Horizon Worlds is Meta's premiere Social VR product -- it encourages user-generated content and experiences, with in-app "world creation" tools featured.
Quality audio is key to a convincing and meaningful VR experience and we supported this product from the very beginning. My team created and implemented the sound and music in the app itself as well as supporting the tools for creating sound in the "worlds," being closely involved with the underlying tech and system design. We created the audio "library," and we directly supported content for a number of the worlds. It was a big commitment; I "embedded" some of my folks directly into the product team.
I helped spearhead efforts to make objective and testable criteria for refining the sound of the realtime voice system, which is critical to the sense of virtual presence, tackling trade-offs in latency, fidelity, and spatial precision.
When Horizon Worlds shipped, The Verge wrote, "Horizon Worlds is Meta's first attempt at releasing something that resembles CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the metaverse." (1)
Superbowl commercial.
Horizon has been reported to have a user base of 200-300k people. It's minuscule when compared to the billions of people who engage with Meta's other platforms, but strikes me as meaningful given what it is.
Horizon Worlds grew pretty directly out of a line that started with Facebook Spaces in 2017.
Spaces was the first social VR product that I was closely involved with (note, Spaces audio was done by the Facebook team; soon after, we would join forces with the Oculus audio team when we formed the Immersive Sound Design group).
In fact, the famous Oculus Connect conference where Zuckerberg made a VR call to his wife happened my very first week at the company. It was a pretty wild introduction.
Spaces dev team, as avatars!
(1)For what it's worth, in my opinion that's a misconception. People often equate "the metaverse" with legless avatars floating around in a candy-colored world. But that's just the current state of -- and only just one approach to -- social VR.
A sense of virtual presence; the ubiquity, invisibility, and seamlessness of technology; the interoperability of platforms; the notion of a digital identity in the physical world and a physical one in the digital world -- these things make up the metaverse. Social VR is just one corner of it, though an important one.