Meta announced that it will shut down its most famous version of the “metaverse” – and then reversed the decision.
The ongoing fate of ‘Horizon Worlds’ reflects a broader question over the future of the metaverse, which Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had once promoted as the future of technology.
The metaverse has been envisioned as a software world, accessed through virtual reality headsets, that would allow people to socialise over the internet but as if they were really together. Meta’s commitment to it was such that it inspired the company’s 2021 rebrand from Facebook to Meta, and the operation inside the company known as Reality Labs that is focused on developing it has spent $73 billion trying to do so since then.
But the software – the Quest headsets through which it can be accessed – have failed to take off, and the company has seemingly at least partly backtracked on its plans for the technology. Earlier this year, it announced that it was laying off around 1,500 people from the division.
It also said that it would shut down Horizon Worlds, the software that had been created to try and show the possibilities of the technology. This week, it said that stop supporting the app in June, making it available only on the web and through mobile apps.
But just days after, Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said that it would actually remain available. “We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR,” he said in a question and answer session on Instagram, in response to a user who said they were “heartbroken” by the decision to shut it down.
Since its launch, the world has been largely populated by a very small but sometimes very active community of users, who play games and socialise through virtual reality headsets. That does not seem to have been enough to encourage optimism about the technology at Meta – but is perhaps enough to keep the world available for some more time.
Mr Bosworth has claimed however that Horizon Worlds is seeing continued success on mobile, and suggested that focusing on that app was the reason behind shutting down the version for its Quest headsets.