© META, NIST, MICROSOFT
MARK ZUCKERBERG’S vision of the metaverse is big and bold, but currently floundering. Meta has invested billions of dollars and assigned thousands of people to create the Utopian dream that Zuckerberg called his ‘Holy Grail’. The platform’s flagship game, Horizon Worlds, is still buggy, although avatars do now boast legs. There are barely 200,000 users, under half the projections. Most user-created worlds are never visited, and an internal memo described it as an “empty world, a sad world”. Consequently, most visitors leave after a month.