Discussion

Meta will shut down VR Horizon Worlds access in June

xnx: Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416940

stephc_int13: This one should be studied in management schools.I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.

taeric: It reminds me of Google Plus. I think you could make parallels to how heavily some of the tech companies were pushing ML?

cmrdporcupine: That was about Horizon Worlds on the hardware or platform or whatever, not the HW "place" itself, no?

LogicFailsMe: And there was much shareholder rejoicing...

robmccoll: Yes! And now Meta is chasing that too and failing. It's not clear to me what advantage developing its own LLMs affords Meta. Google and the other platform companies, I get it, but it's not like Meta is using what's unique about their social data to train something interesting.

alex1138: So that they can push those stupid AI questions at the bottom of Facebook postsZuck seriously seems to have no clue how to do anything. His entire existence is stealing other people's stuff

geophph: Genuine question - was it the product or the implementation that led this to not pan out? Maybe both?

luckydata: Was the product. It's fundamentally unsound, but beyond that, why would you be in that thing? The Metaverse had barely any content worth using, there was no reason to buy it beyond disposable income and novelty.

luckydata: I think it was totally predictable, I was telling my colleagues at Meta back then the Metaverse was completely toast in 2020 for a variety of reasons that only Mark Zuckerberg in his infinite wisdom couldn't see clear as day.The Metaverse was not something that Meta was good at, they went about it all wrong and it was doomed to fail.

asadotzler: No one wants to wear a PC on their faces. The few who did wanted that for games but Zuck wanted a social VR platform, not a third-rate gaming console. Games couldn't even bring in the numbers needed to pivot anyone to social so they're giving up.

general_reveal: Decoy division to hide AI buildout, but I doubt it fooled anyone in the know.

brcmthrowaway: Is this speculation?

mistersquid: > not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.

ceejayoz: This; I mean, they even renamed the company.

everyone: I was surprised by how may VR games I played and how many hours I put into it once I got a headset.That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.

jfoster: Meta essentially made a sequel to Second Life.I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.

anonymousab: Zuck never seemed to actually articulate how this was any different or newer than a sterile corporate vr version of second life. Then VRChat got big and seemed to be better than Horizon Worlds for... everything.I feel like the main possible benefits that these digital spaces bring, for consumers, are kinda the opposite of things that any Big Corporate Entity would ever want to be involved in.

cmrdporcupine: I actually think there's a huge number of people who want to do online social "world" reality -- just not without the "VR" part. I'm talking like old school MOOs and MUDs but modernized -- or something with a 2d "Zelda overworld" or "isometric" UI even.The 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that. But more than anything, no matter what, it's awkward to pretend the immersion -- but people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver.I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.Yes. People want to connect with other people. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create an author and extend that worldBut I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )

taeric: I think the general strategy for a long time in the tech world was to have as many of the programmers as you could under your umbrella. You don't necessarily know what you are racing towards, but the general feel was you knew that programmers were going to get there.

darkwater: Speaking of Apple, and honesty asking: how are their VR devices going? Looks like they released a spec'ed up version with the M5 processor end of 2025 but, what's their future? There was some (artificial?) hype in the beginning, are people actually using it? What's the SV landscape?

mkozlows: It sold terribly. The update was super-minimal, and mostly seemed to have been made for production-simplification reasons (as in: it was cheaper to update it than to keep making the old product, and they apparently didn't want to just cancel it entirely).Rumors of future products are never super-reliable, but point to their ambitions being downscaled at best. Really, everyone expects them to pivot to smart glasses, because that's what they clearly wanted to make all along, and there's probably a market for smart glasses in a way there isn't for... whatever the AVP was supposed to be.

vrosas: Meta is just paying engineers not to work at any other faang company.

riskable: > No one wants to wear a PC on their faces.This has yet to be determined! Because no VR headset so far has actually been a proper PC. You can't develop on them. You can't just install whatever TF you want. You have to use their app store and getting developer mode enabled doesn't even give you root on the device.A more accurate statement would be, "No one wants to wear a locked-down, extremely limited-use phone on their faces."When the Steam Frame comes out, then we'll see how much of a difference having full control over your VR hardware can make. It runs SteamOS and you can install whatever you want. It's a complete Linux distro! An actual PC on your face.

anonymousab: I am still surprised that they thought they'd see success with the extremely low quality version they shipped at launch. Just awful models and missing features along with a completely lackluster and shallow vision for what any sort of VR world could be.Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.

fullshark: Cause he doesn't actually want to spend time in a VR world, and has no idea what a good or bad one would be. He just was hoping it was the next smartphone and he'd own the platform.

deltoidmaximus: We've all forgotten the facebook phone failure but I doubt Mark has. He wants control further up the stack. Breaking into OSes is very hard but if you squinted just right VR kind of sort of looked like a green field that was ripe for the taking.

drivebyhooting: It is really amazing how bloated the reality labs division is. Triple layers of directors and VPs. They have been running this grift for years.When interacting with them I was left wondering whether they were delusional.But the explanation is simpler: they were just lying through their teeth to empire build.Can you believe they even built their own game engine to replace Unity? So may layers of principal engineers, directors, etc. I’m sure it will be cancelled if it hasn’t been already.

mrguyorama: "Metaverse" will never happen because we don't fit in the wires and can't eat electricity.You can never opt out of reality, so that dramatically reduces the value of a metaverse, and people don't ever actually want pretend reality.If you are willing to relax the parameters to eliminate the full VR immersion and "rich presence" and other superficial nonsense that moron Execs want because they have no imagination and just think making Ready Player One will make them rich, then we've had the "Metaverse" since the 90s. It's the internet.In terms of a digital space with user generated content, there have been tons. Some even successful. Meta had ample knowledge to draw from in the space, and should have been able to truly stand on the shoulders of giants.Instead they chose to omit legs from their atrocious avatars and not give anyone any reason to use it over existing services.Zuck is a moron that can't accept "You are a moron" as an answer.

elcapitan: I'm kind of sad they're now officially dumping it, it was always so much fun to see completely fake sponsored discussions on the Metaverse and Metaverse ads in podcasts, and book publications about it. There's something satisfying about watching that whole universe of cognitive dissonance and pretense. Like a sandbox demonstration of the fake hype this industry often indulges in.

randycupertino: Remember when they added legs and they were soooo proud of how it now had legs? But then turned out the legs weren't actually available, it was some minions wearing a motion capture suit specifically for the demo?https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/10/14/mark-zucke...> During the most talked-about segment of the show, Zuckerberg proudly announced that legs were coming the metaverse, which sounds bizarre out of context (and kind of in-context), but it’s the solution to many years of Meta VR avatars being nothing but floating torsos. He and another Meta worker showed off their new legs by kicking and jumping, and Zuckerberg talked a little bit about legs and why it’s taken so long to get them.> “I know you’ve been waiting for this. Everyone has been waiting for this,” said Zuckerberg. “But seriously, legs are hard, which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”> But it turns out the legs that were shown off with all that kicking and jumping were fake. That was not actually Mark jumping, the sequence was pre-rendered for the show.

alex1138: Is it possible all this was a major ploy to get around antitrust? I'm aware FB has been working on VR for a while even beyond the Oculus that they purchased but it's like... "Facebook bought Whatsapp, yes, but; we're Meta"

jitl: the rename came at a nadir of "Facebook" brand when there was lots of hate for misinfo, genocide incitement on the platform, etc. I think that's the more important context rather than "lol i bet we'll fool the antitrust guys w/ a quick name change"

mulderc: This was all a money laundering scheme right?

estimator7292: No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up.The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.

hirvi74: I read the first four words of the title and got my hopes up.

randycupertino: Zuck and Co just completely failed to read the room. Horizons didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready - it failed because nobody actually wanted the product. It didn't solve any problem and added a ton of friction (headsets, eye goggles, no legs, etc). The headsets were uncomfortable and isolating. The vibes were creepy and weird.The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.

Karuma: Please read the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmlSpecifically this part: "Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

smileybarry: It's funny that Horizon Worlds will shut down before its actual launch here. Meta Quest headsets are sold here but the Horizon Worlds part of the OS was entirely blocked off. (The mobile app shows it, but I could never get the headset to navigate anywhere, just stuck in the homeworld lobby)

cheeze: What is "here" in this context?

Keyframe: Metaverse, of course. Same here.