Meta's Awful 'Horizon Worlds' Ad Helps Explain $70B Metaverse Loss | Hacker News Reader

Meta's Awful 'Horizon Worlds' Ad Helps Explain $70B Metaverse Loss

forbes.com

Horizon Worlds continues to look like a product with leaders who don't actually want to use a virtual world, or understand the appeal. There is no amount of money which can fix that.

Until that changes, it won't be anywhere near as good as Second Life (which I worked on) or VRChat, despite those systems costing a tiny fraction of what Meta has spent on Horizon Worlds and related projects (Facebook Spaces, Oculus Rooms, etc.). Ex-colleagues of mine worked on this stuff at Meta for years, eventually giving up because of leadership's continual failure to grasp fundamentals of why people like and use virtual worlds.

> Horizon Worlds continues to look like a product with leaders who don't actually want to use a virtual world, or understand the appeal. There is no amount of money which can fix that.

Hmmm people worth millions of dollars, who basically won in real life and can experience/afford pretty much anything they desire don't see the appeal in locking themselves up in some sort of virtual wii sport looking universe

Perplexing...

Everywhere I look I only see desperate techbros trying to keep the money printing machine running. I'm still not convinced anything good came out of tech after google maps

It took a minute but I found the hugely elaborate and expensive >hour-long video Meta showed in Oct 2021 to announce and pitch the Metaverse concept (along with renaming the company). Almost everything in it is simulated by pre-rendered mock-ups. It's interesting to skim through and compare the vision with what's shipping today after 4 1/2 years of intensive development and >$100B. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8

Somehow they made something inferior to VR chat as it existed when zuck began this farce. Something gets ruined when too much money is just dumped on a vague idea too quickly. If they had 2% of the budget I assert it would have ultimately sucked less, but still been worse then VR chat.

Metaverse always felt like they were trying to invent a new thing for the sake of inventing a new thing.

We have all of this money and no ideas, so let's try... productivity-oriented Second Life in VR?

I took it as trying to corner a hardware device market they owned. Not limited by whatever telemetry Google and Apple are willing to share.

Maybe I'm a bit too cynical, but I always felt like its entire reason for being was to be the optimal data collector. Everything Meta does is driven by that need, and this never revealed itself as an exception.

That view also felt like the simplest explanation for why they re-implemented things we can already do extremely efficiently without a virtual world, while largely ignoring the efficiencies and innovation that a virtual world can bring.

During covid, my manager (also personal friend) was legitimately excited about trying out the “metaverse” to have meetings. Never before in my life have I immediately lost so much respect and trust in someone. It still haunts me!

Ironically, a work meeting was my best experience with VR. I enjoyed it much more than video calls (at least once a group is > 4 people)

When I worked at Second Life we'd often have work meetings in-world. It was fun, often silly, but also productive. Ultimately, it was a voice conference with decent audio and tinker-toy visuals, and we could dogfood and demo our work.

But this was around 2010, when most internet video conferencing tools were still terrible, so Second Life was decent competition. For doing work meetings in 2025, the only virtual-world-like competition to Zoom & co that I can think of is maybe Apple's Spatial Facetime, and that's thanks to expensive hardware designed to solve or hide the usual VR usability issues.

A fascinatingly horrible advertisement, revealing what they likely know about their user base: lonely people looking for company, but failing to understand how any of this would be appealing to such a person.

The animation in the commercial reminds me of Reboot, the 90s cgi kids cartoon. I found the animation too uncanny to stomach.

Link for the awful ad I think https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d4q42oqpblill4dzgz25expx/po...

the link in the Forbes thing is broken.

It's impressive how bad the lip syncing and arm movements are give there's quite a lot of stuff out there that does those not too badly these days.

My goodness that looks bad.

The original Instagram link goes to a 404 for me, did they delete it out of shame?

lol

think so. It's here https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d4q42oqpblill4dzgz25expx/po...

Meta claims to be anti-DEI and yet gave most of the ostensibly male character models in their metaverse product a nice pair of ta-tas. Not that I'm complaining, I love me some ta-tas.

Maybe they are just catering to what the market wants? It could be that people who are early adopters in online immersive virtual reality want to see or be men with "ta tas".

Maybe?

In any case I am not at all anti-diversity. I am very pro diversity. I just think its funny that given their recent political realignment and public statements all but one of the character models (that the sort of people who spout anti-DEI rhetoric would insist must identify as male) in their ad have prominent boobs.

I think the real answer is that their 3D rendering and animation systems just absolutely suck despite the 10s of billions of dollars of investment, its like looking at something out of the mid-90s.

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