Watch: Zuckerberg Unveils Horizon Worlds Updates: "Improved" Avatars (Except Not), and Hyperlink-Like "Primitives" (Sounds Familiar!)

Courtesy the eagle eye and video capture skills of Rhiannon from Avacon, here's Zuckerberg at this week's MetaConnect announcing "improved" avatars and HTML-like building blocks for the Metaverse, which he calls... "primitives".  

Someone should write a book about this one sentence!

RE "improved" avatars, the problem isn't Horizon World's avatar graphics quality, but their fundamental conception:

Nick Yee and his QuanticFoundry firm, by the way, about 1 in 3 men prefer to play as female avatars. (With about 1 in 10 females choosing male avatars.)  

Why did Meta design avatars to look like their real life owner, when 1 in 3 males don’t even want avatars that share their real life gender?

As we’ll explore in later chapters, the popularity of non-realistic avatars reflects the internal motivations of people who most enjoy metaverse platforms -- especially the very young, who comprise their core user base: They are in virtual worlds where they can explore and create and experiment with identity, which they are still developing and in their own lives. 

As for "primitives", that's been a core term for building blocks in Second Life for over 20 years*. But then again, Zuckerberg probably heard the term in a Facebook presentation.. from founding CTO Cory Ondrejka:

Cory’s shepherding ultimately led to Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus in 2014. 

As part of that purchase, Ondrejka began telling company leadership, including Zuckerberg, about the power of virtual worlds.

"All the work we did during that time was sharing some of the lessons from Second Life, sharing virtual world lessons in general, thinking about what it'd mean to have virtual world notions connected with a social network --  either connected directly or near it, having VR as an interface,” Ondrejka recalls. 

“And really laying out that: 'Look there is a play to be made here, once Oculus is shipping out product, and is high quality. So that was in 2014 where I was talking [to Facebook executives] about virtual worlds as one obvious application of VR.” He wrote up numerous documents and decks about virtual worlds, presenting them to Facebook leadership. 

 I just wish Zuckerberg had listened more closely to Cory when he told him about his Second Life avatars, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

As for Horizon Worlds, no word yet on Martin K's theorized virtual machines, but maybe it's too primitive to expect that yet.

*Update, 9/30: In Comments, reader Joey1058 notes that "primitives" was used in VRML as far back as the late 90s.

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Comments

[Gwenette Writer Sinclair]

different from any other ... than ever before ... LOL Mark is so, so ignorant (as are his developers & speech witers) when it comes to understanding virtual worlds established existing societies, build capabilities and world connection transporting (grid hyperlinks). The all definitely needs to read few books or research papers on their history. Obviously they must "know" but are constantly implementing that tried and true method of telling the same lies over and over again until everyone believes they are true.

[Martin K.]

> As for Horizon Worlds, no word yet on Martin K's theorized virtual machines, but maybe it's too primitive to expect that yet.

Well, I didn't expect them to use the term "virtual machine". However, they did mention some of the benefits that come with the ability of running the same code on several hardware platforms ( https://www.youtube.com/live/ezXhxAkhJfk?t=7156 ). In their words:

> now that Horizon Worlds works across web, headsets, and mobile, you can reach an even larger audience than ever before

What surprised me a bit was how prominent "Worlds" (i.e. maps in Horizon Worlds) are going to be featured in the forthcoming Horizon OS user interface: https://www.youtube.com/live/ezXhxAkhJfk?t=7630 . If you look closely at the icons in the bottom line of the user interface, you'll see that the icon for "Worlds" appears to the left of the icons for Friends, App Library, and the Store. Meta appears determined to push users into Horizon Worlds whenever they get a chance to do it.

[Joey1058]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 'primitives' isn't new to SL either. We'd been using prims in VRML for half a dozen years before SL left the lab.

[mySedgwick]

The term “primitives” for building blocks is another interesting choice. It’s been a staple in virtual worlds like Second Life for decades, so it’s not exactly a groundbreaking concept. It seems like Meta is borrowing heavily from established virtual world principles, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does make you wonder about the originality of their approach.

[Wagner James Au]

Oh wow, that's new to me, thanks, will update with a fact check!

[It should be obvious]

Can you be a ferret?