Horizon Worlds: The doors of the Facebook metaverse are open – Technologies

Facebook has already released “Horizon Worlds,” the metaverse game, under the Meta banner, the new name of Mark Zuckerberg’s group.

At the moment, the game is only available to cybernauts over the age of 18, who reside in Canada or the USA.

“Horizon Worlds” is produced by Oculus, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014. Mark Zuckerberg’s group released a beta version of this game last year, after some Oculus VR users chose to try out the new product.

The launch of “Horizon Worlds” is the first tangible step in the fight for the metaverse, a market dominated by big “players” such as Decentraland and Sandbox.

In July, Facebook announced the formation of a team that will work in the metaverse market. Two months later, Andrew “Bose” Bosworth, who is currently Head of Hardware, was promoted to Director of Information Technology, a position he will take up in January 2022.

In the coming months, Meta will invest $10 billion in this market. The next step is expected to be the release of a “token”, as Decentraland MANA and Sandbox SAND already exist.

The market is still waiting for the launch of the VR cap, which the company announced in June. Facebook has patented in the United States a “virtual reality cap”, which consists of a viewfinder application, very similar to glasses that exist for this purpose, attached to the brim of a hat.

The social network’s goal is to overcome the failure of Google Glass, the augmented reality glasses launched in the market in 2012 that the brand recognized in 2015 were “not well targeted for a specific market consumption”.

Metaverse: a futuristic concept with nearly 30 years

The concept of the metaverse, a world in which 3D avatars interact in a digital world, is far from being an original idea from the minds of the tech sector.

In fact, it is a concept that was first seen in the world of literature, more specifically in science fiction. This genre of literature has always imagined digital worlds, where avatars manage to coexist in a fully digital environment, as if they were an exact replica of the real world.

Nearly 30 years ago, American writer Neil Stephenson launched Snow Crash, in which characters use complex computers to connect to a digital world where there are roads, houses, pubs, or highways, specifically called the metaverse.

But before “Snow Crash,” writer William Gibson in the 1980s described in his “Neuromancer” a digital world accessible through a specific station, with references to virtual reality even before its technology existed—even in this work the term “cyberspace” was used. and not the metaverse.

Several decades later, with technology already developing in such a rapid fashion, the metaverse has become a “buzzword” in the technology jigsaw and an aspiration for many companies in the sector. Virtual reality has been touted for years as the next big step for the tech industry, but so far it has been limited to uses in gaming and multimedia.

The aspiration to advance in this digital world, in a vision in which every person can be represented through a 3D avatar, has already found vacancies, but it has gained strength from the moment the major tech companies began to include the subject in each of them for a long-time-strategy Term.