> Facebook Meta Announces Horizon Worlds And Somehow Manages To Make Xbox Avatars Look Good

Mitchell Clark at The Verge:

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of his digital avatar standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and what I think is supposed to be la Sagrada Família as a way of announcing that Horizon Worlds was launching in France and Spain. Unfortunately for him, the internet more or less immediately started dragging and meme-ifying the screenshot of the virtual reality platform — likely because the graphics were, as one Twitter user described it, about on par with the Teletubbies game for the PlayStation One.

I’ve always said that if any of these headsets would be successful it would be Facebook’s Meta’s. They were smart to hire John Carmack in 2013 because if anyone knows how to optimize a system for performance its him. The optimizations and things that he and his team at id Software did to get Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake to do what those games did on the limited hardware of the time was nothing short of genius. Buying a Quest, at least in terms of the system itself, means that you’re getting a solid hardware platform. Carmack simply understands hardware and how to use it, or trick it, to get the software to do what he wants. It’s a shame to see all that work put in to make something great only for it to essentially end up with the graphics of a Nintendo Wii. But this seems like typical Facebook Meta these days. Lots of things and no idea what to do with them.

Ultimately, though, graphics are secondary to what you do with them. Even if Meta’s new update to Horizon upgrades the visuals to the level of, say, Fortnite, that won’t matter unless there’s something interesting to see in its virtual worlds. That point is perfectly illustrated by this tweet dunking on Zuckerberg’s original post

Problem is it’s up to developers to make interesting things with it or good games that will get consumers to buy into it. That doesn’t seem to be happening. Carmack’s game dev days are over. There is no “Doom” coming to save this ship. Besides, they already tried that. While the second screenshot looks much better it does nothing to pique my interest. On the upside they finally got Zuck to look like an actual human. Unfortunately good graphics only go so far. Hell I’d even bet that if you had a really good game with mediocre graphics you could still sell some headsets. But don’t try and tell me this is the future when it looks like something my Nvidia Riva 128 from 1997 could run.

The thing about this whole Metaverse nonsense is that it’s being pitched as some Next Big Thing. But for who? When Facebook Meta announced the shift to Meta and all that entails last year it was met with a heavy dose of skepticism and rightfully so. While VR always leaned into gaming it’s a very niche gaming platform. Facbook Meta pitched it as a sort of office replacement. Problem there is it isn’t an apt replacement for an in person encounter. Sure there’s lots of uses for VR and I’m big on allowing a surgeon to practice a surgery before doing it for the first time or whisking a student away to fantastical version of ancient Rome. But again, these are niche uses and VR is great for that.

Maybe that’s the trick. Maybe it’s time to recognize VR for the niche product it’s always been and will most likely always will be.

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