Meta is actually keeping its VR metaverse running, for now

3 hours ago 2

Jay Peters

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

Meta is reversing its plans to shut down its VR metaverse — sort of.

On Monday, the company announced that it would be shutting down the VR version of its 3D social platform Horizon Worlds on June 15th in favor of a new focus on the mobile version of the app. But in a Wednesday AMA on his Instagram, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said the company has decided that existing VR worlds would remain available and that the Horizon Worlds VR app will be available to download “for the foreseeable future.”

Meta is keeping VR Horizon Worlds experiences around as a way to support “the fans who reached out, like yourself, who really care about that,” Bosworth says. But the company isn’t bringing out new VR Horizon Worlds games, and it’s still mostly focused on Horizon Worlds on mobile; “The reason for that is because that’s where most of the consumer and creator energy already was, and so we’re kind of leaning into that,” according to Bosworth.

Meta’s bets on VR software haven’t worked out very well; the company recently laid off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closed three VR studios, stopped new content for VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinued its metaverse for work. But Bosworth says that Meta has talked about the metaverse more broadly as “not just VR and virtual worlds and immersive spaces, but also AR and how you can have digital artifacts overlaid on physical things. And I’ve always said to people from day one that the metaverse is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

That apparently encapsulates activities like somebody next to you being on their phone, Bosworth says:

When somebody is using their phone and you’re physically with them, they’re at the dinner table with you, and yet when you talk to them, they hear nothing, because they’ve transported themselves through the glowing rectangle into a digital space. And it doesn’t have to be three dimensional, maybe they’re scrolling media, maybe that they’re in a text world, but like they have transported themselves. So we’ve always had this internally, at least me and Mark, this very expansive construct of the metaverse as this digital, physical construct.

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