Facebook, since rebranding itself to Meta, has been spending a lot of time and money to focus on their new venture – the Metaverse. One such high profile technology is their social VR platform for the Quest headset known as Horizon Worlds. It rolled out in early December for users in US and Canada but in less than three months it has gained 300,000 users and has grown its monthly user base by a 10x rate.
In a recent Virtual call, Meta CEO Zuckerberg addressed the members as Metamates and also called Horizon World as the core to their Metaverse vision. The chief product officer, Chris Cox, updated regarding the monthly user base of the VR platform. Meta spokesperson, Joe Osborne, confirmed the statistics and mentioned that it included users of both Horizon worlds and Horizon Venue, excluding Horizon Workrooms.
https://twitter.com/HorizonWorlds/status/1494007916990373895?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Earlier, Horizon world was only available in private beta for testing purposes, before it was introduced in December. Horizon worlds let users create a virtual reality to play games as avatars. Horizon Worlds, in a tweet, explained that 10,000 separate worlds were created since the beginning. It is still early to celebrate as Horizon was only recently introduced and Meta still hasn't disclosed the number of Quest headsets it has sold to date, which makes it difficult to measure the success of Horizon worlds. But if sources are to be believed, the sales of headsets are said to be around 10 million for Quest.
The company is making some real-time changes and updates for Horizon worlds, it is trying to make it reliable for users to use. It recently announced ‘Personal Boundary’ which prevents avatars from virtually entering and disrupting someone’s personal space in virtual reality. It will create a better space for people to interact and avoid unwanted interactions.
During Meta’s last earnings call, Zuckerberg said that later this year they would release a mobile phone version of Horizon World which would bring this immersive experience beyond VR, but no more information on this was shared.