During the research phase, Meta/Facebook launched a simple metaverse app “Facebook Spaces”. I evaluated this until it was deprecated and replaced with Horizon Worlds. Horizon Worlds – and other “Metaverse” apps are, to me, a clear descendant of graphical MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented); I’ve used these for many years and wrote about their graphic and text precursors extensively in my years as a technology journalist. Graphical examples include Second Life and text examples would include LambdaMOO.
- The shift to VR brings over most of the key features of MOOs. There are:
- Communal areas where individuals can meet with other users and hang out.
- Customisable avatars, profiles and clothes that allow you to create an online persona and present creatively.
- Games and entertainments (in the case of Horizon Worlds, Venues integrates 360 video concerts and events.
- Private home areas players can retreat to.
In terms of communication, players can “friend” other players and message them, or invite them to an area they’re in (much like LambdaMOO) – so there are social media elements too (as there were in MOOs and MUDs).
These are consumption features. Horizon Worlds also has a creative “Build Mode” allowing users to create their own spaces. Like Spatial.io – creators can make their own spaces with supplied assets and primitive shapes within the application. However, at the time of writing there are no tools for uploading models or importing worlds from other game engine tools – in fact, these were available in pre-launch beta and then removed.
There are, however, object-oriented scripting tools allowing users to create more complex interactions and multimedia experiences.
Feelings
I have long felt uncomfortable with the “social” aspects of “metaverse” spaces, and feel they cater both to the hierarchically minded and the extroverted. The elements of cosplay, role-playing and power structures find a way into virtual worlds as much as the real world and are, in some ways, amplified. As a long-term user of the Internet, I have seen this play out repeatedly in message boards, mailing list and social media. This is a highly personal response, and some people enjoy the social aspects very much. However, I think it’s also fair to observe that engaging with journalism content is not necessarily a social activity – or at least if we are to make it a social activity, we would approach it in a very different way.
Horizon Worlds allows us to route around the social aspects though (as did MUDs and MOOs) – enabling players to create private or invite-only instances of spaces. It makes sense (to me) for spaces dedicated to telling journalistic stories to allow players private access.
Horizon Worlds is improving rapidly, but access to all building tools is currently being gated through early access programmes and invitations to develop spaces. There is an element here of oversight in the overall direction that may make it difficult to use HW as a space for developing journalism until it is more open to ambitious creators. It’s a problem shared with VRChat – which demands a specific level of engagement before creators can begin to make worlds.
Evaluation
In my use of Horizon Worlds, I spent most of the time exploring empty worlds published by other users – some of which were very sophisticated. Despite the lack of an upload feature, creators are working around the limitations to create entertaining and rich spaces.
A post from UploadVR last year (2023) suggested Horizon Worlds would eventually get SketchFab and TypeScript capabilities, but that information is over a year old at the time of this update, and there were very few updates on Horizon Worlds in the latest Meta Connect keynote event.
I worked through building tutorials and found the current tools paradoxically cumbersome and simplistic. The building system enables users to create objects in templated spaces (including buildings) using primitives (shapes that can be resized and positioned). There is little fine control, which makes building frustrating. However, I am reminded that I spent hours as a teenager creating pixel-art with manually produced anti-aliasing and this is the stage we are at here. Still the outputs are less cartoonish than Rec-Room and the scripting system more sophisticated.
In addition to the primitive building tools, there are a number of pre-fab assets, which are more complex models than it’s possible to build in the system. Their availability is increasing, helping creators create more feature-rich worlds.
Application
Horizon Worlds is owned by Meta and is clearly part of the significant push into VR the company has made over the last decade. The Quest headset now prominently features individual worlds that users can access, in the same way that games are promoted. It seems the ambition is that HW will become the default gateway to VR experiences on the Meta platform and, if this is the case, it makes sense to build journalism hubs for immersive stories in HW from a commercial perspective.
Conclusions
For now, I will continue to monitor and build in HW and a potential future project will be to create a journalism hub on the platform. However, I would prefer the building tools to be more open and the social aspect to be easier to opt out of.