New World Notes

Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product"

Originally published on my Patreon

Kelly Stonelake is a 15 year veteran of Facebook/Meta, who recently filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging a series of highly serious charges around sexual assault, denied promotions, and a culture of discrimination. 

While her lawsuit has been covered elsewhere, her last role at Meta included Director of Product Marketing of Horizon Worlds, which deserves special focus here. As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.

Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial. 

Seen that way, her insights also addresses a criticism I've come across often in recent years: If the Metaverse is supposed to be so important, why couldn't Meta, one of the wealthiest companies in history, succeed in creating it?

Because, Stonelake suggests, few people at Meta ever actually cared deeply about the product that was meant to help build it. 

Asked to review and comment on my article, for instance, her point of view largely gels with what I wrote in March:

Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product"

Ex-Meta Director Helps Confirm What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds: "No One Loved the Product":

As I wrote back in March, a former Meta developer speaking on condition of anonymity described a workforce for Horizon who were mostly disinterested in virtual worlds or even VR.

Kelly Stonelake, speaking on the record with me, is able to shed more light on what went wrong with Horizon Worlds -- once touted as Meta’s early entry into the Metaverse, which the company even promoted with a Super Bowl commercial. 

Read the rest on my Patreon.

Horizon Worlds Pivoted to Compete With VRChat Around 2019 (Unsuccessfully), Says Senior Meta Veteran

I keep learning more about how Meta, one of the most powerful and profitable companies in human history, has been unable to grow its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds. Part of that story is told in my book (plug!), while another part of the story I wrote about here, in which Meta leadership decided to develop Horizon Worlds with a VR version of Meta's React code of mobile apps, called "ReactVR" -- leading to a team of 2D app developers driven by engagement metrics and retention numbers, but little experience in virtual worlds or VR.

Another piece of the puzzle was just offered by Meta senior veteran Jim Purbrick, who knows quite a lot about virtual worlds and VR -- read his blog links below for much more -- but was sidelined from leading Horizon Worlds design. (Sometimes with disastrous consequences for the company.)

Commenting on my post, Jim recently tweeted:

There was, briefly, an acknowledgement that "The Metaverse" would require learning. Horizons started out as an experiment alongside Rooms and Venues then grew and sucked all of the oxygen out of the room when it was decided that Meta needed a platform to compete with VR Chat.

Yes: VRChat, the social VR virtual world first created by a tiny startup, grew organically with little marketing, but still far outpaced Horizon Worlds in terms of active users, even (and especially!) on Meta's own VR platform.  So Meta pivoted to catch up.

More from Jim:

AltspaceVR, Microsoft's Sunsetted Virtual World, Attempting Reboot

I'm late to this party, but thanks to Julian of the Virtual Worlds Museum for flagging this to me:

AltspaceVR, once a Microsoft-owned social VR platform with a pretty active community before the plug was pulled in 2023, is attempting a rebirth:

My name is Danny Mac, and I’m the owner, CEO and Refounder of AltspaceVR. After Microsoft sunset the platform and dissolved the business, I was able to reclaim the marks and form a new company dedicated to bringing this incredible community space back and ensuring it's here to stay.

To be clear, Altspace was never just a platform or a product to me. It was always about the community, the vibe, and the creativity. The connections that happened because a safe, non-toxic space existed for them to happen in.

That’s my north star moving forward, to rebuild AltspaceVR as a community-first, open source platform, with sustainable models to keep it alive for good.

Here's the revival website to get involved. I'm reaching out to Mr. Mac and hope to get more info when I can.

Want to Play a Free Alpha Preview of "Stay: Forever Home", the Upcoming AI Pet Sim for Quest?

Unlike the Convai-powered human NPCs we were recently discussing, AI-powered animals are far more interesting, believable, and frankly, appealingly un-creepy. So if you're interested in the best and latest in AI-driven virtual creatures, here's a chance to get a free Alpha preview of Stay: Forever Home, an upcoming mixed reality game for Quest headsets where you go on adventures with Ember, a magical, multi-color dawg imbued with its own unique life. (Watch some gameplay footage above.)

Click here to request early Alpha access to Stay: Forever Home.

Lead developed by game industry veteran Bernie Yee, the game promises much more than caring for a simple virtual pet.

Ember comes, Bernie tells me, with "a personality axis, multiple quirks and preferences, biological state."

Ember's AI code, he explains, "was taken from Sims AI and LMNO, the secret Spielberg game which didn't ship." In that defunct project backed by Steven Spielberg, a player would have escorted an alien creature called Eve across the country. So Ember's soul, so to speak, is distinctly Spielbergian.

"You add the AI into the mix with a dynamic environment and other (dumber) critters, it's pretty magic," says Bernie. "There was a build I played, a month ago, pre-DICE. i choked up because she felt so alive. So much of this is ALSO procedural animation, so it doesn't look like she's replaying animation timelines robotically."

Exploring a virtual world with Ember leads to some interesting emergent gameplay:

What Went Wrong With Horizon Worlds? Former Meta Devs Share Surprising Insights -- And a Solution to Still Save It

Originally published on my Patreon

After writing about Meta’s highly misguided $50 million bounty for developers to create content in Horizon Worlds, a former software engineer at Horizon Worlds reached out to me. They had read my latest book, where I devote a chapter to Meta’s many missteps in trying to build the Metaverse. 

But this engineer had even more surprising details to share.   

By request, I’m keeping their breakdown anonymous, but it rings true to everything other Meta employees past and present have told me, both on the record and off. For good measure, I also just gut checked it with two other developers who have recently quit working on Horizon Worlds. (Meta itself has declined to respond officially to my many requests for comment, beginning in 2023, after my book interview with Zuckerberg fell through.) And at least one of them believe Horizon Worlds can still be saved -- read their solution at the end.

It's an important story to share. For one thing, it helps explain why Horizon Worlds is floundering, with far less active users than Second Life (now 21 years old), let alone VRChat and Rec Room, which are far more popular on Meta’s own Quest headset. Despite billions spent in development and marketing, including a literal Super Bowl ad, Horizon Worlds has roughly 300,000 users, versus Second Life's 500,000.

For another, it helps explain why the Metaverse "failed" in the general public's eye, since most people assume Meta was the leading developer of the technology.

I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds.

Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding:

Expert Explains How Using VR Can Help You to Have Lucid Dreams IRL

Flying in VR can help induce lucid dreams, says researcher

With Quest headset sales slumping last holiday season, and their overall active usage dipping down to 1 in 3 active owners,  there's a good chance your VR rig is gathering dust. Or maybe you're still enjoying it for games and virtual worlds like VRChat and Rec Room. In either case, here's a VR application you might want to try out:

Train yourself to have lucid dreams in real life.

You know those: The seriously cool kind of dreams where you experience yourself as being aware that you’re in a dream -- and are even able consciously change what’s happening within the dream.

This post brought to you by the generous support of the Virtual Worlds Museum, now crowdfunding an expansion to build the largest resource and online community devoted to virtual worlds! Go here for all the details on Kickstarter.

Yes, you can train yourself to lucid dream over time without VR. One common technique is to get in the habit of keeping a notebook near your bed, and writing down your dreams the moment you wake up from one. (Which I’ve never tried, because frankly that seems like a pretty sure way to ruin a good night’s sleep.)

So if you have a VR headset, you might be able to take a shortcut to all that.

These tips come from Dr. Jarrod Gott, who led an experiment testing that very thing a few years ago. I’ll get into the science down the way, but since it’s the holidays, here’s the fun part first. As with anything in VR, be careful, and don’t do this near furniture or someone you can trip on.

How to Train Yourself to Lucid Dream With VR:

• Play highly immersive content. Flying games are very good for this. IE, "Velocity". Enough to produce a mild dissociative experience following play.

• Then conduct reality intention checks within this 1-2 [second] dissociative window.

Here’s what Dr. Gott means by dissociative experience:

Meta's Horizon Worlds $50M Creator Fund Yet Another Deep Misunderstanding of How Metaverse Platforms Work

I promised myself I'd stop picking on Meta after last month's "Make Horizon Worlds succeed or get fired" debacle*, but this latest announcement is too painful to keep quiet about:

Meta has made some strides on content by attracting more and more creators to build for the platform and creating some of its own first-party games inside of Horizon Worlds.

Now the company is making another big bet to incentivize creators to build on Horizon Worlds; today it announced a $50 million ‘Creator Fund’ that will pay out to creators of worlds that drive high visits and retention.

If you're an indie developer or studio who needs the work, you should definitely consider applying, but this fund is basically Meta's open admission that Horizon World as a metaverse platform is fundamentally not fun.

Historically, successful metaverse platforms like Rec Room, VRChat, etc. are rich with amazing content created by the user communities themselves which they create for free because they enjoy the very process of creating and enjoying them together as an end in itself.

Paying third parties to create this content not only does not make the underlying platform any more fun, but it will inevitably lead to content that's not optimized for highly social, casual play, where metaverse platforms thrive. I just blogged one such example from VRChat, a community-created volleyball game, again made for free by the users themselves.

All of this is why one of my golden rules for metaverse development is the creation process should be fun and rewarding in itself, and that the platform should not be monetized immediately. You want a large and highly active community on there before thinking about that. Which Horizon Worlds is decidedly not.

Or as Richard Bartle explains it: 

Meta's CTO Memo Was an Early Signal of Company Shifting Away from VR/Quest Toward AR & AI (Comment of the Week)

With news breaking that Meta is now laying off thousands of employees to focus on its AI products, this comment from reader Martin K last Thursday sure seem sadly prophetic:

Since Quest headsets and Horizon Worlds cannot succeed on the scale of Meta's ambitions (and certainly not in 2025), I'm reading [Meta CTO's internal memo] as a preparation for a major shift of focus away from mixed reality and Horizon Worlds towards augmented reality +AI glasses (at the end of this year or in 2026). (And I'm sure that Meta will find a way to describe this new focus as an evolution of their vision of the Metaverse. Maybe the new/true/real Metaverse or whatever. They'll come up with something.)

If this shift of focus towards AR glasses and AI is already planned, why not just announce it? I assume the purpose of this whole exercise (and its predictable outcome) is to rationalize the scaling down of the MR and Horizon Worlds teams, prevent or shut down internal discussions about this change, and give some employees a chance to leave or switch teams before they are fired.

But I'm biased because Meta's VR strategy never made much sense to me. Thus, I guess, I'll just wait, watch, and limit my engagement with the Quest platform.

"Despite the reductions," MSN reports, "Meta still has around 1,000 job openings in California, with hiring efforts focused on AI and other business-critical roles." So, yes, I agree with Martin that limiting engagement with the Quest is probably a good idea. 

As for my original rant about Bosworth's memo, there's a pretty good conversation on it on LinkedIn, where it went mini-viral.

Meta's Reality Labs' Dubious XR Sales Growth Claims "Leaked" Ahead of Poor Revenue Reports

I was scratching my head last night about an "internal" memo that was "leaked" to Business Insider:

"2024 was a pivotal year for Reality Labs and positioned us for greatness in 2025," [Reality Labs' head Andrew] Bosworth wrote. "The team beat nearly all of last year's aggressive sales and user goals, growing RL sales >40% YoY overall," he added. "We are seeing massive sales growth in wearables and the Quest brand has never been stronger."

First off, it's strange Bosworth did not cite a single hard sales number in an "internal" memo. Also, saying "growing RL sales >40% YoY" (emphasis mine) is an important qualifier, as that only refers to VR/XR sales in retail/brick and mortar stores. Which isn't impressive if (as likely) 2023 was slow for retail -- especially as compared to 2024, when Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses were heavily discounted.

More key, if you check out Matthew Ball's latest video game data report (mandatory reading!), XR headset sales (and Reality Labs' devices in particular), continue to be notably "down-to-flat". Which is basically confirmed today in Meta's earnings call: