A minute-long video posted to the Meta Quest YouTube channel shows a timelapse of creators in Horizon Worlds using its tools to make a game very much like some of Rec Room’s cornerstone activities.
While we’ve been covering the steady changes to Horizon Worlds over the last couple years and the paintball-like world itself isn’t super new, this video does offer one of the best looks yet at the level of advancement made by Meta in its Horizon Worlds tools for making environments in VR and layering in complex game mechanics. Over the course of the video embedded below you can see how the tools allow co-creators to build up the landscape, copy large areas and quickly customize elements to vary specific pieces.
Of course, the creation might also bring to mind Paintball and Laser Tag — two cornerstone experiences from Rec Room that have existed for around half a decade at this point. Rec Room got its start back in 2016, but in recent years the startup has been raising substantial funding rounds while expanding its platform from VR to iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, and more. The company says millions of custom rooms have been made already in Rec Room as they offer tools so creators can make money from their work.
Meanwhile, Meta’s head Mark Zuckerberg set a goal to see Horizon Worlds running on flat screens in 2022 while the company has launched competitions with cash prizes to encourage creators to build specific game mechanics for Horizon Worlds. Creators can then use these mechanics as the basis of bigger and more complex projects down the line. Horizon Worlds, however, is restricted to people using a Facebook account and older than 18 in the United States and Canada.
VRChat is also building in a similar area and procuring significant investment rounds as well, and we’ll be curious to see how all three platforms develop alongside one another in the next two years as they compete for players and creators across a growing array of headsets. Differences in approach to cross-platform support and new tools for personal expression could have major impacts on growth for these growing social platforms, and we’ll have updates as these tools evolve.
