using the Quest VR headset. Despite the criticism, grew to 300,000 users in the first two months after its December 2021 launch, and in February, the Horizon Worlds Twitter account posted that more than 10,000 worlds had been created, though Meta did not explain how it plans to moderate the platform, one of the biggest issues common.
Meta is currently expanding the Horizon Worlds offerings, even bringing them to mobile phones. Horizon Worlds also released “world shopping” for a “handful” of creators, which would make it more similar to Roblox.
Anyway, from the criticism and the viralizations, the Facebook Metaverse goes having more and more publicity. But what it doesn’t seem to have is interested users.