If You Were Excited About Facebook’s Big Tech Upgrade — There’s A New Reality

This week, Meta announced it was shutting down Horizon Worlds, the company’s virtual reality social network, on June 15. Going forward, the platform will only be available as a mobile app and will no longer support VR headsets.

“We are separating the two platforms so each can grow with greater focus, and the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience,” the company said in the announcement.

Skepticism greeted Mark Zuckerberg’s vision from the start. When he declared in 2021 that Facebook would transform into the Metaverse — an online world where avatars would live, work, and play — even enthusiastic early adopters had doubts.

Zuckerberg formally announced the concept that year and renamed his company Meta to match, calling it “the next frontier” of tech.

“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg said in 2021.

Critics, meanwhile, called it unsettling and strange. Now, with the platform hemorrhaging billions and parts of it shutting down, those critics appear to have been right.

Horizon Worlds was once positioned as the centerpiece of Meta’s VR ambitions. The retreat comes just weeks after the company laid off more than 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the division responsible for developing its metaverse products.

After news of the shutdown spread, Meta appeared to walk back its announcement, clarifying that it would continue to support some existing VR apps within Horizon Worlds, but would not be adding any new ones.

A February blog post insisted that the company “remains the biggest investor in the VR industry” and had “a robust roadmap of future VR headsets in the works.”

According to CNBC, Reality Labs has reported billions in losses each quarter since its launch, with the most recent figure — $6.02 billion — reported for Q4 in January.

The outlet also noted that Meta has shifted its focus from VR worlds to artificial intelligence. According to The New York Times, Zuckerberg mentioned AI 23 times at a recent developer conference, and brought up the metaverse only twice.