Meta’s Horizon Worlds is surprisingly decent on the web and mobile
By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
Meta’s Horizon Worlds 3D social platform is starting to roll out on the web and mobile, and it generally works a lot better outside of VR than I expected — though I wish there were more to do.
Until recently, Horizon Worlds has only been available on Meta’s Quest VR headsets. In VR, the app lets you explore a wide range of virtual experiences, including games, social spots, and giant 2D screens of concerts from huge music stars. It doesn’t have anywhere close to the breadth of worlds on metaverse platforms like Roblox or Fortnite, and many Horizon Worlds experiences only have double- or single-digit numbers of players at any given time. But you can see the nascent beginnings of some kind of social network for 3D spaces.
The thing is, visiting Horizon Worlds in VR is just a big hassle. I have to dig out the Quest headset and controllers from the drawer near my desk, cross my fingers that they have enough battery power to work, and maybe wait for the device to install a Horizon Worlds update before I can actually get to the app. By the time I’ve gotten it up and running, I’ve often already lost interest in checking out whatever I wanted to see.
Horizon Worlds on the web and mobile, on the other hand, has the promise of being much less of a hassle by nature of being on devices I’m already regularly using. So when I recently got an email telling me I had early access to the web and mobile versions of the app, I was eager to see how the experience might differ from VR.
One positive for Horizon Worlds on the web and mobile: accessing it is just plain faster. On my
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