"Legendary" isn't the word I'd use, Bosworth

Welcome back!

Well, just as I was intending to sit down and finally type up a longer post about the arcade cabinet mischief I've been up to, an ad for Meta's Horizon Worlds came to the internet's attention. Forgive me–I promise, this blog/newsletter/LiveJournal stand-in really isn't going to be regularly focused on this moving forward–but it's time to talk about the metaverse. Again.

THIS IS THE MARKETING BILLIONS BUYS YOU

The ad in question isn't one that you're going to see during the breaks in an NBA game. No, for whatever reason, despite deciding to go all-in on making Horizon Worlds the centerpiece app for Quest headsets, Meta still won't put that kind of budget behind an attempt to sell consumers on what actually awaits them once the appeal of whatever the latest Quest pack-in game has worn off. Instead, the ad is a Valentine's Day-pegged Instagram Reel that was brought to Bluesky's attention by Nathie, a popular VR/AR influencer who I'm sure a decent number of the industry folks subscribed to this newsletter know well.

"This is Meta’s brand new ad for Horizon Worlds," he writes. "Not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it."

It's bad, dude. It's not what you're supposed to feel, unless we assume this was intentional self-sabotage on the Horizon marketing team's part, but all this commercial does is make the viewer feel bad.

I don't feel the need to break down every level on which this attempt to get people interested in Horizon Worlds is a failure; you can click through to the quote replies of Nathie's post if you want to see people point out the complete lack of imagination evidenced by the school gym setting, or the folly of pitching a fun virtual hangout with a… yap session about breakups that looks like an AA meeting.

For those in the industry and some of my ITP peers reading this, I'd rather focus on how this ad completely fails to even put the parts of Horizon Worlds that have improved (since the days of the dead-eyed Zuckerberg selfie and all the cracks about "no legs") in any kind of positive light.

Let's begin with the avatars. Meta keeps spending money and time on total overhauls of its avatar system–even if it were still my job to keep track of how many times the company has scrapped its avatars I'd have stopped counting ages ago. Granted, compared to the totally soulless waist-up characters Horizon launched with, these newer avatars are significantly more detailed and expressive.

Want to know a great way to undermine all of that work spent on 3D characters capable of more nuanced facial expressions? Pair them up with horribly bland, low-effort voice talent! The totally wooden delivery of the lines in this "breakup support group" ad only serves to emphasize how limited Meta's latest avatar revisions still are, and that's before we even consider what's going on with them below the neckline.

It's 2025 and Meta's marketing team remains stuck in this mode of thinking (1) what people really want to see in Horizon is a bunch of people sitting down talking to each other and (2) that the company's inverse kinematics models for animating its avatars have improved to the point where avatars seated in chairs don't look like total shit.

Here's a bit of Mat Olson lore: one of the reasons I got a full-time job writing about AR and VR in the first place is because I wrote a long, thoroughly researched explainer for USgamer on what inverse kinematics is and why it's such a tricky problem for animating VR characters.

At the time I was writing about why it made sense that Valve didn't give players fully animated first-person arms in Half-Life: Alyx, but the piece focused on the same technical limitations that keep Meta's avatars from looking even remotely like normal human beings when plopped in a chair: when you try to estimate the positions of the other joints in a human body given only the coordinates/rotation of a person's head (the VR headset) and hands (tracked hands or VR controllers), you're generally missing too much information to create believable, realistic animations on the fly.

Here's the thing, though: humans spend a whole lot of time sitting and talking to one another. It's something we generally quite enjoy doing (probably a contributing factor in the ongoing miscalculation of metaverse "meetings" being worth pitching) and, as a result, sitting + talking is an activity where we're particularly primed to notice when things feel "off."

When you take a human avatar, as Meta has, and constrain half of its joints to a seated position, you're already fighting a losing battle against our very well-honed human faculties for noticing body language. Whereas in real life you might either never notice the way a person is sitting, or perhaps pick up on things from the way they cross their legs, shuffle their feet, etcetera, in Horizon Worlds every seated avatar has its legs pinned together awkwardly at the knees, feet uncannily placed together directly in front of them.

This is a failure on so many levels simultaneously. People generally don't want to sit around listening to strangers when they get into social VR for the first time: they want to experience things they normally don't or straight-up can't experience in regular social settings!

For fuck's sake, Horizon Worlds launched with a fairly fleshed-out laser tag experience for a reason: it's active, and one of the benefits of that is that people are less primed to notice or care about janky animations when they're running around and having fun. Hell, Meta's avatars even look more normal to the eye when they're animated as standing or walking because the inverse kinematics solutions for those are less like sticking your hands up a puppet's ass!

The people creating this commercial chose to depict a scenario where Meta's avatar system isn't up to snuff, and they deserve the criticism for it.

404: FREAKS NOT FOUND

Something fascinating that I predicted could become the case back when Horizon Worlds finally opened up to the public is how it has become an eerie mirror of Meta's own aborted, continually mismanaged social media platforms that fewer and fewer people want to use.

It's not a one-to-one comparison: for one thing, even for as actively user-hostile and advertising slop-focused as Instagram has gotten, that's still a platform that can somewhat quickly and satisfyingly deliver real value to its users. Finding any joy in Horizon Worlds, for many Quest owners, would first require that they literally dust off their headset, download a series of updates, and then try to find someone remotely normal to talk to out of a sea of kids trying out the latest racial slurs they heard on the playground at school earlier that day.

No, it's more that Meta's version of a social metaverse hub is generally as degraded and degrading an experience as being locked into its social media platforms is once it's put in contrast to the alternatives: for Instagram or Threads it's the comparison to something like Bluesky or Mastodon, and for Horizon Worlds the bizarro "good" counterpart has always been VRChat.

Yes, VRChat is "not for everyone." The people who're fully bought into that world enter it with expensive PC VR setups that incorporate additional tracking hardware so they can eliminate as much need for inverse kinematics as possible and instead pilot their avatars with greater ease and natural movement… and a lot of that is done to facilitate pretending to be anime girls or sexy demons in virtual nightclubs and hookup spots.

But like, step back for a moment and appreciate that having a niche at all is a very good thing for VRChat and is one of the chief failures of Horizon Worlds as a social product. If Horizon Worlds isn't going to be geared around fantastically rendered art worlds or sleazy gentlemen's clubs that would make a Grand Theft Auto developer blush, what the hell is it for?

Maybe if someone offers to pay me for my time I'd bother dusting off my own Quest headset in an attempt to find out the answer to that question. I'm not such a skeptic or hater that I refuse to believe that anyone exists who finds value in Horizon Worlds as a social platform–but even if there are thousands of people out there who'd say that sitting around in a circle discussing breakups is a fairly faithful depiction of the "fun" they like to have in Horizon, I refuse to believe anyone with half a brain believes that's an effective way to market it as a product.

Instead, this ad reeks of having been created by a committee of people who either realize that Horizon Worlds has no exploitable niche to speak of or who are simply so uninterested in doing the hard work of finding that angle and building an effective advertisement around it that they came up with this dumb bullshit.

The marketing geniuses in question went for a painfully obvious "relatable" angle (loneliness on Valentine's Day) in an attempt to convince "normal" people that there are other people just like them–people with nebulous but tame dreams, 9-to-5 jobs that provide just enough disposable income to keep trying shit like VR, and incredibly low standards for what constitutes a good time–hanging out together all the time in Horizon Worlds. And they failed.

GO HOME, "BOZ"

There is one person inside Meta's organization (besides Zuckerberg) who deserves very ounce of ire he gets for the failure that is Horizon Worlds: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, or as those internal to Meta or inappropriately chummy with him in the tech press call him, "Boz."

(I will not be calling Bosworth that here without the use of sarcastic emphasis quotes because I'm not a Newton-esque toady and because Bosworth is so thoroughly unpleasant and lacking in an appreciably human capacity for creativity that I believe it's an unforgivable slight against the great musician Boz Scaggs that the tech press has tried to help Bosworth's nickname stick.)

For those unfamiliar with who Bosworth is, his great claim to fame–his nasty, world-worsening equivalent of Lido Shuffle–is that he was the architect of Facebook's News Feed. Remember News Feed, the product that put Facebook on the transformational path from "better Friendster" to a propaganda engine that melted the brains of half your boomer relatives into a hot, sticky paste? That's Bosworth, baby!

Before that, Bosworth taught Mark Zuckerberg in a compsci course at Harvard (wow, what good fortune for Bosworth, though I'm sure his recruitment to Facebook was still done with serious consideration of his chops and wasn't the result of him having enabled a young, more brash and "masculine" 19-year-old Zuckerberg). Oh, and then in the early 2010s he oversaw the development of Facebook's much-beloved and not at all problematic mobile ads business.

Unlike other higher ups in Meta I've interacted with, I have nothing positive to say about my brief interactions with Bosworth. Nothing all that negative either, to be honest–the one time I can recall talking to him about "the metaverse" in his capacity then as head of Meta's Reality Labs for more than a few minutes, he honestly just seemed checked out and disinterested.

And that's because, I think, that's exactly what Bosworth is: disinterested. As one of Zuckerberg's most trusted lackeys and the man who made the News Feed and mobile ads "work," Bosworth built up a reputation within the company as the guy who makes the impossible happen. Once Zuckerberg had Oculus locked down and knew that Palmer Luckey was, at best, a pie in the sky dipshit incapable of making VR break out as anything bigger than a gaming peripheral, it wasn't long before Bosworth was selected as the man to make the metaverse happen.

It's not going well for him! On top of telling employees unhappy with Meta's new Trump-loving direction that they should fuck themselves and quit, in a leaked memo from earlier this month obtained by Business Insider, Bosworth said that 2025 is the make or break year for the company's metaverse initiative. Quote:

"Horizon Worlds on mobile absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance. If you don't feel the weight of history on you then you aren't paying attention[...] This year likely determines whether this entire effort will go down as the work of visionaries or a legendary misadventure."

Horizon Worlds came to mobile a long while ago, in case you've forgotten or understandably didn't even know that it happened. It has certainly not had a "break out" moment.

It's a story for another time, to be sure, but on top of all the envy and animosity that Bosworth and however many like-minded drones he has within the Reality Labs must feel toward more successful "metaverse" products like Roblox and Fortnite, Meta has also long been nursing a huge fucking grudge against the Seattle-based company Rec Room. 

Rec Room was one of the first to launch a social-focused product for PC VR, became a "unicorn" startup valued in the billions as of a few years back, and is a company that actually successfully grew its namesake app with the break out launch of a mobile version. It has consistently–with far less funding and fanfare behind it–been showing that it's possible to build an immersive social VR and mobile product that at least attempts (more than Meta does) to moderate with kid safety in mind and a big-tent, normie group of users as its target audience. It's what Horizon World aims to be and consistently fails to be reinvented as.

Mark my words: Bosworth, and by extension the org he runs inside Meta, will never get anywhere close to the level of success the metaverse efforts need to hit in order to thrive inside Meta. They won't reach Rec Room numbers, let alone Roblox numbers.

And it's not just because Meta targets an already unrealistic goal in the first place, but because Bosworth doesn't fucking care. If there's any part of him that genuinely seems to believe in this shit (as I believe, to the man's detriment, there is in Zuckerberg), I've never seen it and it certainly isn't reflected in how he runs the Horizon Worlds team.

The original sin of Horizon Worlds, the thing that makes it an inescapably bad project from which no appreciable social benefit will ever be produced to justify the billions wasted on it, is that Bosworth and others have approached it as a product that "needs" to exist. Horizon Worlds is a box that Meta thinks must be ticked in order to make its preferred version of the metaverse economy happen; behind it, there is no commanding vision of what a good, immersive social platform could or should be like, and no guiding arguments as to why building such a thing would be socially worthwhile.

In fact, I have it on pretty decent authority that the few people inside Reality Labs who have advocated for exactly that sort of thing have basically all bounced out of the Horizon Worlds group or exited the company altogether, in large part because their ideas were either twisted to fit the Bosworth marching orders or just ignored outright.

The Horizon Worlds support group that should exist is not the fake one made for a limp, embarrassing Valentine's Day advertisement: it should be a real one that exists to support all the people who've had their hearts broken or livelihoods threatened by Bosworth's incompetent leadership.

The only thing Bosworth has been right about when it comes to the metaverse is that 2025 will likely end up being the year where Meta either decides it's still worth burning his CTO salary on metaverse initiatives or concludes that this was just one big "misadventure."

And even with that assessment, Bosworth has found a way to be self-aggrandizing and completely fucking wrong: for the story of Meta's failed metaverse vision to be "legendary," it'd have to be a unique tale of misguided decision making and product development. A bunch of rich guys burning billions on a product they don't care about and which nobody wants isn't "legendary" in the slightest these days. It's just the tech industry.

Until next time.