News hardware Meta: The Horizon Worlds Metaverse Is So Bad That Even Its Creators Don’t Use It
Yet pushed as the future of a radiant metaverse by Mark Zuckerberg, Horizon Worlds, the application dedicated to the Meta Quest 2 VR headset, does not thrill anyone. Not even the developers who worked on it, much to the chagrin of their boss.
Do you find Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual reality social network, of more than limited interest? Don’t worry, you’re far from the only one thinking this. And it’s probably even worse than you imagine: in fact, it turns out that even the development team of this app, which runs on the Meta Quest 2 headset, doesn’t enjoy using it.
Yet considered as the flagship application of the metaverse of MetaHorizon Worlds is riddled with bugs and does not meet the quality standards one would expect with such an ambitious project. According to the website
The Vergewho published a murderous investigation into the subjectthe platform is struggling to find the right tone, and one of the reasons for this would be how little faith the developers have in this project.
“Look how much fun we have!”
The media reports information from internal Meta documents, which point to the fact that Horizon Worlds dev teams are reluctant to use their own product. “For many of us, we don’t spend a lot of time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show that pretty clearly”underlines an internal memo from Vishal Shah, the vice president of metaverse within Meta.
What is dog food?
In the world of development, dogfooding is a principle which consists, for a developer, in actively using a product on which he is working to put himself in the place of the end user. In this way, he can see the weaknesses, and thus work to improve them.
” Why is that ? Why don’t we like the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is that if we don’t like it, how can we expect our users to like it? »he adds, for his teams.
The situation is so problematic that the metaverse division of Meta is working out a new way of managingin order to “making managers accountable”. In other words, developers will have to use their product, willingly or unwillingly. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Enter in there. Organize times to do this with your colleagues or friends, both in the internal builds, but also in the public build so that you can interact with our community. »
A communication that suggests, between the lines, a bad will of the developers, but also a particularly toxic management of the situation : the metaverse, you like it or you leave it, in short.
“Come on, there’s even the Eiffel Tower!”
The big question that remains unanswered is: Why do the developers of Meta’s metaverse seem to reject so strongly the application that has already occupied them for quite a while?
The answer may well lie in an ever-changing roadmap, shifts in direction that have forced developers to question months of work, and generally speaking, in a pretty hazy vision of what Horizon Worlds should be like in the future.
Necessarily, this is enough to demotivate people whose job is to give life to virtual worlds that are pleasant, stable and interesting over time. A few days before the next Meta Connect conference, which will be held on October 11, such an observation risks staining the course of Meta’s ambitions. Especially since its boss, Mark Zuckerberg, remains convinced that the future of the Web lies in virtual reality and mixed reality. It’s hard to believe that he manages to lead the general public massively on this road, when we see that at their current time, even his own development teams seem to have trouble following in his footsteps.