The company initially planned to discontinue VR Horizon Worlds experiences, but they will now remain accessible ‘for the foreseeable future.’ Meta is altering its decision to close its VR metaverse. On Monday, it announced the closure of the VR version of its 3D social platform Horizon Worlds on June 15th to focus on a mobile version. However, in a Wednesday Instagram AMA, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth stated that existing VR worlds will stay available, and the Horizon Worlds VR app will be downloadable “for the foreseeable future.”
Meta is retaining VR Horizon Worlds experiences to support “the fans who reached out, like yourself, who really care about that,” according to Bosworth. The company will not release new VR Horizon Worlds games and remains focused on the mobile version, as “that’s where most of the consumer and creator energy already was,” Bosworth explained.
Meta’s investments in VR software haven’t been very successful; it recently laid off around 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closed three VR studios, ceased new content for the VR fitness app Supernatural, and ended its metaverse for work. Bosworth mentioned that Meta views the metaverse more broadly as encompassing not just VR, virtual worlds, and immersive spaces, but also AR, where digital artifacts overlay physical things, implying the metaverse is already here but unevenly distributed.
This includes actions like someone on their phone next to you. Bosworth elaborated:
“When someone is using their phone while physically with you, at the dinner table, when you talk to them, they might not hear you because they have transported themselves through the glowing rectangle into a digital space. It doesn’t have to be three-dimensional; they could be scrolling media or in a text world, but they’ve transported themselves. Internally, at least, me and Mark have always had this broad view of the metaverse as this digital, physical construct.”