Meta’s social VR space Horizon Worlds is taking its first step outside of the US and Canada, as the company announced it will soon rollout access to users in the UK.
Starting this week, Quest 2 users aged 18 and older in the UK will be able download and jump into chats with users across the pond in addition to creating and sharing their own worlds.
The company says it also plans to roll out Horizon Worlds to more countries in Europe later this summer.
Other goals include providing a web-based version of Horizon Worlds and eventually fusing all of its Horizon apps (Home, Worlds, Venues, Workrooms) for all users on the platform. For now, Meta has already folded its live event app Horizon Venues entirely into Worlds, which hosts live sports, concerts, comedy, and user-created meet-ups.
In addition to rolling out access to UK-based users, in the next few weeks Meta says it’s also launching a new voice feature aimed at keeping users from being overloaded with unwanted conversations. Changing from the default of hearing nearby users at the same volume and toggling on ‘Garbled Voices’ mode will soon let you essentially render any non-friend conversation into what the company calls “unintelligible, friendly sounds.”
“If you enable Garbled Voices, strangers will see an indicator that you can’t hear them so they don’t feel like you’re ignoring them,” Meta says in a blogpost. “But if you do want to hear what they’re saying, you can simply raise one hand with the controller to your ear to temporarily un-garble them without having to add them as a friend.”
Since launching into the region-restricted beta, Horizon Worlds has added 4-foot personal boundaries, the ability to block, mute, or report anyone engaging in unwanted behavior, and a feature called ‘Safe Zone’, which lets users quickly jump to a private environment. The company will likely continue its refinement of social tools and features, as it no doubt wants to avoid being known for the sort of unregulated free-for-all behavior seen on other social VR platforms.
In the meantime, the company is nudging developers with $10 million in cash to build out content for its nascent metaverse platform—something it will need as it looks to attract users away from third-party solutions. Meta announced last week that Quest 2’s v41 software update will finally give you the ability to invite friends and tour content as a party, including 360 videos and games, all of which will be built-in so you can access social features as soon as you pop on your headset and load into your Home space.
Horizon Worlds is Meta’s social VR platform for Quest 2 and Rift which includes ways for users to explore together, create their own rooms, and play mini-games. The company is making good on its vision to mold the social platform into more of a monolithic metaverse app by folding its live event app Horizon Venues entirely into Worlds.
The change is slated to take place starting June 6th, the company says in a blog post, which will allow Horizon Worlds users direct access to Venues events, such as live sports, concerts, comedy, and user-created meet-ups.
Horizon Worlds is still in somewhat of a beta, as only 18+ users from the US and Canada have access right now. That means that once the company transitions Venues into Worlds on June 6th, only those users will be able to access it, including minors and Quest 1 users. The company says it’s still publishing highlights and replays of Venues events in Oculus TV.
“We’ve experimented with portals between Horizon Venues and Horizon Worlds over the past few months, and we’ve seen just how powerful it can be when you can seamlessly jump between a game world to a hang out space—then head right into a big show with your friends,” Meta says.
Meta says it will roll out Horizon Worlds in more countries at some point this summer. The company hasn’t intimated any significant event between now and Connect 2022, which typically takes place in Fall. It might suggest the wider rollout of Horizon Worlds won’t feature the sort of fanfare associated with some of its most celebrated platform exclusive features and games—although that’s pure speculation.
Meanwhile, Meta is vying for more third-party developer talent to help build out Worlds by expanding developer programs to include training on how to build games and experiences which ought to help attract more users from competing social apps, such as Rec Room, VR Chat, and Bigscreen.
Meta’s collection of virtual reality (VR) social apps (Horizon Worlds, Venues and Workrooms) is a bit of a fragmented affair as you can’t switch between them as one seamless metaverse. However, part of that is about to change with Venues about to be absorbed into Horizon Worlds in June.
Meta has announced that the Horizon Venues app will be shuttered on 6th June 2022, so if you use it for watching Foo Fighters concerts, martial arts events, the Space Explorers series or any other programming that’ll soon come to an end. You will be able to catch highlights via Oculus TV if that’s any help.
Instead, on that same date Venues will get its own dedicated space within Horizon Worlds, giving the metaverse greater utility and so more reason for Meta Quest owners to venture inside. The downside, Horizon Worlds is still only accessible to Meta Quest 2 users over 18 in the US and Canada. For the rest of the world or those under 18 who do use Venues, tough luck, for now.
It’s understandable (and expected) that Meta would merge these apps, it’s just a shame that this would happen when only very select territories have access. The company has indicated that Horizon Worlds will be expanded to more countries this summer although specific details on when and where have yet to be unveiled.
Meta has been gradually rolling out several new updates to Horizon Worlds over the past few months, testing monetization tools for creators that’ll allow them to sell virtual items and effects inside their worlds. And to ensure users feel safe in its metaverse Meta introduced the Personal Boundary as an unseen security guard.
Every day there seems to be a new company jumping on the metaverse bandwagon with several key tech giants leading the charge. One of those is Epic Games, having made several acquisitions of late as well as releasing Unreal Engine 5, Metahuman and RealityScan, for example. Alternatively, there is Niantic Labs and its vision for a real-world metaverse utilising augmented reality (AR).
As Meta releases further updates for Horizon Worlds, gmw3 will let you know.
After two years of private beta testing, Horizon Worlds — Meta’s first VR metaverse app — finally opened to the North American public in late 2021. Allowing public access to Horizon Worlds was a big deal for Meta (née Facebook), as it signalled Mark Zuckerberg’s real entry point into the metaverse — the oft-mentioned space he’s now positioned his business model around and committed himself to overtake.
Like many things under Zuckerberg’s watch, the Horizon series (Worlds, Venues, Workrooms) hasn’t launched without a bit of turbulence. From reported incidents of virtual “groping” to a janky, difficult-to-use interface, so far it’s been tricky for users to select Meta’s first offering as their chosen metaverse platform.
What are some of the early pitfalls of the Horizon series? Should they be passed as typical blunders for an entry-level application in a new world, or are they larger indicators that Meta is starting off on the wrong foot? Let’s take a closer look.
Safety risks in the Horizon world
If you’ve been reading the news, sexual assault has become a rising concern in the growing Web3 space. A myriad of experts has started weighing in on the safety risks that an immersive, lifelike online experience can pose — with many leaders suggesting that the effects of sexual harassment in VR could evoke similar responses as a real-life physical experience would.
At the time of writing, chances are that if you run a quick Google search, reported incidents of virtual “groping” and harassment in Horizon Worlds are likely to be the most popular instances you’ll find in any search result.
While running a beta test in Horizon Worlds, a woman reported being “virtually groped” inside the platform by other male users. Not long after this encounter, Nina Jane Patel reported being “verbally and sexually harassed” by other male avatars inside Horizon Venues.
“You are literally stepping into a 360-degree digital environment,” Patel describes when recounting her experience. “Because virtual reality has been designed to be as real as possible, it is similar to inviting someone into your living room, so the violation feels more acute than it would feel on a social media platform.”
Moreover, Patel stresses that “sexual harassment and violence is a big problem in the metaverse in its current state.” She’s since had several other women reach out and report having similar experiences in the virtual ecosystem.
Upon further inspection by Meta’s team, Vivek Sharma, Meta’s VP of Horizon, called these incidents “absolutely unfortunate”. However, he also noted that both users had failed to deploy ‘Safe Zone’ — a built-in safety feature that, when switched on, has the ability to prevent other users from touching or interacting with an avatar.
With that being said, Sharma also addressed the need for these safety features to be easier-to-find and more accessible for users. He added: “We want everyone in Horizon Venues to have a positive experience, to easily find the safety tools that can help them — and help us investigate and take action.”
Underaged users have also been cited as risky subjects for the Horizon world at large. Children claiming to be as young as 9 have been reported using each of the apps (registered users are required to be 18 and up), while several other reviews on the official Oculus site include complaints about foul-mouthed youngsters spoiling the experience for adults. Experts have noted that this dangerous mix of children and adults can lead Horizon to become a meeting ground for predatory behaviour.
Sarah Gardner, VP of external affairs at Thorn (a non-profit tech startup focused on online child safety) highlights how sexual predators “are often among the first to arrive” on new online forums that appeal to children. “They see an environment that is not well protected and [that] does not have clear systems of reporting. They’ll go there first to take advantage of the fact that it is a safe ground for them to abuse or groom kids.”
To combat harassment on the platform, Meta has since added an extra layer of protection for Horizon users: “Personal Boundary”, which will now be turned on by default in both Worlds and Venues. Functioning as an invisible virtual barrier around avatars, the “Personal Boundary” feature can prevent other users from getting too close, acting as a “two-foot radius of personal space.”
A failed metaverse gig
During this year’s Super Bowl celebration, popular rock band Foo Fighters performed their first big virtual gig in Meta’s Horizon Venues. Attendees were given a digital hot-seat, with 180-degree cameras positioned around the stage and a “custom stage design, practical effects, sophisticated lighting programs and XR elements blended into the concert scene.” Those who attended the gig were also given the opportunity to socialise in real-time with other attendees, as well as the ability to don their avatars with limited edition Super Bowl attire.
However, if you were one of the concert’s lucky attendees, your review might have looked a little different. Post-gig reports alleged that Horizon Venues suffered from a poor onboarding experience, system crashes and — believe or not in this day and age — capacity issues. Out of tens of thousands of people who expressed interest in attending the VR show, only a reported 13,000 were able to actually get in.
Most online events allow people to enter a virtual queue before proceeding onto the actual event (in most cases, this is usually at least 30 minutes before the show starts). This is done to mitigate any impacts that can be caused by too many users flooding in all at once. However, Meta interestingly chose a different approach — one that didn’t allow people access to the event until the advertised 8 PM PT start date. Inevitably, the digital “lobby” crashed from the force of 61,000 people trying to enter the show at the same time.
Again, Vivek Sharma was forced to comment on the controversy — claiming that “problems were caused “by unprecedented demand”. He also added that further opportunities to watch the show would be made available for those who were ultimately unable to attend.
Despite the attempt, however, this response was highly criticised by Meta Quest users across the globe — primarily due to the fact that the event was well-hyped and advertised during the Super Bowl’s most recent ad campaign.
Enter Workrooms fatigue
Recently, two of my colleagues joined me in trying to set up a virtual meeting in Horizon Workrooms. With each of us sporting a brand-new Meta Quest 2 on-head, we were all pretty stoked to explore how we could carry out our weekly meetings inside a metaverse space.
However, after about 20 minutes of trying to join a single room using our headsets, we ultimately decided to wrap things up and call it an afternoon. Before that, however, we tried several options — such as setting up party calls inside the Quest 2’s built-in interface and configuring our headsets to link with our web browsers. Ultimately, we grew tired of trying out so many logistics just to join a virtual meeting (many of us are still recovering from Zoom fatigue, mind you).
(We’ve also since had better success with Spatial and Rec Room, but we’ll save that for another piece.)
If you’re able to launch and join Workrooms successfully, you should be able to create a room for a team and allow other users to virtually join using their dedicated avatars. Users who don’t own a Meta Quest 2 can also join the Web2 way — via their web browsers. Either way, meetings in Workrooms should feel akin to real-life meetings: any other avatars can sit beside yours at a virtual table — and team members should have the ability to collaborate on projects immersively (such as being able to share a large blackboard).
Other users have reported the difficulty of setting up an experience in Workrooms. For starters, users are required to use their PC to create a Workrooms account before being able to use the platform in VR — all after they’re already also required to have a working Facebook account to use a Meta Quest 2. Extra steps are also required to associate the headset with a Facebook account, where users are prompted to enter a special code that is viewable through VR. And if that wasn’t enough, this is all in addition to needing to download a companion app that will mirror the desktop in VR.
While we will likely see this onboarding process become more streamlined in the future, this long sequence of steps feels exhausting to even type about — especially for those of us who have considered inserting a virtual meeting into a day of back-to-back events. Until the program becomes a little more tested and tried, it’s likely that the bulk of us simply won’t find the time or reason to kick this off. Even Web2 platforms (such as Google Meet, Zoom and Miro) still offer faster, more efficient web collaboration tools that get stuff done.
Final thoughts
Everyone’s gotta start somewhere — and Meta shouldn’t be an exception to this rule. Facebook itself wasn’t built in a day. Meta’s staff also seem to be receptive to any raised complaints — an indication that they are at least trying to make improvements in light of a difficult start to 2022.
However, the list of excuses behind these pitfalls is also questionable when they’re coming from a multi-billion dollar company that’s pledged $50 million to build the metaverse responsibly.
As of right now, the Horizon platform has hit up to 300,000 users — that’s 10 times the increase in about three months. But will we see this growth proliferate? Early user growth statistics might look positive — but many experts also believe that Meta will need to iron out a lot of kinks if that’s going to happen.
Meta’s vision of its metaverse is a safe happy place where you can socialise with friends or make new ones. However, that’s not always the case and there will always be a small contingent who’ll try and ruin it for others. To that end, Meta has just announced Personal Boundary for Horizon Worldsand Horizon Venues, a feature that’ll prevent avatars from coming in close proximity to one another.
An example, not how it’ll look as the boundaries are invisible. Image credit: Meta
Essentially, Personal Boundary is an invisible shield that stops anyone from getting too close. You won’t notice it and there’s no haptic feedback to indicate the fact, it’s just there as your unseen security guard.
Whilst it is a shame such features are required, having them there is better than not. Plus the Personal Boundary does have one customisable setting. By default, it is always on but you can turn it off if you so wish, if you’re in a private setting with real-world friends and family for example. The boundary extends two feet from your avatar so there can be a total of four feet between you and someone else.
There’s no way to adjust the boundary yourself if you want to make it bigger or smaller. Those kinds of customisation options may arrive at a later date as Meta fine-tunes the feature.
Image credit: Meta
Meta adds in a blog post that: “Note that because Personal Boundary is the default experience, you’ll need to extend your arms to be able to high-five or fist bump other people’s avatars.” So there might be a few odd moments where two people lean in for a fist bump.
Personal Boundary is rolling out today for Horizon Worlds and Venues. Actually accessing Horizon Worlds is another matter. Currently, under development as Meta’s core metaverse experience, the app was in beta for ages until it opened up to adults in the US and Canada in December 2021. There’s still no indication as to when other territories will gain access.
For continued updates on the Horizon family of apps, keep reading gmw3.
In early August 2021, a playlist was added to Fortnite among the usual solo, duo, trio and squad options. ‘The Rift Tour’ would be an “interactive musical journey” featuring pop princess Ariana Grande. Before the concert, players could shop the online store and buy a skin of Ariana, which would transform their avatar into the singer. There were also accessories and emotes – animated movements – to support the concert. A popular emote made the player avatar wave a cell phone flashlight in the air.
The concert was a huge success and saw millions of players flood the servers to take part. The performance – all pre-recorded – featured a giant Ariana, endless Escher staircases, users bouncing on pink, fluffy trees and riding inflatable Llamacorns through the sky.
As we near the all-encompassing ‘metaverse’, music acts embracing technology and connecting with their fans through these events will be a surefire play to get users into web 3.0. By expanding beyond the confines of a contained show and utilising available technology, fans can get closer than ever to their idols.
Preceding the Ariana concert, Fortnite had already teamed with Travis Scott and plenty of DJs who took to the virtual stage. It’s clear that Epic Games are determined to continue in this vein given their purchase of Harmonix, a company known for creating music based videogames such as Fuser and Rock Band. Virtual concerts are clearly successful because consumers are given a new way to interact with their favourite music acts. It’s worth keeping in mind that many players may attend these gigs even if they aren’t a fan of the musical star, purely for the spectacle.
This is an easily monetised side hustle. Selling skins, items and accessories in the lead up to a concert or experience not only benefits the developers and publishers of the game but the artist too. Given the changes in the world since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, virtual attendance is appealing, more so when you consider the interactivity virtual concerts offer compared to their ‘real world’ counterparts. Artists can sell tickets and merchandise recouping revenue lost during the pandemic.
Over on the Roblox platform, acts such as Lil Nas X and Twenty One Pilots have hosted concert experiences. Users can convert their cash into Robux and buy T-shirts and hats, showing them off within games.
More recently, Wave put on a virtual concert for Justin Bieber and the strategic shooter game Scavengers hosted K-Pop idol AleXa. It’s these latter examples that point to a possible future within the metaverse as they experiment with crowd participation and real-time performances, they also differentiate themselves from Fortnite and Roblox, by creating more fan participation.
While it looked like Justin Bieber had been fully prerecorded, AleXa interacted with the crowd in real-time, much as they would at a traditional concert. Each of these concerts asked the attendees to mash buttons to hype up the artists or throw up glow sticks to create that gig atmosphere.
With improvements in VR and AR, it makes sense that the next step in entertainment will embrace these technologies. In fact, VR is already a usable tool for concertgoers, albeit with some restrictions. MelodyVR – soon to be rebranded as Napster – an app for Oculus devices, allowsviewers to purchase tickets to a show and watch it using the VR headset. MelodyVR feels a bit like those early DVD extras, which allowed you to watch a scene from different angles. Once the concert is loaded, you can choose from many positions to watch from, including mosh pits and the wings of the stage. Some angles truly make the user a part of the show by positioning them on the stage, with the performer moving around them.
Horizon Venues is another portal for entertainment, both live and prerecorded, except here your avatar is relegated to a seating area while the performance takes place on a screen. This emulates a cinema, rather than an arena, but the visual fidelity is much better. Using this tool to sit with a friend and watch the latest Marvel film or stand-up comedian would be one step closer to the metaverse often depicted.
Attempting to stand out within the metaverse, is Sensorium Galaxy. Sensorium empowers the concertgoer with a digital avatar who can be fully customised, before attending the gig. Sensorium has already announced a bucketload of virtual concerts with some of the biggest DJs in the world – Carl Cox, David Guetta, Steve Aoki, Charlotte de Witte and many more. These powerhouses in dance music are scanned and captured in motion capture creating a “photo-realistic’ avatar to perform and interact with fans. Sensorium can be used via VR for a “fully immersive experience” which will be unlike anything found in existing experience platforms.
As time passes, video quality will get better, the sound will improve and the metaverse will envelop these experiences, pulling them into the decentralised network. Going to a gig will come in two forms – visiting the arena and using your smartphone to access AR features, or watching from home via VR. It makes a great deal of sense from the artists perspective, especially given the cut to revenue during the pandemic.
We’re still quite a way from Ready Player One, but if Roblox is anything to go by, younger audiences are already preparing themselves for the metaverse revolution. With a concert on the Roblox platform, players can gather together, chat and dance, sometimes interacting with the artist via prompts. What removes this from a true metaverse experience is the lack of seamless movement. You don’t start at your house, on your own land and walk to the venue. You don’t look into the distance and see the rest of the city sprawling before you, ripe for exploration. This will be a future step.
The metaverse needs to bring all of this together, grouping the disparate ventures and creating an experience that benefits the user both digitally and physically. If you were to walk from your house to the arena, meet friends along the way and use VOIP chat to converse, that’s one step. If, when you arrive, you can buy an NFT poster for your digital bedroom, plus a T-shirt for your avatar – all from a digital avatar vendor – it would help if the physical versions of these were then dispatched to your home.
Combining current and emerging technology will bring a rounded experience to everything from games to concerts; work meetings to dating. However, a few things need to change first – VR headsets must become more affordable, or be pushed via government programs. Seamless experiences will only develop if corporations begin working together to decentralise the digital space. Early adoption must try to offer metaverse existence through AR or VR as the cherry on the cake, where our current lives are the cake beneath. The first rung on the ladder is getting everyone together in sections of the metaverse, using the technology available to us. The next step will be folding them all together.
Back in October, Meta announced that it would eventually transition its home environment to ‘Horizon Home’, giving it a fuller set of social features like being able to invite party members to visit, hang out, or launch into VR apps together. It seems we’re getting a step closer to the release of those features, as Quest 2’s recent v37 firmware is hiding a few things.
Developer Luboš V released a video showing off some of the hidden features that lurk within v37 of the Quest firmware.
Apparently itinerant firmware sleuth ‘Basti564’ also had a part in uncovering the hidden features, who is known for leaking images and models of Project Cambria, the company’s in-development mixed reality headset, and for having uncovered videos of the Quest 2’s Space Sense room guardian in action before its official launch.
Check out the video below:
The v37 update is now available on the Public Test Channel for Quest 2, however the features seen above aren’t accessible. In the video we get a glimpse at:
Tutorial on how to use Horizon Home
Room capture: letting you virtually integrate your playspace by mapping walls and ceiling
Apple keyboard support
Voice assistant history menu
What appears to be a work-in-progress social network integration, which is likely either be a portal to its Horizon social VR apps or more Facebook integration
The revelation of these hidden features comes on the heels of an interview with Digiday where Meta’s VP of Horizon, Vivek Sharma, hinted that the company hopes to eventually bring all of its social VR apps social VR apps—Horizon Worlds, Horizon Venues, and Horizon Workroom—together in a more seamless way.
There’s no telling how soon we’ll see any of that stuff though. Closer integration with its Horizon social apps, representing a substantial overhaul, certainly sounds like one of those flashy monolithic updates Meta typically reserves for events.
Meta previously said it was hosting a Gaming Showcase in early 2022, although it’s not certain when that’s taking place. Last year’s was in April, although GDC 2022 in March may be a better bet. In any case, we’ll have our eyes peeled on the Oculus blog in the meantime.
Though Meta is steadily building up three social VR apps—Horizon Worlds, Horizon Venues, and Horizon Workrooms—the trio still exist as separate apps and hardly constitute a seamless experience. In the future the company hopes to change that and open the door to non-VR devices. But how long will it take?
Meta is undoubtedly bullish about taking a leading position in the metaverse, but it still has a very long way to go before anything that it’s working on could even really be considered part of the metaverse.
Today the company runs three separate social VR apps under the Horizon name. There’s Worlds, a place where people can build experiences for others to enjoy; Venues, where people can watch concerts, sports, and more together; and Workrooms where people can collaborate with traditional meeting tools.
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Image courtesy Facebook
Image courtesy Facebook
Image courtesy Facebook
Although all three share a common umbrella name, and even share the same avatars, they’re really entirely different applications. You might be sitting right next to your colleague in Workrooms and invite them to watch a show with you in Venues after the meeting, but there’s no seamless way for both of you to actually go from A to B without quitting your current app, launching a new one, and then eventually find each other on the other side. Not to mention dealing with an entirely different interface and features between the two.
In an interview with Digiday, Meta’s VP of Horizon, Vivek Sharma, hinted that the company hopes to eventually bring these experiences together in a more seamless way.
“Eventually, Sharma plans to stitch [the three Horizon applications] together to create a cohesive virtual world,” writes Alexander Lee. “Though he didn’t offer specifics about the timeline for this union or what the overarching platform would be called.”
“You can imagine us building out an entire ecosystem where creators can earn a living, where communities can form and do interesting stuff together,” Sharma told Digiday. “So it’s not just a place for games; it’s not just a place for people to build creative stuff; it’s all of the above.”
At present, Horizon is scattered in more ways than not being able to navigate seamlessly between apps. Accessibility is also an issue… you’ll need an Oculus Quest 2 headset if you want to be able to access all three. If you have the original Oculus Quest you can only use Worlds and Venues. If you have an Oculus Rift you can only use Worlds. And if you have a non-Oculus headset well, you’re out of luck.
To some extent, the company hopes to fix, or at least temper, this issue by opening Horizon apps to non-VR devices, Sharma told Digiday. Exactly when this might happen, or which devices it would target is unclear at present.
High accessibility is important for any social applications to find traction, something that Meta ought to know better than anyone else. And yet when Meta does finally get around to making its Horizon apps more accessible, it will only be playing catch-up.
Leading social VR applications like Rec Room and VRChat have long since supported VR and PC, with Rec Room even being available on game consoles and smartphones. Not to mention that both of the aforementioned apps are available on a much wider range of VR headsets than any of Meta’s Horizon offerings.
The NBA officially kicked off its 2021-22 regular season in mid-October after having last year’s derailed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting this week, Meta (formerly Facebook) is welcoming Quest users back to Horizon Venues for some more courtside action.
You’ll be able to catch the first game on November 14th, which features the Golden State Warriors vs. the Charlotte Hornets. Check out November’s full NBA VR lineup below:
To watch, users need the paid NBA League Pass, which comes with a few other caveats. Meta says in a blogpost that League Pass games will only be open to users based in the US, and to those that are outside of a 50-mile radius of the two teams in a given game. That’s the wonderful world of broadcast syndication for you.
The newly rebranded Horizon Venues (previously just Venues) offers up multi-user spaces for large event viewing, which means you can watch games courtside with friends and key into exclusive play-by-play commentary from NBA champion Richard Jefferson, sportscaster Adam Amin, and more.
Meta says it’s going to publish more participating games in the future, however here’s November’s upcoming schedule. Click the links below to subscribe for an event reminder.
