United States - Facebook opens the doors of its metaverse

It’s crunch time for the Horizon Worlds social platform. Two years after its public presentation, American adults can access it without invitation through the application available for Oculus headsets and a Facebook account. This immersive environment allows you to meet in a virtual space with up to 20 people at the same time.

Human guides are available to welcome newcomers to the Plaza, the central gathering place for teleporting to custom worlds and community-created games. These guides are experienced users that Meta (ex-Facebook) employees train to learn about the best browsing practices and spread good rules of behavior.

But everything remains to be created in this universe still far from the Oasis of “Ready Player One” imagined by author Ernest Cline and directed by Steven Spielberg. Like the game platform popular with tweens Roblox, it’s also up to visitors to furnish this world with their own creations.

In the design area, explains TheVerge site, it is possible to create your own custom objects, such as a bow with arrows or a paper airplane launcher. It is then possible to define the rules of operation of objects, such as the firing of a weapon when the trigger is pressed or the bounce of a ball when it hits a surface.

The code, the specialized site explains, works much like layers in Photoshop by allowing rules to be chained together to create complex interactions, such as a classification that updates automatically once the game ends. Currently, the encoding is done entirely in virtual reality, but eventually Meta plans to be able to do it from a desktop computer as well.

To promote creation, the platform organizes contests with cash prizes. For the rest, there is no way to win any, either as a creator, guide or player. But it could come from other services tied to Horizon Worlds like Horizon Venues, a standalone experience for hosting large virtual reality events, and Horizon Workrooms, the virtual reality work collaboration software.