Meta announced a significant replace for its immersive digital world, Horizon Worlds, on Thursday that may see it go away the metaverse behind. The tech big mentioned it’s shifting focus for Horizon Worlds to be “nearly completely cellular” and that it’s “explicitly separating” its Quest VR platform from the digital world.
Meta’s Actuality Labs division for VR and sensible glasses improvement has misplaced nearly $80 billion since 2020. The replace to Horizon Worlds, and different latest strikes, alerts that Meta is considerably rethinking its VR ambitions.
Final month, the corporate reportedly laid off roughly 1,500 workers from its Actuality Labs division — about 10% of the unit’s employees — and shut down a number of VR sport studios. Moreover, it was reported that the VR health app Supernatural, which Meta acquired in 2023, will not produce new content material and can transfer into “upkeep mode.”
Horizon Worlds initially launched in 2021 as a VR platform and later rolled out to the net and cellular. Meta mentioned Thursday that to “actually change the sport and faucet right into a a lot bigger market, we’re going all-in on cellular.”
By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with fashionable platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.
“We’re in a powerful place to ship synchronous social video games at scale, because of our distinctive potential to attach these video games with billions of individuals on the world’s largest social networks,” Samantha Ryan, Actuality Labs’ VP of content material, mentioned within the weblog put up. “You noticed this technique begin to unfold in 2025, and now, it’s our important focus.”
Ryan went on to notice that Meta continues to be targeted on VR {hardware}.
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“We’ve a strong roadmap of future VR headsets that will probably be tailor-made to completely different viewers segments because the market grows and matures,” Ryan wrote.
Meta’s metaverse ambitions have successfully been deserted in favor of AI. After shifting its Actuality Labs investments away from the metaverse, Meta is now targeted on creating AI wearables and advancing its personal AI fashions.
Throughout Meta’s newest earnings name final month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned, “It’s exhausting to think about a world in a number of years the place most glasses that individuals put on aren’t AI glasses.”
The exec additionally acknowledged that gross sales of Meta’s glasses tripled throughout the final 12 months, calling them “a few of the fastest-growing shopper electronics in historical past.”
