Whenever I read anything about Meta’s “metaverse” efforts, I get a flashback to the day in late 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg announced his company was betting the farm on the concept. It’s not the CEO’s words that I recall, but those of longstanding metaverse champion and at-the-time Meta technologist John Carmack, who was a key figure charged with actually building the thing: “I want it to exist, but I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse.”
Judging by a Wall Street Journal report this morning, Carmack—who left Meta at the end of last year, complaining about internal bureaucracy and complacency—won’t be eating those words anytime soon. It seems Meta now wants to boost interest in its Horizon Worlds metaverse app by targeting teens and young adults who are happily spending time in other virtual-reality apps on Meta’s hit Quest 2 headset, but not so much in the supposed flagship experience.
