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Jacob Diaz Nov. 7 2021
Student Choice - Horizon Worlds
Meta has recently announced a new series of virtual reality experiences called the Horizon Series. The series includes Horizon Workrooms, a workplace in virtual reality; Horizon Venues, a platform for events in virtual reality; Horizon Home, a social home space for users; and Horizon worlds, a open world virtual reality game that allows users to build, create and explore virtual environments. Currently these platforms are planned to start as their own separate applications, but Meta has spoken about eventually having all of these applications integrated into one experience. Since these applications have either not been released, or have only been released in the Beta Early Access stage, I will talk more about the application that has been closest to its production release, Horizon Worlds.
(Figure 1 - Tech Crunch - Game Creation)
Horizon Worlds is a VR open world sandbox game focused primarily on it’s integrated game creation feature and exploration. Upon starting the game, the user is tasked to create their virtual avatar in which they can customize their physical appearance. From there, the user is able to roam around the virtual world exploring creations from other users, as well as creating their own virtual environments. Currently Horizon Worlds is very empty and relies heavily on creators to create different experiences. What makes Horizon Worlds different from current sandbox games like VRChat and Altspace, is that environments in Horizon worlds can be built directly in the game. In VRChat and Altspace, there is a bigger learning curve since users have to learn how to use 3D building software like Unity. On the contrary, Horizon Worlds is geared toward easy to use development. The game uses a drag and drop feature that allows users to manipulate many different primitive shapes by performing gestures that allow them to do things such as scaling, rotating, stretching, and duplicating. Users are also able to create scripts by using easy to use drag and drop code blocks that is similar to the beginner code language, Scratch. These easy to use features will be more inclusive to more developers, as building is simpler and faster.
A key feature of Horizon Worlds is their way of handling user privacy. Facebook has dealt with issues in the past with cyberbullying, and harassment on their social media platform. Since Horizon Worlds is much of a public space, they have created privacy features to deal with many issues that they have dealt with on the Facebook platform. Users are able to select in their settings of appearing to be seen or heard in a world. If a user feels they are in a situation where they are being harassed they are easily able to experience the world in isolation without other users. Horizon Worlds is also actively watching for any potential rule violation. The last few minutes of everything that users see and hear is recorded on a rolling basis and can be used to make claims of harassment or cyberbullying.
(Figure 2 - Horizon Worlds Events / Meetups )
Horizon World's key audience can be broken down into three different categories. The first being developers who come to the game to create content that they want to share with the virtual world. The second being the players who want to play virtual games for leisure and competition. And the third being users who want to engage with different communities and converse with people from around the world. These three categories can fit people of all ages, from children to working professionals, and can fit in one or all of the categories explained above.
As Horizon Worlds continues to expand, and more and more features are added, the platform will become a great way for users to meet new people, as well as get together with friends and family, and have hours of fun inside different games and virtual environments. There are many things users will be able to do in Horizon Worlds that they won’t be able to do in the real world, such as collaborative virtual building, easily moving and manipulating objects in a space, as well as being immersed in a virtual space with people all over the world. As much of Horizon Worlds is dictated by the users, people can also feel immersed in a community they find interesting without having to live near any of the people in the community. Large scale virtual enterprise games can be worked on all in a remote virtual environment. Horizons Worlds can really bring power to it’s developers by allowing them to benefit financially from being able to create and sell their virtual games, art, spaces, or collectables. Developers also gain financial support from advertisements as the user population of Horizon Worlds increases.
Though having an open world social VR game can come with many benefits to its users, it can seem to have many issues if the game receives mass adoptions and sees the amount of users sibling applications like Facebook and Instagram have seen. Statistica.com states that Facebook has roughly 2.91 billion users (Statistica.com) and Instagram landing around 1 billion users (Statistica.com). A problem that many people may see with Horizon Worlds is that if it were to have billions of users like Facebook and Instagram, Meta would be the single entity to control this virtual world. Meta would be in charge of creating the rules that the virtual world must follow.
If virtual economies began to spring up from Horizon Worlds, which is very likely, Meta would be solely responsible for creating regulations for an entire economy. Issues like this have been seen at a smaller scale in platforms such as Youtube who had modified monetization regulations for online videos, which in return resulted in many creators who have lost a majority of their income because of regulation changes (Gizmodo). Another economic issue may be what currency will be used in the Horizon Worlds. Facebook has created Libra, a digital currency used on the Facebook platform for digital purchases. Having an entire company have the ability to be in control of a currency may give that company power over many users. This type of power can be seen as a threat to many, and can leave many to be cautious about Horizon Worlds.
I believe the rise of virtual reality and "The Metaverse" is inevitable as technology continues to advance. Though Meta's Horizon Worlds is the first real initiative by a large company to create a VR world, I think more companies will push to be the leader in the space. As competition enters the VR world, the overall cost of entry (the software and hardware) will become faster and cheaper leading more and more users to join. Though Horizon World can positively impact the lives of millions, and even billions of users, it will have to do a lot of work to build a system to combat the negative aspects described above.
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Resources
Statistica Facebook - https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/#:~:text=How%20many%20users%20does%20Facebook,the%20biggest%20social%20network%20worldwide.
Statistica Instagram - https://www.statista.com/statistics/325587/instagram-global-age-group/
Gizmodo -
https://gizmodo.com/youtube-unveils-new-monetization-rules-killing-ad-reven-1822154823
TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/25/facebook-horizon/
Everything Facebook revealed about the Metaverse in 11 minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gElfIo6uw4g
Building a world in Horizon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD_ovjVfXu4
Horizon Worlds Image - https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PwVV-zczHYI/maxresdefault.jpg