“Long-term investments” will “land” later this year to make Horizon Worlds “more visually stunning and inspiring”, Mark Zuckerberg told investors.
During Meta’s Q4 earnings call, where the company reported its highest ever quarterly revenue from its Reality Labs AR/VR division, Mark Zuckerberg gave investors a very vague tease of what to expect from Horizon Worlds this year:
“This is the year that a number of the long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. So I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.”
It’s entirely unclear what exactly Zuckerberg means by this.
When Horizon first launched back in 2020, both its avatars and worlds were ridiculed for their low detail graphics, and this criticism stood for years after. But over the past 18 months, Horizon Worlds has undergone significant changes to address this.
Originally all its worlds were created inside VR using primitive shapes and an in-VR visual scripting system, but now the leading worlds are built using traditional 3D asset creation pipelines and textual scripting. While it originally only provided these tools to professional game studios, Meta started rolling it out to interested individual creators last year. Further, the company launched revamped avatars with improved graphics in October.
David Heaney
It’s possible that Zuckerberg is simply referring to a wider rollout of the professional creation tools that let Horizon Worlds environments look more like the VR games you purchase on the store.
But if that’s not what he’s talking about, what could it be? Could it be breakthrough upgrades to the platform’s rendering capabilities, perhaps leveraging neural upscaling? Or could it even be cloud rendering, as it has been testing in its Avalanche project, which would offer the same kind of graphical fidelity as PC VR on standalone headsets? With such a vague quote it’s impossible to know, but we’ll keep a close eye on Meta for any details of what’s coming for Horizon Worlds in 2025.
