Clouds on the horizon of Zuckerberg’s virtual world
Mark Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars a year to create a virtual world which he wants to be so compelling that it will form part of everyday lives. However, its present version is of such poor quality that not even employees at Meta want to use it, leaks suggest.
Memos from a senior executive overseeing the metaverse for Zuckerberg appear to show that Horizon, the virtual world the company has built, is so full of bugs that it is unusable.
The leaks come days before Meta’s annual conference to show off its new hardware and software for the virtual future.
In a note to staff dated September 15 and seen by The Verge website, Meta’s vice-president of metaverse, Vishal Shah, said his team would remain in a ‘‘quality lockdown’’ for the rest of the year to ‘‘ensure that we fix our quality gaps and performance issues before we open up Horizon to more users’’.
‘‘Currently, feedback from our creators, users, playtesters and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon,’’ Shah said.
He noted that staff were not using Horizon, and asked: ‘‘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?’’
Horizon Worlds is accessed through Meta’s Quest 2 virtual reality headset, and has about 300,000 users. Users experience it through their avatars, and can build houses and go to nightclubs, bars and cinemas.
It is a showcase for Meta’s new vision, launched a year ago by
Zuckerberg with the complete rebranding of his company away from Facebook.
His company is spending about US$10 billion (NZ$17.8b) a year to build the vision. Some estimates suggest that his total expenditure could rise to US$70b (NZ$124.9b), making it an almost unprecedented gamble in big tech.
But many are sceptical about the metaverse’s future. In the 11 months since Facebook announced its new name, the company’s shares have fallen 55%.
Meta spokeswoman Ashley Zandy told The Verge: ‘‘This is a multiyear journey, and we’re going to keep making what we build better.’’