Wagner James Au / New World Notes

As part of Meta's Horizon monetization announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an in-world chat/demo with several community creators (watch below). And before I get too ranty, let me start by saying that's a smart and good thing! If you want to foster a positive and thriving metaverse platform community, you definitely want to show the community that their creativity is highly valued, even and especially by those at the very top of the company.

So that's a small but solid step in the right direction.

That said, around 6 minutes in, while talking about Horizon's collaborative creation features, Zuckerberg says something so jaw-dropping I had to watch it several times to make sure I heard it right.

One of the things that we're trying to do differently is the whole co-developing experience and the fact that everything you're building is in Horizon itself… it really is just different from all the other experiences out there. [Emph mine – WJA]

Maybe I'm missing some context, but it's difficult to conceive of a context where this statement is accurate. In-world, collaborative creation has existed in virtual world/metaverse platforms for at least 20 years. Actually more like 22 years, because this was a core feature of Second Life when it was still an alpha demo called Linden World. Like some guy wrote:

As Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka spoke to their financial backers, a projector displayed a live video feed of Linden World, projected on the wall. Other Linden staffers were in-world, running a demonstration that the investors could watch. A few of them were using the building tools the staff used to create content. And as it went on, the investor’s eyes drifted away from the meeting, and to the screen… This, everyone realized, was what made their world unique.  

Later on, Minecraft and other platforms launched with similar functionality.

But surely Zuck knows all this. So maybe he's just referring to in-world collaborative creation in social VR. If so, he'd be on slightly safer ground. But there are other metaverse platforms which already have this feature — including platforms compatible with the Quest in the Quest app store. 

Here's what collaborative creation in VR looked like in Rec Room three years ago:

Video via Rec Room's Sean Whiting, after I contacted him for a fact check on this point. Sean tells me the Rec Room platform actually supports highly collaborative in-world building, with "up to 40 people in a room and if they all have build permissions, they could all be building together".

Maybe Zuckerberg misspoke, or only meant to refer to something very specific about Horizon's building tools. But every interpretation pretty much lands me in the same place: As with Jim Purbrick's ignored warnings about player-to-player harassment, it's unclear that Horizon is being built by a team who's aware of what's come before them — or even what exists now and is possible on their own hardware through other, competing platforms.

Which is, well, unfortunate.