Meta launches first metaverse app: “social world-building”

by Will Tubbs

Lauren Moye, FISM NEWS

 

The first metaverse app released by Meta Platforms, Inc. publicly launched last week. Horizons World is available for free to certain users.

Horizons World, which has been compared to Minecraft and Roblox, offers users the chance to create personal avatars, build worlds together, and play mini-games. The game is now public for residents in the U.S. and Canada who are over the age of 18 and is free for users of Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 headset.

Meta tweeted a video trailer along with their announcement on Dec. 9:

“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.

The app has been in invite-only development mode for the past year. Meta’s announcement stated the company “spent the past year developing those tools and improving them based on creator feedback.”

Multiplayer games will be a staple of Horizon World, which allows up to 20 people to connect at one time. It also includes a randomized world-hopping mode to encourage the discovery of new mini-games and in-app activities.

Some of the development of Horizons World is based on creator-content through the use of a coding and creation interface. CNet’s Scott Stein described what the meta app offers users, including “a series of competitions” to challenge players to create new content.

“The timed events deliver cash prizes, and the assets can end up being shared as public assets,” Stein said. “The app encourages code-sharing so that builders can quickly riff and adopt ideas others have had, crowdsourcing new mods fast.”

Mark Zuckerberg, known best as the founder of Facebook, announced his company’s rebrand into Meta in late October with the intention to invest in a metaverse based on augmented reality technology. The signature social media app retained its name as one part of the company’s vision.

At the time, Zuckerberg said, “Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future.”

FISM previously explained the metaverse concept as expanding the “existent technology of virtual reality” to create an “extended reality.” Helpful comparisons used in the special report are Star Trek’s holodeck, the Matrix movies, and an older dystopian novel called “Snow Crash.”

The metaverse is considered a possible replacement to mobile internet and has already generated big investments. Reuters exclusively reported that a Meta Platforms associated company purchased trademark rights to a U.S. regional bank known as Meta Financial Group for $60 million on Monday. Nike Inc. also recently announced the acquisition of a virtual sneaker company.

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