I zap over to a teleport pad, and whoosh, we're off to a robot battle chamber. The Battle Bots experience was built using Horizon's creative toolkit. And this is the company's latest attempt to reboot its approach as previous social VR experiences, Spaces and Rooms, get shut down.
FACEBOOK BETA ALL HOW TO
Facebook's still trying to figure out how to make VR social and creative.
I've been down this road before: I remember connecting in chats with far-off people in Spaces, and playing board games and watching TV in Rooms, and joining people for live video streams in Venues. And this new iteration, which could very well be the social glue that holds all of Facebook's next-gen VR OS together, looks like…well, it looks like NintendoLand. Facebook, despite being a social media company, has never gotten social VR right.
Facebook Horizon is an attempt at a new virtual social experience, one that promises to finally figure out social. I'm inside a demo of a beta coming next year for a select group of Facebook's Oculus VR audience. It has a Disneyland vibe, without a doubt. Soon enough, I'm stepping into a vast outdoor lobby, where canyon-like arches spread overhead. I'm wearing Facebook's recently released Oculus Quest VR headset, but I'm trying an experience that won't launch until early next year. Thumbs up and thumbs down, I make a shrug-like face. I give a thumbs-up to myself in the mirror. They're cartoonish, in a 3D-animated Pixar or Dreamworks way. I get used to my new virtual face and virtual body, crisp and clean and legless. Facebook's new attempt at social VR: it's Nintendo Disneyland.