Do you remember the metaverse? The technological news orbits around the artificial intelligencethe AI agents and all its implications, but not so long ago, the buzzwords were ‘metaverse’ and ‘NFTs‘. The seconds were fleeting and they hit an anthological ‘chestnut’but something different happened with the metaverse: it deflatedbut it didn’t go away completely.
Meta is one of the companies that invested the most in the metaverse, to the point that until four years ago they were known as ‘Facebook‘ and changed to ‘Meta’ after the company’s new focus. His boss, Mark Zuckerberg, dedicated himself to the metaverse and its benefits and, although now he is more focused on the artificial intelligence models and in which all let’s wear glasses with a camera and connection to their serversit seems that he has not forgotten that parallel virtual life.
That platform is ‘Horizon Worlds‘ and, although not even Meta employees they used itthe company is creating a new push to Your multimillion-dollar investment comes together at once for everyone in the real world. As? Taking the metaverse everywhere.
Meta returns to the fray with the metaverse
Before telling the new adventure that Meta has in mind, some context is necessary, and we have to go back to 2019. That’s when Facebook premiered ‘Horizon‘, an open world game that wanted to become something more: a new ‘Second Life‘. The idea was that users They will spend their free time doing activities in that virtual worldbut no one called it ‘metaverse’.
Two years later the word arrived. Zuckerberg’s company started betting on a virtual world in which, thanks to virtual reality glasses (your Oculus), we could dive in for a second life. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, there were companies that opted for that “metaverse”, with many quotes, to hold meetings and events in which we were present through our avatars.
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The bet was of such magnitude that Facebook changed its name to Meta and announced ‘Horizon Worlds’, that virtual world. However, after a multi-million dollar investmentthe promised metaverse was nothing more than a crappy version of ‘Wii Sports’. The years have passed and we still don’t have that second virtual life, but the company still believes in the metaverse. And its new strategy will be to take it beyond virtual reality.
The Oculus Quest seemed like the ideal gadget for the metaverse by offering almost total immersion, but there is a problem: device adoption. Not everyone wants invest money in a VR headset nor does he want to isolate himself from the outside, but what everyone does have is a smartphone. And it is very possible that they also have instagram or Facebook.
The ‘Horizon Worlds’ games are built with the Unity engine. It is a great engine that has been used to countless independent video gamesbut in The VergeVishal Shah, deputy director of metaverse at Meta, says he has a problem: “it was the right place to start, but we needed to build something tailored to our needs.”
Shah comments that, like great social games like ‘Roblox‘ either ‘minecraft‘are developed with their own engines or deeply modified versions of other engines, they needed tools like that.
Meta Horizon Engine is the answer, an engine that the company has designed to speed up game development for its platform, allow the creation of multiplayer worlds with ease, speed up loading times and, above all, integrate artificial intelligence to give a boost to development times. That detail of loading times is crucial for the company.
“You feel like something takes a long time to load if you have to wait more than 15 seconds. Below 15, it feels fast, but the magic number is seven seconds or less,” says Shah.
Meta has built an engine as an umbrella for all its ‘Horizon Worlds’ games and systems, and it is what will allow you to take it everywhere
This engine optimization allows us to click on a game and, almost instantly, we’re playingfreeing us from the entry wall that for many players can mean waiting those 15 or 20 seconds of loading. It seems like a short time, but for TikTok generationit can be a lot. But optimization is just one leg of Meta’s new approach to the metaverse.
The other is to bring the experience where the potential players are (and we already told you that, right now, at least, they are not in the virtual reality glasses). Therefore, Shah comments that they are starting to add ‘Horizon’ games on other platforms, such as Facebook.
“If you go to the games tab on Facebook, you can find ‘Horizon’ experiences,” he says. In addition, he states that the company is also studying how to integrate these games into Instagram.
Until now, these were the ways to access the metaverse. Instagram and Facebook will soon join
Scaling to these platforms is something that would have been much more complex with engines like Unity, but with the new Meta Horizon Engine, it is much easier to develop for your other applications, creating an ecosystem that, now, can be the gateway to ‘Horizon Central’, the social plaza where the Meta metaverse adventure begins. (This is all a bit confusing, but it’s just that Meta has a gigantic mess with names).
Shah says the new tools They will be implemented little by little in all corners of ‘Horizon Worlds’arriving first at the square, but gradually also at other sections such as ‘Horizon Arena‘, which is Meta’s concert and event space in virtual reality.
Now, what about the true metaverse? If the idea was for us to live a virtual world, the ideal is to do it with a VR viewer and with gesture control elements like the new ones launched by the companybut that doesn’t go hand in hand with playing a Facebook game.
Shah mentions in The Verge that logic tells them that “once users discover Horizon games on mobile devices, they are more likely to try them in virtual reality.” It’s a bit like ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ and the “you have to have faith,” but Shah and his team are working to see What is the best way to take ‘Horizon Worlds’ everywhere?including VR systems, and the first step was to simplify the software.
But perhaps the most complicated thing is something that is further from your control: convincing users to invest time in that metaverse when, precisely, everything right now (from Netflix to Spotify, newsletters and video games) compete for the same thing: our little free time.
Images | Goal
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