Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world isn’t doing so hot. Not only are the vast majority of the public disinterested in The Metaverse, but it turns out so are the people creating it. In leaked documents from the company, its claimed that The Metaverse‘s developers are barely using the tool.
Meta employees hate The Metaverse
Reported by The Verge, the team in charge of creating The Metaverse isn’t using the technology very much. With the current iteration of the virtual world being feature-lax and rather buggy, its creators do not want to work in it.
Currently, around 300,000 users have signed up to play in the virtual world. However, it has been criticised for its lack of polish (including legless avatars) and rampant racial and sexual harassment on the service.
In a memo to employees, VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah revealed that the team will spend 2022 in “quality lockdown”. The Vice President revealed that the team will the team will focus on fixing “quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users.”
In a memo on September 15th, Shah explained that developers “don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly.” He asked: “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
A follow-up memo stated that employees should be using Meta’s Metaverse at least once a week. He said: “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”
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Big changes are coming
In the leaked memos, Shah revealed that big overhauls are coming to the virtual world. Firstly, the developer will be creating a 2D version for web browsers and phones that won’t require the use of a VR headset.
However, by far the biggest addition, is the upcoming graphical overhaul. After the Internet made fun of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s low-quality graphics, the virtual world will be overhauled.
In a post on Instagram, Zuckerberg revealed that major graphical changes are coming. The new visuals will retain the Metaverse’s stylisation while also being more realistic.
“Major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics coming soon,” he posted. “I'll share more at Connect. Also, I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic -- it was taken very quickly to celebrate a launch. The graphics in Horizon are capable of much more -- even on headsets -- and Horizon is improving very quickly.”
Horizon Worlds graphical overhaul may bring more people to the virtual world. However, will the platform ever be as popular as already existing virtual worlds such as VR Chat?