Horizon Worlds: the worst kind of déjà vu all over again?

Launched in December 2021, Horizon Worlds, Meta’s immersive three-dimensional digital environment, has been growing fast and now has 300,000 users according to the company, despite only being available so far on a few platforms and devices.

The strong increase in sales of virtual reality headsets last Christmas, which has even been reflected in insurance claims, seems to be generating interest in an environment developed on the cross-platform game engine Unity — the company claims more than 10,000 subscribers and two million downloads — where users become legless avatars and can create their own environments, as well as playing various games and meet other people.

Could Mark Zuckerberg’s company repeat the success of Facebook, bearing in mind the terrible reputation accumulated by its management over the years? The company’s numbers may not be entirely credible, but for many users, an attractive term like “metaverse” and Facebook’s name change seems enough to have persuaded them to buy a virtual reality headset to explore the environment, even if it is still profoundly limited (more so than many video games) and the company remains the same one that sees users as raw material to be sold to advertisers.

While some analysts seem to have accepted the idea that Horizons World is the metaverse…