In December of last year, apparent budget cuts at Meta’s reality labs division looked ominous for Meta’s metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, and my Gizmodo colleague James Pero dared to suggest that they may have spelled the end for Horizon Worlds and the metaverse itself. It now looks like the cuts didn’t quite herald the Metapocalypse, but according to a Meta Community Forums update from Tuesday, you soon won’t be able to access Meta’s flagship metaverse experience on its flagship metaverse-experiencing device: the Meta Quest VR headset.
Now, the update says, “the Horizon Worlds platform will become a mobile-only experience.”
It sure has been a long and bumpy ride for Meta’s ‘verse. It was less than four years ago when Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that Horizon Worlds was being released in France and Spain, attaching a now legendary image of his own Horizon Worlds avatar looking not just chillingly expressionless, but unmistakably like a low-poly version of Zuck’s heavily made-up digital corpse straight from the digital undertaker. Fitting, since the metaverse concept itself has long been in a state of living death.
Weeks later, Horizon Worlds avatars famously got legs, a response to a common criticism from would-be users who weren’t satisfied to exist in the metaverse as a mostly inert human traffic cone. But the addition of legs didn’t really address the big intractable problem of walking around in virtual reality that engineers have tried to solve with giant hamster wheels, and moving tile floors that look like they cost billions of dollars. No one seems to have cracked that, and we may never reach the promised land of satisfying VR locomotion.
If you still want to experience Horizon Worlds on a headset, you’ll have to download it before March 31, when it will disappear from the Quest Store. Users who have the app already installed can continue to use it until June 15, at which point it will be sunsetted. Once that happens, those exciting virtual legs that once mattered so much will become a mobile-only legs experience.
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