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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
The glasses stole the show: When Meta held its annual Connect developer conference last month, the company’s new Ray-Ban Display glasses got a lot of attention. Without new hardware to announce, VR took a bit of a backseat. Sure, there was James Cameron, who is helping the company bring 3D movies, shows, and sports events to Quest headsets. But what about that whole metaverse thing? How’s that going? To get an update on Meta’s efforts to make VR social, I talked to the company’s metaverse VP, Vishal Shah.
Meta’s struggles with Horizon Worlds, the company’s social metaverse platform, have been well-documented. Shah himself complained in a series of leaked 2022 memos that not even Meta’s employees were using the platform, leading him to pose the question: “If we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
The company has since launched a series of polished games within Horizon and spent heavily to attract VR developers to the platform. At this year’s Connect conference, Meta doubled down on those efforts by announcing not just AI developer tools, but also a whole new game engine for Horizon Worlds.
All of this is part of the company’s efforts to turn Horizon Worlds into a link between social 3D spaces everywhere, from headsets to phones to your Facebook and Instagram feeds — and one day, as Mark Zuckerberg suggested during his Meta Connect keynote, perhaps even glasses.
Worlds apart: making VR games work on phones isn’t easy
When Meta launched the first version of Horizon Worlds in late 2021, it very much embraced a kind of DIY ethos. Developers could easily build games and worlds in headset, but the resulting experiences all lacked texture and complexity. Remember Zuckerberg’s selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower? That was essentially how Horizon Worlds games looked at the time. “The ceiling of what you could make was low,” Shah says. “It was just not compelling enough.”
The company began shifting away from this approach in 2023 by building and investing in higher-quality games like Super Rumble, a PvP shooter built by Meta’s in-house studio Ouro Interactive. It eventually fully transitioned from in-headset creator tools to a desktop solution for building worlds earlier this year. That software, Meta Horizon Studio, lets developers create more complex games with TypeScript, including haunted houses, sports competitions, and party games.
Meta’s Horizon Worlds game Super Rumble looks a lot better than the titles the metaverse platform launched with in 2021. Image: Super Rumble
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