As much as they tried to hammer us with the idea that the future of the Internet was all about putting on virtual reality glasses and shopping in the aisles in 3D worthy of the first PlayStation, the truth is that most of us didn’t buy into the Metaverse. But Mark Zuckerberg did, and how. So much so that he decided to spend a fortune on forming the Metaverse of tomorrow and change the name of his company to Meta. It all went wrong. But hey, at least now his avatar has legs.
Legs, what do I want you for?
Just a year and a half ago Meta launched for free an application halfway between social network, video game and ‘Second life‘: ‘Horizon Worlds’, which can only be tested with the virtual reality glasses Oculus Rift and Meta Quest 2. One might think it has been a failure, but in October 2022 there were 200,000 people gathering there daily. Less than Facebook would like, but more than any of us would have bet on.
However, there was something strange already from the first trailer: for some reason, the avatars lacked legs and simply floated, as if they were Miis come to life. But ten months ago, Zuckerberg already showed that they were working on it: the ‘Horizon’ characters could walk. It only took almost a year, but finally there are legs. The problem is that they are useless.
Want to duck? Feel like running? Bad luck: you can’t do it. Ah, yes, even worse: want to see your own legs? You can’t either: if you look down you’ll see absolutely nothing. You can only see other people’s legs. There’s more: this coveted add-on (which, frankly, should come as standard) is only available to players with access to version 57, and will not appear in ‘Horizon Worlds‘ or other games, only in ‘Horizon Home’, at least for the time being.
So far, Meta has already lost $13 billion just trying to start up their universe, and the numbers keep going down. Now that it has become clear that the Metaverse is neither the future nor the present, is it time to acknowledge that it was a mistake, or have they already spent too much money for that?
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