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Facebook has removed its brand from the developing social virtual reality platform Horizon and plans to focus its efforts on VR-based construction tools with a $ 10 million fund to encourage creators.
Horizon Worlds is the new name for Facebook Horizon and the company is removing support for Unity-based worlds, encouraging creators using this game engine to search the Oculus Store for release.
When the social service was first introduced for Oculus Quest in late 2019, it supported worlds created in Unity that were significantly more complex and engaging than those created in VR using Facebook’s tools. Unity is the most popular game engine among developers, and alongside Roblox, Rec Room, and Epic Games, companies are on a short list of efforts to build powerful yet easy-to-use tools for interactive world creation. virtual 3D. Facebook has attempted to acquire Unity in the past, and the acquisition reportedly gave the advertising giant a set of key tools that would push many creators to work with the social media company. Instead of selling, however, Unity went public in late 2020.
“We have no plan [for] direct development at Unity level above Worlds, but absolutely as a VR developer you can lean on Unity and bring that experience, be it a game or whatever, to Oculus through the Oculus app store, ” said Vivek Sharma, Vice President of Horizon at Facebook Reality Labs.
Facebook recently announced its Horizon Workrooms app to work remotely in VR. When seen together, “Horizon” can now be considered Facebook’s trademark for first-party social VR applications.
VR script and artistic creation
Facebook offered a tour of some of the worlds of Horizon recently taken by community members using virtual reality-based tools.
Community members can add to the work of others, building from primitive shapes to create new objects and adding logic and rules to the world through a scripting system. You can of course resize yourself to work at different scales – one of the hallmarks of VR as a medium – so you can go very small to work on small details or very large to get the big picture. of all. Creators can also set up portals to other worlds and share items with others to use and develop. For example, a pair of worlds created by OcuLos410 called “Intro To Horizon” and “Horizon World Tours” give creators a glimpse of what’s possible, a meeting space for help, and sample tools they can use. ‘they can use to make their worlds more complex.
Overall, then, two years after its initial launch, Facebook is refining Horizon Worlds around its virtual reality-based creative community with the $ 10 million Creators Fund that will be distributed through community contests, a program of acceleration and funding for developers who agree to build for Horizon according to the theme suggested by Facebook.
Facebook has said it will add more people to the test version of Horizon Worlds during the remainder of 2021.
“We fully expect paid events, we expect people to ask for donations of goods, exchange of goods, purchase of goods and digital items, as well as of course the experiences themselves. , so subscriptions within those experiences themselves, ”Sharma said. “I don’t have anything to announce today in terms of the exact features we’re working on, but if you take a look at what Facebook’s family of apps already support, that’s a pretty good line. we already have the capabilities of other places that we can tie all of these things together in a beautiful arc for our creators.
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