Metaverse virtual reality app barely stays open

Meta’s biggest swing at creating a virtual reality social network looked like it was dying fast in June. Horizon worldsa platform that Meta said would de-emphasize virtual reality in favor of mobile earlier this year disappears From VR on June 15. Then, on Wednesday, Meta changed her mind. Kind of.

The original news, which broke on Tuesday, came as a shock to people like me who thought the Meta would at least retain access to some community-created VR experiences, such as AA support groupsworks in private meta Quest headphones. Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, appears to have changed tack Post AMA It was announced that the virtual reality applications in Horizon Worlds will continue to work. At least for now.

“We decided just today, in fact, that we will continue to do Horizon Worlds in VR for existing games, to support fans who have reached out, like you, who really care about it. Those are Horizon Unity Runtime games. They will not work on mobile. They will only work in VR. We will not be bringing new games back,” Bosworth said.

“Most of our energy is going toward mobile and the Horizon Meta engine there; the reason for that is because that’s where most of the consumer and creator energy is already, so we’re kind of leaning into that. But yeah, you know, for people who already have games that they love and use in Horizon Worlds, you’ll be able to download the Horizon Worlds app and use it in VR for the foreseeable future.”

Meta said she would lower her priorities VR metaverse app Last month, this is still the plan. Horizon Worlds was a platform I never used much, and it angered many VR developers who found it stole the attention of games on the Meta App Store. Instead, Meta will continue to build Horizon Worlds as a mobile app to compete with Roblox and similar apps.

But the end goal here is also unclear: Will future Meta headsets work with phones to access these experiences? I would say it’s questionable that Meta still doesn’t have a real way to link any of their headsets or glasses across phones to be fully phone-based beyond simple audio and video streaming. The company is also pulling back on its impressive space capture app Hyperscape Capture Which was released in beta last year, removing its ability to share scans with other people using headphones.

Keeping the Horizon Worlds apps running is the right move, especially since Meta spent so much time and money convincing people to use them in the first place. But the latest pivot suggests that Horizon Worlds in VR is still on borrowed time.

Meta has retreated from VR in all sorts of ways this year, starting with the shutdown of its fitness app supernatural To close down several high-profile game studios it had acquired. The big question is whether Meta will shut down VR completely one day.

Meta says no, and reports say a new VR headset is coming next year. But all the things I’ve seen so far indicate that the Meta is all about AI and AR glasses. Meta glasses can’t handle it yet Features Offered by Quest headphones. With such a rapid rate of transitions to the company’s XR strategies, I don’t know if they will.