Could Facebook Horizon be the beginning of Ready Player One?
A few days ago, Facebook just announced the arrival of their new ever-expanding virtual universe: Horizon.
Facebook claims that in the virtual world, you can explore the universe that is constantly growing, play games that defy real-life physics, and create things from your imagination. It’s coming to Oculus Quest and the Rift Platform in 2020.
For anyone who claims that this might sound familiar or straight out of a sci-fi book, you are not wrong… This seems to be the real world start of Ready Player One’s fictional OASIS universe.
According to Wikipedia, the OASIS (Ontoloigcally Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) is a “massive multiplayer online simulation game created by James Halliday and Odgen Morrow… While starting as an onlien gaming platform, the OASIS gradually evolved into a globally networked virtual reality world that most of humanity now uses on a daily basis.”
MTonomy Analytics tried mapping out some of the similarities and differences between Facebook Horizon and OASIS and here’s what we found:
They are shockingly similar, aside from the fact that Facebook avatars do not actually have legs in the universe.
However, according to one Instagram user, undead.mantis_vr, there are many more social VR games that resemble OASIS than Facebook’s newest release. The account claims that “VRchat is very similar in gameplay and presentation, while Sansar is a lot closer in terms of graphics.”
VRchat and Sansar are both massive multiplayer virtual worlds where users can join through a VR platform.
VRchat boasts 50,000 communities and growing; plus, they have full-body avatars that can interact with one another. Users can make friends, play games, and even attend weekly events.
In a similar fasion, Sansar also allows users to create a custom avatar. However, users have the option to join quests and attend concerts, podcasts, meet-and-greets with their heroes.
According to undead.mantis_vr, the beginnings of a real life OASIS just needs a“combination of the two, and a seamless universe that is lightyears across with player and dev made planet sized planets, zero latency, infinite player count in an area, and the most advanced physics and particle effects ever seen in a game.”
