Meta wants to take its metaverse everywhere

Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: What’s next for Horizon Worlds, and TiVo is giving up on DVRs.

The glasses stole the show: When Meta held its annual Connect developer conference last month, the company’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses got a lot of attention. Without new hardware to announce, VR took a bit of a backseat. Sure, there was James Cameron, who is helping the company bring 3D movies, shows, and sports events to Quest headsets. But what about that whole metaverse thing? How’s that going? To get an update on Meta’s efforts to make VR social, I talked to the company’s metaverse VP, Vishal Shah. 

Meta’s struggles with Horizon Worlds, the company’s social metaverse platform, have been well-documented. Shah himself complained in a series of leaked 2022 memos that not even Meta’s employees were using the platform, leading him to pose the question: “If we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

The company has since launched a series of polished games within Horizon and spent heavily to attract VR developers to the platform. At this year’s Connect conference, Meta doubled down on those efforts by announcing not just AI developer tools, but also a whole new game engine for Horizon Worlds. 

All of this is part of the company’s efforts to turn Horizon Worlds into a link between social 3D spaces everywhere, from headsets to phones to your Facebook and Instagram feeds — and one day, as Mark Zuckerberg suggested during his Meta Connect keynote, perhaps even glasses.

Worlds apart: making VR games work on phones isn’t easy

When Meta launched the first version of Horizon Worlds in late 2021, it very much embraced a kind of DIY ethos. Developers could easily build games and worlds in headset, but the resulting experiences all lacked texture and complexity. Remember Zuckerberg’s selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower? That was essentially how Horizon Worlds games looked at the time. “The ceiling of what you could make was low,” Shah says. “It was just not compelling enough.”

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