My two young daughters are both crying as I tell my husband that he’s on his own because I’m going to the metaverse. Shutting myself in my home office at 7 p.m. on a Friday, I put on Meta’s $399 virtual-reality headset: the Quest 2, a bulky, white visor loaded with all manner of cameras, microphones, speakers, eye displays and sensors.
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When I power it up, the cries of “I want Mama to do bedtime” fade away, replaced by the sounds of a gentle breeze and birds chirping. I am transported to a mountainside villa. I turn my head to gaze at a distant river and a golden sky dotted with hot-air balloons. This breathtaking spot (which I can change, like desktop wallpaper) is a glorified lobby, where I choose an app to load.
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I could meditate, cardio box or kill zombies, but I am here for Horizon Worlds, Meta’s V.R.-based social network, where at least 300,000 people hang out as cartoon versions of themselves, building virtual mansions, nightclubs, gardens and theaters — known as worlds.
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I choose a world with a four-story comedy club under a starry sky. When I enter, a man in a gray hoodie comes up to me.
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“Hello,” I say.
He stares at me in reply, so I float away.
Another avatar approaches me. He has a beard and a man bun, and wears a collared shirt unbuttoned to reveal a generous portion of his digital chest.
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“Kash Hill,” he says, reading the white card hanging above my head.
“Can you speak French?”
“I do not speak French,” I say.
He shrugs and floats away.
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A baseball-capped avatar takes the stage and picks up the mic.
“Want to hear a story about my school?” he asks in a youthful voice that suggests a tale of sixth-grade woes.
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“I do not want to hear this,” says someone who sounds as though he’s standing to my left, though I’m alone in my office.
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Horizon is “Meta’s universe in the metaverse,” said Vishal Shah, the executive in charge of “the spatial co-present version of the internet” that the company formerly known as Facebook has staked its future on. Meta has an impressive track record, fundamentally changing the way its nearly three billion users socialize, share information and waste time.
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Meta is estimated to have sold nearly 15 million metaverse-enabled headsets, and yet people remain skeptical of an immersive internet. Since Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, announced last year that he planned to spend billions of dollars bringing the metaverse to the masses, the company’s stock price has plummeted.
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There is no shortage of skeptics mocking Meta’s plans, but how many of them have actually experienced the metaverse? I decided to try it out, defining, for my purposes, the metaverse as Horizon, Meta’s virtual platform for events, business meetings and user-constructed spaces.
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My goal was to visit at every hour of the day and night, all 24 of them at least once, to learn the ebbs and flows of Horizon and to meet the metaverse’s earliest adopters. I gave up television, books and a lot of sleep over the past few months to spend dozens of hours as an animated, floating, legless version of myself.
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I wanted to understand who was currently there and why, and whether the rest of us would ever want to join them.
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Full article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/technology/metaverse-facebook-horizon-worlds.html (Pay Wall)