Meta’s New Interactive Options For VR Worlds

Meta Have Been Making Big Moves In The Building Of New Virtual Worlds To Encourage Social Interaction On The Platform.

With covid transforming the way that we communicate and interact with our loved ones the switch to online communication seems to have inspired Meta. They are working on improving their VR environments to be more social, allowing users to invite friends into their Meta Horizon Home environment.

[Creds: MetaGuest]

Allowing friends to enter VR environments will mean that users can game, socialise and watch videos together without having to leave their homes.

Meta explains this within an announcement saying: 

“For years, Home has existed as a transitory space. Home is the first thing you see when you put on your Meta Quest headset and a familiar place to return to when you’re done exploring…With v41, we’re taking a step towards our long-term vision. As part of this update, we’ll begin gradually rolling out the ability to invite friends to your Meta Horizon Home environment and hang out, coordinate your next gaming session, and even launch your group straight into supported multiplayer experiences.”

[Creds: TheInternetProtocol]

The multiplayer interaction feature is still in its early days as avatars and environments have to be developed. But despite this still being seemly rudimentary, Meta has big plans for making this feature the new way to socialise with others, hopefully replacing phones and social media. 

Meta has been working on their new avatar system which aims to create photo-realistic avatars for users to use.

This process has required a lot of attention and effort but with time they hope to create avatars which positively represent their users. 

[Creds: Ars technica]

As expected, many users who have grown up with the likes of science fiction shows like Black Mirror, are sceptical of an environment where you will shut the whole world out, no matter how social this is. Of course, this sort of interaction has existed on gaming sites for years but to encourage a much more global market of people to engage in this sort of interaction seems farfetched. 

Covid has truly amplified the need for human interaction face to face with friends and loved ones so this move seems to be badly timed. Possibly if this existed as a tool during the pandemic it would have been embraced but now it comes across as unneeded.

As currently, the Meta-verse isn’t widely available it is hard to say how it will be approached. Purely by seeing the amount of investment into technology that this project has required it seems unlikely that the average person will have access to the technology required to operate within the meta-verse so maybe we will have to wait for a while to see the impacts that this new feature will have on the ways in which people communicate. 

Finally, for our previous #SocialShort, click here.

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