Facebook has already released Horizon Worlds, a meta-universe game under the sign of Meta, the new band name for Mark Zuckerberg.
At the moment, the game is only available to cybernauts over 18 years old who live in Canada or the United States.
Horizon Worlds was produced by Oculus, a company acquired by Facebook in 2014. Mark Zuckerberg’s group released a trial version of the game last year, selecting some Oculus VR users to try out the new product.
The launch of Horizon Worlds marks the first concrete step in the fight for the metaverse, a market dominated by big players like Decentraland and Sandbox.
In July, Facebook announced the formation of a team that will operate in the metaverse market. Two months later, Andrew “Bose” Bosworth, who currently heads the hardware division, was named CIO, a position he will take in January 2022.
Meta will invest $ 10 billion in this market in the coming months. The next step is expected to be the release of a “token” as Decentraland MANA and Sandbox SAND already exist.
The market is still waiting for the launch of the virtual reality hat announced by the company in June. Facebook has filed a US patent called “Virtual Reality Cap”, which uses a viewfinder very similar to existing glasses for this purpose, and which is hung on the brim of a hat.
The goal of the social network is to overcome the failure of Google Glass, augmented reality glasses launched in 2012 and which the brand acknowledged in 2015 that “they were not well targeted at specific consumption in the market.”
Metaverse: a futuristic concept created almost 30 years ago.
The concept of the metaverse, a world in which three-dimensional avatars interact in a digital universe, is far from the original idea invented in the tech sector.
In fact, this concept first appeared in literature, more precisely in science fiction. This type of literature has long represented digital worlds in which avatars manage to coexist in a completely digital environment, as if they were an exact replica of the real world.
Nearly 30 years ago, American writer Neil Stevenson published Snow Crash, in which characters use sophisticated computers to connect to a digital world of avenues, houses, bars, or a highway, aptly named the metaverse.
But before Snow Crash in the 80s, writer William Gibson described in Neuromancer the digital world accessible through a specific terminal, with reference to virtual reality, even before there was technology for this – even in this work, the term “cyberspace” not the metaverse.
Decades later, with technology already advancing at a rapid pace, the metaverse became a buzzword in the tech landscape and the ambition of several companies in the sector. Virtual reality has been described as the next big step for the tech industry for many years, but so far it has been limited to gaming and multimedia applications.
The drive to advance in this digital universe, in a vision in which each person can be represented as a three-dimensional avatar, already has its own vacancies, but has intensified since the moment when major tech companies began to include this topic in their long-term projects. term strategy. deadline.
