In an interview with CNET, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke more about the company’s upcoming social experience app Facebook Horizon and how he hopes it will be the ‘social fabric’ of VR.
Facebook Horizon was announced almost two years ago and has been seemingly close to release ever since. We know that varying levels of beta testing took place last year and we even saw the app for ourselves, but we’re still waiting to hear when the service might launch fully for all Oculus users.
Speaking to CNET, Zuckerberg reiterated that Horizon remains a “very big priority” for Facebook and that it will “play a big role toward helping to build out this broader metaverse that will go across all of virtual and augmented reality.”
You can read the full interview here, but here are some quotes we’ve taken from the interview that provide insight into Horizon and Zuckerberg’s thoughts on how it might be used (all emphasis is our own):
“Yeah, this is a big project for us because there needs to be a social fabric that goes across all of the different layers of virtual reality. That’s what we hope to do with Horizon. “
“I have to say, one of the things that I’ve been excited about as we start thinking about what the policies are going to be around how employees start returning to the offices, and after the pandemic clears up, one of the things that I hope is that, going forward at Facebook, in addition to doing videoconferences and stuff like that, I want to basically have our culture be that a lot of our employees are holding meetings in VR, in something like Horizon.“
“We’re very focused on just giving creators and developers the tools to build that with Horizon. It’s a very big priority for us. We’re not building it as just a single app or experience. We’re building it out as more of a platform that will enable people to build a lot of these different things over time. That’s why we’re building it methodically, and step by step. Maybe it’s taken a little longer than we would have thought to kind of have its first major, completely open release. But it’s a very important part of what we’re doing and the whole vision here. And I think it will play a big role toward helping to build out this broader metaverse that will go across all of virtual and augmented reality.“
Are you looking forward to Facebook Horizon? Let us know in the comments.
