Facebook Shutting Down Its Horizon Worlds Vr Metaverse

Meta, formerly Facebook, has a bee in its bonnet about AI and is spending as much money as it can.

But it had another bee in its bonnet before this — the Metaverse! Virtual reality! Mark Zuckerberg loved the Metaverse so much he even changed Facebook’s name to Meta.

The Metaverse’s flagship app was Horizon Worlds. That was the VR world that launched with player avatars that didn’t have legs.

Facebook promised an exciting 3D world experience! And what we got was office meetings that should have been Zoom calls.

Anyway, Horizon Worlds on Oculus VR is being shut down on June 15. Both customers will still be able to get Horizon Worlds on a mobile phone — a tiny 2D screen instead of 3D full field of vision through your Oculus headset. [Meta]

On the Reddit Oculus forum, the consensus is: good riddance, it sucked. [Reddit]

This has been coming a while. Meta said to its third-party developers in February: [Meta]

we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success … We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.

Before that, the Reality Labs division of Meta lost $19.2 billion in 2025. Zuckerberg announced a 30% funding cut to Reality Labs, and Meta’s stock price went up 4%. [Press release; Reuters]

Mark Zuckerberg is not a guy you should be letting have ideas. He blew about $77 billion total on Reality Labs. [WSJ, archive]

We need to understand the thinking that went into the Metaverse. Fortunately, I’ve got a completely up-to-the-second report from Gartner, right here! “Building a Digital Future: The Metaverse” — it came out ten minutes ago, on 3 August 2022: [Gartner, PDF, archive]

By 2025, 10% of workers will regularly use virtual spaces (in activities such as sales, onboarding, remote teams), up from 1% in 2022.

By 2026, the second and third iterations of spatial computing glasses will arrive, creating  more pervasive metaverse experience connected to the physical world.

Huge if true. Facebook’s creepshot glasses might count for that last one.

Here’s how your CEO needs to think about the Metaverse:

Task an innovation team to look for opportunities where metaverse technologies could optimize digital business, or create new products and services.

Work with qualified agencies to evaluate the viability of metaverse technologies in terms of user and customer reach, and engagement rates with new, early-adopter Audiences.

And so on. This is why the Metaverse is AI — identical hype and recommendations with a different buzzword.

Those Metaverse sceptics are just a bunch of Luddites. They need a more nuanced view to be taken seriously.

But the Metaverse isn’t just AI. It’s also crypto. Here’s Zuckerberg on stage at SxSW in 2022: [YouTube]

we talked about stuff like NFTs, and the ability to, long term, I I would hope that the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse can be basically minted as an NFT and you take it between your different places. I think that there’s like a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen.

The Metaverse is for NFTs. That was recorded in April 2022, one month before the crypto bubble popped.

And there can’t ever have been any such thing as Second Life all over the entire media from 2006 to 2009. Or all this Metaverse hype would just have been stupid.

I guess the Metaverse just didn’t have … legs.

• Video — Podcast