Meta’s Horizon Worlds, their flagship for consumers in the corporate virtual world as they call it metaversecurrently unable to live up to expectations, internal documents show.

Initially, Meta was targeting 500,000 monthly active users on Horizon Worlds by the end of 2022. But documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal show that the current user count is under 200,000.

Only 9 percent visited

In addition, the document shows that most users do not return to the metaverse after the first month on the platform, and the number of users has continued to decline since spring.

Only 9 percent of the world is visited by at least 50 people, and most have never been visited at all, writes CNBC.

The bad news for Meta comes with a drop in user numbers, a drop in ad revenue, and a drop in stock prices. Shares of parent company Facebook are down 62.5 percent on the Nasdaq so far this year.

Zuckerberg is engaged

Parent company Facebook last year changed its name to Meta to showcase the company’s ambitions beyond social media, and Mark Zuckerberg is said to be very interested in expanding the metaverse, the company’s virtual world that allows users to work, shop and play together.

That’s why Meta built Horizon Worlds, which will be virtual places where users can interact with each other as avatars via Meta’s VR headset. Going forward, the company says it will build versions of the program for mobile devices and computers this year, but so far no launch date has been announced, writes CNBC.

A Meta spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that the company will continue to make improvements to the metaverse, and that it was always meant to be a multi-year project.

Skeptic Apple boss

Someone who, however, isn’t that enthusiastic about virtual reality is Apple CEO Tim Cook, who revealed in early October that Apple is mostly trying to avoid using the word metaverse

– I’ve always thought that it’s important for people to understand what something is. “I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what a metaverse is,” Cooke said, adding that Apple was largely trying to avoid using the term.

Cook thinks VR can be immersive, but it still has its limitations.

– I don’t think you want to live your whole life like that. VR is not a good way to communicate, he said.

Then Cook put more faith in augmented reality (AR), or “extended reality” in Norwegian – where virtual objects appear on top of the real world through glasses or smartphones – a transformational technology that Apple bosses hope will become widespread soon. smartphone or internet.