It is the first major such release since Facebook renamed itself Meta and announced its plans to "build the metaverse" of connected digital worlds.
The app lets users build their own mini-games and activities on top of Meta's base game - similar to Roblox or other creator-focused apps.
There is no way for creators to make money directly from their worlds.
Instead, Meta has put $10m (£7.6m) into a "creator fund" to reward community creators who win competitions. That is different from apps such as Roblox, where creators can sell their games for in-app currency.But in user-generated spaces, there won’t always be these human moderators who could intervene if something goes wrong. It’s not realistic to expect to see a Meta representative in every space in Horizon Worlds — it might even feel a bit creepy — but the metaverse poses new challenges in keeping people safe online.
Horizon Worlds is, however, free to players using an Oculus Quest 2 headset sold by Meta.
Anyone aged 18 and over can create a legless, floating VR avatar - the same style as Meta is using in its workplace-focused meeting system - and get started."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 in its announcement. "And we've spent the past year developing those tools and improving them based on creator feedback."
The creation tools are built directly into the virtual reality game, so players can access them directly without any extra downloads or steps.
Players can fly around their world and place items such as trees or shapes to use as "building blocks" to make a custom digital environment. Then, they can use "scripts" - pre-made snippets of code that affect the world around the player - to set the rules of the game.Meta has struggled to remove hate speech and violent images from Facebook, and the company is reeling from the impact of leaked internal documents that show how its app Instagram can be dangerous for teens’ mental health. Just yesterday, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri testified before Congress about online safety for children and teens. But a metaverse world poses additional challenges, as it’s a more immersive audio-visual experience. Clubhouse struggled to moderate its live audio rooms, and even Twitter has run into issues with harmful content on Spaces as of late. Twitch streamers have dealt with “hate raids,” too.
But in terms of user experience, Horizon Worlds is a massive step up from Horizon Venues, Meta’s platform for immersive events (once Worlds is globally accessible out of beta, Venues might be rendered obsolete).
Right now, if you use Venues, you just get dropped into a blocky entry area, like a hallway in a movie theater. You can choose from a few rooms to enter, where you can watch a pixelated recording of a Billie Eilish concert on loop, for example. Worlds already feels more engaging and promising than Venues. But as Horizon Worlds opens itself up for millions of users to join, Meta needs to prove that it’s capable of keeping a social platform safe.
To run Horizon Worlds, you’ll need to download the free app on a Quest 2 device. As of January 13, 2022, it will no longer be supported on Quest 1.
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