Meta will give out a total of $50 million dollars to creators of the most "fun and engaging" Horizon Worlds experiences.
These Meta Horizon Creator Fund payments will be "tied to worlds’ contributions to the overall ecosystem across time spent, retention, and in-world purchases, so there are a variety of different ways for creators to maximize their earnings"
Back in 2021, Meta launched a somewhat similar $10 million creator fund when rebranding the platform from Facebook Horizon to Horizon Worlds. And in 2022 it launched a smaller $500,000 fund for "unique, innovative, and engaging worlds".
The new Horizon Creator Fund dwarfs both previous efforts, and arrives amid significant concerns about Meta's focus on Horizon Worlds over store apps.
The Horizon Creator Fund announcement comes as Meta just launched the Horizon Desktop Editor in early access, letting creators use their PC to import assets and write TypeScript to build "high-fidelity worlds" with "complex game logic".
Meta is also enabling Horizon Worlds' in-world monetization features, which let world creators charge for items and experiences, in 18 new countries from Monday: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan, in addition to the currently supported US, UK, and Canada.
The Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor is now publicly available in early access, with asset importing and TypeScript support to build "high-fidelity worlds" with "complex game logic".
Horizon Worlds is Meta's "metaverse" platform. Most worlds on it today are made inside VR, using the Touch controllers to manipulate primitive 3D shapes and rig up interactions using a spatial visual scripting system. While this allows anyone with just a Quest to build virtual worlds, the results have been widely and harshly criticized for their simplistic cartoonish appearance.
Since summer 2023, Meta has been providing desktop tools to game studios, including an internal studio it spun up called Ouro Interactive, to build higher fidelity worlds using traditional 3D asset creation pipelines and textual scripting. These worlds, including Super Rumble and Citadel, now make up some of the top visited and rated destinations on the platform. Last year, Meta started rolling out these advanced desktop creation tools to select Horizon Worlds individual creators in a closed beta.
Now, the Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor is available, in early access, to anyone aged 13 and above in any of the 23 countries where Horizon Worlds is available.
In the US, exclusively for now, the Desktop Editor public beta release also includes generative AI tools. To start, you can generate sound effects, ambient audio, and TypeScript, and Meta plans to roll out new generative AI features later this year, including 3D model and texture generation.
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Meta preview of upcoming Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor model, texture, and animation AI generation.
Meta's (Limited-Scope) Unity Competitor
According to creators who have been testing the closed beta version, the Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor has an interface resembling a simplified version of game engines like Unity, reminiscent of Apple's Reality Composer Pro, the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), or the Roblox Creator Hub.
Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor screenshot from Vidyuu.
The tool, which currently only runs on Windows, offers the ability to import 3D assets, images, and sound files, place them in a 3D landscape, and implement game logic functionality using TypeScript, an offshoot of JavaScript popular with web developers.
The software also supports creating in-world user interfaces (UIs) for use in VR, web, and mobile, and for creating, animating, and setting up the behavior of simple non-player characters (NPCs).
Horizon Worlds Desktop Editor interface.
As with other similar desktop game creation tools, it supports near-instant testing of your world with one click. You can also send a link to your phone, or open a link in your PC's web browser, to test it as it will be seen by non-VR players.
That may be appropriate for some developers, especially those with limited experience with full-fledged game engines. For other more traditional game developers though it will be a hard sell, given it would mean being locked into one XR platform, and giving Meta a higher percentage of their earnings. Meta takes 47.5% of transactions within Horizon Worlds, compared to 30% for apps on the store.
To make this a more appealing option, Meta is enabling Horizon Worlds' in-world monetization features, which let world creators charge for items and experiences, in 18 new countries from Monday: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan, in addition to the currently supported US, UK, and Canada.
Further, Meta is launching a $50 million Meta Horizon Creator Fund to pay creators of "fun and engaging" worlds. Here's the company's description of how the money will be distributed:
"Each month, we’ll pay out bonuses from the Creator Fund to the makers of fun and engaging mobile and MR worlds. Bonuses will be tied to worlds’ contributions to the overall ecosystem across time spent, retention, and in-world purchases, so there are a variety of different ways for creators to maximize their earnings."
Meta's Horizon Worlds platform now has 'Fantastical Avatars', including the new Captain America.
Meta overhauled its avatars in October with the 2.0 update, for both Horizon and third-party apps using the SDK. But a major criticism of Horizon Worlds has been the narrow focus on human form avatars, while other platforms such as VRChat let users embody non-human (and even non-humanoid) characters, including those from popular fiction.
When announcing Avatars 2.0 at Meta Connect back in September, the company said it would bring 'Fantastical Avatars' to Horizon Worlds.
Over the winter holidays, Meta introduced the first of these avatars as part of its winter Style Season, unlocked with the in-world points you get for completing quests, and the company says they were "among the most-acquired assets of the season", suggesting strong demand for non-human forms.
Winter Style Season 'Fantastical Avatars' in Meta Horizon Worlds.
Now, the company is introducing the first Fantastical Avatar "based on a well-known intellectual property", the new Sam Wilson Captain America.
Meta says this Captain America avatar is a "limited time" item, and to unlock it, you need to visit five different worlds or events using a Horizon Central doorway.
Notably, your Fantastical Avatar only exists in Horizon Worlds - it won't appear in other apps which use the Meta Avatars SDK.
Virtuware Ltd's live events-focused app, StageTime VR, hits the Meta Quest store today. StageTime is advertised as "the ultimate virtual venue" where users can enjoy karaoke, trivia and other live events with the platform's growing community.
I've been enjoying live performances and music venues in VR for a long time. The immersive medium has left me spoiled for choice over the years, so I was curious about what StageTime VR would have to offer, and I tried out the app at a special preview event.
The main area of StageTime's community map.
When you first start the program you are loaded into a sleek modern pub awash in purple and blue. The first small room to the right resembles a dressing room, hosting the area where avatars can be customized for wear. On the far end is the stage itself with a grand piano and options for moving a microphone and media screen to different positions. The size of the room looks like it can comfortably accommodate a medium-size crowd without bumping into anyone. During the preview event, the StageTime app crashed once as I fiddled with media buttons, but rejoining was quick and easy.
The map's chairs don't allow for sitting yet, but props are scattered around the bar for interaction. To one side is a bulletin board which lists community events and what days they're hosted on.
StageTime's menu lets users join different rooms, create their own, or join the stage queue.
StageTime's main menu gives the ability to either join or create new rooms. To host a private room for yourself simply reduce the player max count to 1 and hit the "create" button. You'll be able to practice singing alone that way if you're nervous about hopping up on stage in front of others.
A look at StageTime VR's camera system, karaoke screen, and video search menu
Searching for songs on StageTime's menu is easy. First, stand on stage and join the queue. Then switch to the search tab and type in either the song you'd like to play or the artist the song is by. You can't search for non-karaoke songs through the system. I was able to find a song by Essenger during an extra testing session. I also noticed my stage time was limited to five minutes. A clock at the base of the stage will count down to let you know when your time under the spotlight is up.
StageTime's camera system is provided courtesy of LIV. The camera allows for recording video footage but has no way to take a snapshot yet. Its handling for recording is smooth though. As I walked around the map to document the preview event, I noticed the camera wasn't as shaky as other VR camera systems tend to be. Having a drone system for this camera would be incredibly valuable for performers who want to take their recorded videos in StageTime to the next level.
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As this video shows, spatial sound in StageTime is well considered. When you move behind a wall that obstructs the path between yourself and the stage, the sound gains more reverb. It doesn't take effect simply because there's a table between yourself and the stage either.
A side room in StageTime offers reprieve from the crowds.
Sound isn't the only thing StageTime has going for it. The program's main map is well optimized for the Quest 3 I tested it on. While the avatar booth could be designed a little better, the dressing room environment shows a thoughtful approach for what the developers are aiming for.
StageTime still seems to just be getting started and there are many ways this app can expand and draw in more users. More maps for performers to pick their ideal settings is my first request. A mixed reality mode for singing karaoke with your friends in the comfort of your living room would be amazing, and placing AR windows with themed vistas, please! What about earning special props and avatar accessories as you spend time in specific rooms? There can also be special DLCs for more complex rooms with moodier themes, with my imagination running to a rainy jazz bar, an underground bunker with a sparse stage and CRT TVs stacked up on a nearby shelf, or a busy Las Vegas style casino setting. The sky's the limit with the type of features StageTime can add.
If you like karaoke and want to meet other people who enjoy live events, StageTime might be worth checking out now, but something tells me this app's best days are yet to come and we're only seeing the opening act for now.
"Long-term investments" will "land" later this year to make Horizon Worlds "more visually stunning and inspiring", Mark Zuckerberg told investors.
During Meta's Q4 earnings call, where the company reported its highest ever quarterly revenue from its Reality Labs AR/VR division, Mark Zuckerberg gave investors a very vague tease of what to expect from Horizon Worlds this year:
“This is the year that a number of the long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. So I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.”
It's entirely unclear what exactly Zuckerberg means by this.
When Horizon first launched back in 2020, both its avatars and worlds were ridiculed for their low detail graphics, and this criticism stood for years after. But over the past 18 months, Horizon Worlds has undergone significant changes to address this.
Originally all its worlds were created inside VR using primitive shapes and an in-VR visual scripting system, but now the leading worlds are built using traditional 3D asset creation pipelines and textual scripting. While it originally only provided these tools to professional game studios, Meta started rolling it out to interested individual creators last year. Further, the company launched revamped avatars with improved graphics in October.
It's possible that Zuckerberg is simply referring to a wider rollout of the professional creation tools that let Horizon Worlds environments look more like the VR games you purchase on the store.
But if that's not what he's talking about, what could it be? Could it be breakthrough upgrades to the platform's rendering capabilities, perhaps leveraging neural upscaling? Or could it even be cloud rendering, as it has been testing in its Avalanche project, which would offer the same kind of graphical fidelity as PC VR on standalone headsets? With such a vague quote it's impossible to know, but we'll keep a close eye on Meta for any details of what's coming for Horizon Worlds in 2025.
VR's first major massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and one of its longest-running multiplayer experiences, is shutting down across all platforms.
An announcement post on the OrbusVR forums from one of the project's long-time developers states that server shutdown is in April, with sales ending February 10th across all platforms.
OrbusVR: Reborn's listing on Steam already notes the imminent end to sales but there's no such notice on the Quest store listing. I emailed Meta to ask if they're in contact with the developers about changing the page. I also asked if Meta is planning to refund buyers for what they've spent to buy one of the first paid MMORPGs in VR.
As of this writing, the project is still priced $19.99 on both storefronts. OrbusVR: Reborn carried "mostly positive" reviews since release in April 2019 on Steam, and it launched with the original Quest headset as well in May 2019.
On the shutdown announcement page the developer writes:
"In the coming months leading to the server shutdown, we will be planning a few farewell events, including increased drop rates on legendaries, unlocking the DLC for all players that may not have experienced it yet, and hosting the last official Mage Tournament in-game. While we are truly sad to say goodbye to this game, we want to celebrate the fun, friends, and memories that have been experienced in our games’ long history. We plan on doing an end of game wrapup, sharing stats like total hours played, monsters killed, etc., in the coming months.
UploadVR Senior Editor Henry Stockdale is leading the charge as we talk with VR and mixed reality developers on an ongoing basis about the state of the market. We're still seeing groundbreaking new software across most platforms, but some devs are laying off workers and shutting down their projects as they struggle with a rapidly changing market for VR and mixed reality content. In 2025, he's already covered layoffs at Soul Assembly and will have more nuanced coverage of the issues facing developers in the weeks ahead.
We'll be discussing the shutdown of OrbusVR on our VR Gamescast show tomorrow on YouTube, and if you're an Orbus player we'd love to hear from you about the time you've spent fishing, crafting or just plain hanging out with friends in the first VRMMORPG.
Elin Höhler spent the weekend pulling together a new demo in SideQuest's Banter showing a full speech to 3D generation pipeline making objects in a multiplayer world.
Höhler walked me through the pipeline on Monday, showing the three step generation process – first processing speech to text, then an image from the text, and finally outputting a 3D model directly into the shared multiplayer world space for resizing and placement.
"It's kind of perfect for a zany platform like ours," explained SideQuest founder Shane Harris. "I think our users are gonna enjoy this, decorating their home spaces, using this for making props, I know some of our users have already been using it to generate clothing items that they then put on their custom avatars."
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Our video embedded below goes into slightly more depth explaining the toolset, as recorded on my Quest 3, as Höhler considers newer models in the future producing sharper and better optimized assets, but "playing around with Trellis is like getting your feet wet with what's coming."
The creator example is available if you search "world building" on Banter, available now on Steam and Quest. We've seen other generation tools in platforms like Snap's Spectacles as well as in single player experiences, but this is the first we've tried that has been this successful in a multiplayer VR session.
VRChat is now offering age verification to its adult users with paid subscriptions.
Last November, VRChat explained the plan to partner with an organization called Persona to externally verify age with a government ID as well as a phone or computer with a camera. The feature is used to "gate access to instances that were created with the 'Age Verification' option enabled" and won't be required to use VRChat overall.
"The age verification process utilizes Persona to verify your government-issued ID and compare it to your likeness. VRChat will receive and process text extracted from your ID, and will not receive any images or face scans. This information is used to generate an irreversible hash, which is saved.
All extracted text from your verification process other than your birth date is deleted, and is never stored on our servers.
Here's the original announcement video for the feature:
"We're going to be partnering with a few event organizers to run a trial for age verified events," VRChat Senior Community Manager Strasz explained in the announcement video last year. "During this trial period only members of those select groups will be able to apply for age verification and only those groups in particular will be able to restrict instance access to those who have been age verified. We're keeping it small to start so that we can work out the kinks."
Group Instance creators who have access to the feature "have the option to restrict access to age-verified users. For example, a bar may want to restrict access to 18+ users. This will require all attendees to go through the Age Verification process. Once the process is complete, that user (assuming they are 18 or older) can enter any Age Verification Instances in the future."
An optional badge indicating "Verified 18+" can also be added to the VRChat profile of age-verified users.
"We believe that adding age verification as an option will enable our communities and users to better tailor their experience and build a stronger and safer platform," VRChat explained.
This article originally published November 29, 2024 with announcement and testing of VRChat age verification. Article was updated and republished with the release of age verification to VRChat+ subscribers two months later.
The Bigscreen app now has a Cloud Browser feature.
It was already possible to share your PC screen to others in a Bigscreen room, or to cowatch YouTube, local videos, or "channels" without a PC.
As the name suggests, the new Cloud Browser runs in the cloud and streams synchronized to each user in the session, meaning it gives you web screensharing standalone on Quest, without a PC.
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Bigscreen says Cloud Browser can be used with almost any website, including video services like PLEX or web-based games, with the exception of platforms that use DRM, such as Netflix and Disney+. Those aren't supported.
Bigscreen’s Cloud Browser is available for free for the first two hours you ever use it, as a trial. After, it's priced at $1.99 for a day pass or $9.99 for a 30-day pass.
The feature brings a capability otherwise unavailable on Meta's Horizon OS platform. Apple's visionOS offers screen-sharing at any time during FaceTime sessions, including with its realistic Spatial Personas. But Apple's offering requires $3500 headsets, for now, while Bigscreen Cloud Browser works on the new $300 Quest 3S, as well as the approximately 20 million Quest 2 headsets already in consumer hands.
The new Meta Avatars with overhauled graphics and animations launched last week, after being officially confirmed at Meta Connect. But what Meta didn't announce, neither at Connect nor when launching the new avatars, was that you can generate a new one using your smartphone's front camera.
To do so, just open the Meta Horizon phone app, navigate to your avatar, and create a new one. You can have multiple avatars now, so generating a new one doesn't mean overwriting your existing new-style avatar.
It's an interesting feature that should help those who aren't interested in or good with video game character creator interfaces get set up for social VR. Eventually it's possible the same scan could be used to generate a Codec Avatar too, offering you two virtual versions of your self, cartoonish and realistic.
David Heaney
