Social VR

Report: Meta to Open ‘Horizon Worlds’ to Younger Teens Amid Renewed Retention Push

February 8, 2023 From roadtovr

Meta’s social VR app for Quest, Horizon Worlds, is lagging behind the competition when it comes to attracting and retaining VR users. According to a leaked memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the company is now ostensibly looking to boost numbers by more transparently appealing to younger teens in addition to funding a slew of new second-party content.

WSJ only posted snippets of the memo, entitled ‘Horizon 2023 Goals and Strategy’, which was allegedly written by Meta Vice President of Horizon Gabriel Aul. The memo is said to outline the team’s objectives for the first half of 2023.

Here’s some highlights we formatted into a bulleted list, which also includes additional info supplied by a source cited by WSJ:

Competitors are outperforming HW. Improving user retention is most important, especially among teens and young adults
HW to open to teens aged 13 to 17, which could come as early as March
Meta is working with outside studios to build new worlds and experiences for HW
The team is aiming to launch at least 20 new Horizon-hosted experiences built by second-party studios. Of the 20, it’s hoping for five medium hits and at least one a major hit
The flatscreen version of Horizon for mobile and desktops is set to come sometime in H1 2023

Additionally, WSJ reports the memo outlined some key performance metrics, claiming Horizon Worlds’ weekly retention rate was 11% in January, which the company aims to increase to 20%. The goal for monthly active users for the first half of 2023 is said to be 500,000, with hopes of reaching one million for the full year. Currently the platform is at 200,000, or just below the December peak, the reported memo outlines.

The previously reported flatscreen version, which is said to launch by the end of the first half of 2023, is hoping to achieve 150,000 monthly cross-screen Horizon users.

Meta’s Quest 2 headset is technically only available to users aged 13 and up. Horizon Worlds on the other hand has been limited to users 18+ since it was launched in 2021, and only to those in US, Canada, UK, France, Iceland, Ireland and Spain.

While none of this seems to have hindered children below 13 from playing all the Quest 2 has to offer, Horizon Worlds included. More transparently appealing to young teens though will likely come with a host of safety requirements that the company needs to fulfil for liability reasons.

Meta issued a response to WSJ, supporting in part its move to focus on teens:

“Teens are already spending time in a variety of VR experiences on Quest,” Meta spokesman Joe Osborne told WSJ, “and we want to ensure that we can provide them with a great experience in Horizon Worlds as well, with age-appropriate tools and protections in place.”

This comes hot on the heels of Meta reducing its workforce by 13% late last year, one of the biggest tech layoffs in recent memory, which saw 11,000 jobs cut from payroll.

Meanwhile, the company’s Reality Labs XR division has dramatically increased its operating budget in an ostensible bid to maintain market dominance over similar metaverse pushes from the likes of Apple, Google, etc. At the same time, Meta has slashed some XR projects, including first-party title Echo VR.

Provided the report is true, it appears Meta is making another important step towards competing more directly with cross-platform social gaming titans like Roblox and Rec Room.

Meta’s Social VR App is Coming to Web & Mobile Soon, Alpha Begins for Members-only Rooms

January 31, 2023 From roadtovr

Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social VR platform for Quest users, is expanding with alpha tests of new members-only spaces, allowing creators to manage up to 150 card-carrying members in their private worlds. Meta says it’s also gearing up to release Horizon Worlds on non-Quest devices for the first time.

Meta is now rolling out alpha access to its new members-only worlds, which aims to let creators build and cultivate a space in Horizon Worlds. Each members-only world can have up to 150 members, although only 25 concurrent visitors can gather at any given time.

“Every community develops its own norms, etiquette, and social rules over time as it fosters a unique culture,” the company says in a blogpost. “To enable that, we’ll provide the tools that allow the creators of members-only worlds to set the rules for their communities and maintain those rules for their closed spaces.”

Meta says moderation responsibilities can be shared among trusted members, so creators can better control who gets in and who’s kicked out, however the company says its Code of Conduct for Virtual Experiences is still in effect in privately owned spaces.

What’s more, the Quest-only social platform is also going to be available on the Web and mobile devices “soon”, the company says, adding that rules will be made and enforced “similarly to how mobile operating systems manage experiences on their platforms.”

As it is today, Horizon Worlds plays host to a growing number of user-generated content in addition to first-party worlds. The release of Horizon Worlds outside of Quest would represent a massive potential influx of users and user-generated content, putting it in direct competition with cross-platform social gaming titans such as Roblox and Rec Room.

As a similar free-to-play app, Horizon Worlds offers an Avatar Store featuring premium digital outfits—very likely only a first step in the company’s monetization strategy. For now, the company says it allows creators to earn revenue from purchases people make in their worlds, which includes hardware platform fees and a Horizon Worlds fee, which Meta says is 25 percent.

In late October, Meta showed off a tempting preview of its next-gen avatars, although it’s clear there’s still a ton of work to be done to satisfy its existing userbase. Floating torsos are still very much a thing in Horizon Worlds, and that’s despite Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence that full body tracking was in the works. It was too good to be true.

For now, Horizon Worlds is only available on Quest 2 headsets in the US, Canada, UK, France, Iceland, Ireland and Spain—something we hope they change well before it ushers in flatscreen users.

‘Rec Room’ to Bring He-Man Avatars in ‘Masters of the Universe’ Event

December 14, 2022 From roadtovr

Social VR platform Rec Room is getting another big brand collaboration with the limited-time release of avatar items based on the world of Masters of the Universe, which will let you transform into He-Man, Teela, or the dastardly Skeletor.

From December 15th to March 31st, Rec Room users will be able to don the armor inspired by the legendary heroes and boney villain from the Masters of the Universe franchise. To get a copy of the avatar items, just visit the stylized pop-up of Castle Grayskull which will be in the platform’s Rec Center hub.

Ok, so He-Man is clearly missing the massive, rippling muscles you’ll see in all of the franchise’s cartoons, which include the original ’80s show, 2002 reboot, and 2021 re-reboots, but the trailer is certainly on point with everything else:

The collaboration represents another big step for Rec Room, as content is based on the official Masters of the Universe IP owned by Mattel. In the past, Rec Room has run similar events too, such as its collaboration with the NBA to bring team jerseys and branded basketballs to the platform and an event featuring popular YouTuber Mr. Beast.

As a platform that tends to skew to the younger crowd thanks to it not only being free, but available cross-platform across essentially all flatscreen devices and VR headsets, the He-Man licensing agreement may prove as a valuable test case for similar brand engagement vehicles in the future. After all, Mattel owns a mountain of kid-friendly IP that may just as well fit in the growing platform, including Barbie, Hot Wheels, Polly Pocket, Thomas & Friends, Monster High, Bob The Builder, and Pingu to name a few.

And all of that’s possible thanks to Rec Room’s $294 million lifetime financing and reported $3.5 billion valuation. Since the studio last reported Q1 2022 data, Rec Room has attracted over 75 million lifetime users across all platforms, with a reported 29 million active players worldwide.

YouTube is (finally) Coming to Horizon Home Making it Easier to Watch with Friends

October 14, 2022 From roadtovr

Meta announced that Quest users will soon be able to watch YouTube content inside Horizon Home, the first-party social VR space that’s finally making it easy to hang out in VR with friends.

Meta is slowly… painfully slowly… building out the core social features of its Quest series of headsets that first launched all the way back in 2019.

It was just a few months ago that Horizon Home begun allowing users to invite their friends into the Home space. And while you can watch videos together there, what’s on offer is a difficult-to-browse smattering of flat and VR-specific content hosted by Meta.

And while there’s definitely some decent content in there to share, there’s no denying that YouTube is the dominant destination for independent online video content… especially the kind of stuff that’s short and approachable enough to share with friends while sitting on the couch.

Now it’s already technically been possible to watch YouTube in VR with friends in myriad ways. But they all require users to install a new app, and in many cases to make new avatars, or use some kind of alternate friends list or means of joining… not the simple, frictionless experience one would hope for.

But finally… finally Meta says it will be offering up the vast trove of YouTube content right inside of Horizon Home. That means to watch with your friends all you have to do is send them an invite and then hit the play button.

In an announcement from Meta Connect 2022 this week, Meta said it’s “working on with the YouTube VR team” on this project, which sounds like the new YouTube feature in Horizon Home will not only give users access to the complete library of flat content on YouTube, but also its trove of 180 and 360 content made specifically for VR.

It’s great this is finally happening, but frankly it’s an obvious use-case that’s years overdue. And how many more years until it’s just as easy to watch Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and HBO together in this space, you know, like anyone would want to be able to do in a real ‘home’.

It’s not clear exactly when the YouTube VR feature will launch in Horizon Home on Quest, but if we’re lucky perhaps we’ll see it before year’s end.

HBO Documentary ‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ Explores the Real People of ‘VRChat’

July 12, 2022 From roadtovr

A new documentary that was filmed entirely in VR is coming to HBO later this month that focuses on the individuals and communities growing in social VR spaces.

Created by director Joe Hunting and premiered at 2022 Sundance Film Festival, We Met in Virtual Reality explores the lives of real VR users who met in VRChat and their experiences living on the platform.

VRChat is one of the most popular social VR platforms thanks to its ability to allow custom avatars and user-generated content such as rooms and experiences. The platform, which is available on Quest and PC VR headsets, is also free as well as being open to non-VR users on PC.

The film is said to reveal “the growing power and intimacy of several relationships formed in the virtual world, many of which began during the COVID-19 lockdown while so many in the physical world were facing intense isolation.”

The film follows a few people on their journey through VR, such as Jenny, an American Sign Language (ASL) teacher who’s dedicated to building a welcoming community for deaf and hard of hearing VRChat users. The film also follows a number of long distance relationships sparked and maintained in VRChat. A fitness dance instructor named ‘DustBunny’ talks about building a career in social VR dance classes.

The creators say the film has “elements of humor, serendipitous interactions and unexpected events that characterize real life.”

“We Met in Virtual Reality tenderly documents the stories of people experiencing love, loss and unexpected connection, expressing vulnerability around mental health struggles and questions about identity, offering a hyper-real journey into the human experience of an online world that may soon shape the future,” the film’s description reads.

We Met in Virtual Reality debuts on July 27th on HBO (schedule here), and will also be available to stream on HBO Max.

ENGAGE Reveals First Look at ‘Link’ Metaverse Platform for Enterprise & Education

June 15, 2022 From roadtovr

ENGAGE, the XR education and enterprise metaverse company, today unveiled its Link social platform which the company calls a “fully featured corporate metaverse.”

Previously codenamed Oasis when it was first revealed in June 2021, the Ireland-based studio calls Link a “professional metaverse,” as it was designed to host persistent virtual worlds which serve as gateways to individual spaces where employees, students and individual users can interact.

The studio published a six-minute first look at Link today, shown below:

In the video, ENGAGE’s Chris Madsen takes us through the basics of the Link platform starting with ‘Central Plaza’, a jumping off point to other worlds and as well as serving as a meetup location for events. Heading through any one of the portals takes you to what the company dubs a ‘Metaworld’, or virtual persistent locations built specifically for individual businesses.

Madsen then shows off two more hubs, ‘Enterprise Plaza’ and ‘Education Plaza’, which respectively organize portals according to business and educational content.

Link also features an ‘Apartment Plaza’, which hosts configurable personal spaces for anyone who joins the platform, available as a sort of Home space not just for enterprise or education-focused users. The user’s virtual penthouse is what Madsen calls “an opportunity to have friends and family over, to socialize, hangout, watch movies and have a great time.” Besides being able to customize the apartment, Madsen shows off a ‘simulation room’ that lets you launch bespoke experiences.

This follows the studio’s €9 million (~$10.7 million) fund raise last year which spurred the creation of Link, which Engage XR said at the time would be pitched as an “opportunity for corporate users to expand their customer base and provide immersive services at a reasonable price.”

Engage is accessible via SteamVR headsets, Meta Quest 2, Pico headsets, Vive Focus Plus, in addition to desktop and mobile devices. To enquire about pricing and additional features, head over to the company’s website to learn more.