After more than a year in private beta, Meta has made its virtual reality (VR) platform Horizon Worlds available to consumers in the United States and Canada. It’s the company’s first product since rebranding as Meta, and it aligns with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the “metaverse.”
Users must be 18 or older to use the program, which allows them to create their own worlds and mini-games.
It’s akin to Roblox and Ready Player One’s OASIS virtual reality universe. Users can engage with other avatars by creating a legless VR avatar in the same style as its workplace meeting system Horizon Workrooms.
It also lets you to hang out in virtual space with up to 20 people at once, and it’s free for Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 headset users. Horizon Worlds was only available only to Oculus VR users in beta last year, but the app is now available to everyone. In its release, Meta stated, “Our ambition for Horizon Worlds is to bring to life a creator-friendly VR area with best-in-class social world-building tools.”
“And we’ve spent the last year refining and strengthening those features in response to creator feedback.” Horizon Worlds does not pay its creators directly, but Meta has set up a “creator fund” to reward those who win competitions. Meta announced its rebranding from Facebook in October.
The corporation announced at the time that it will spend roughly $10 billion (€8.8 billion) developing metaverse technology during the next year. “Our goal is for the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade, to host hundreds of billions of dollars in digital comme