Facebook Horizon the New Virtual Reality
Facebook Horizon is an ever-expanding, thriving VR world where you can explore, play, and create. There’s no end in sight to the extraordinary adventures and unique experiences you can have. Discover engaging communities, paint a masterpiece, or form a team and compete in action-packed games. You can build a Horizon World of your own using a variety of intuitive tools. Or get to know other Horizon citizens and be inspired by their creations. In Horizon, you are not just discovering a new world; you are part of what makes it great.
Horizon is a world of pure imagination. The creation of focussed experience is gearing up to an integral part of Oculus’ Virtual Reality (VR) platform. Consider Horizon as a mashup between the 3D virtual worlds of Second Life, PlayStations’ VR creation sandbox called Dreams, and the event focussed gameplay of Nintendos’ blockbuster called Animal Crossing with a splash of that rounded, Woody from Toy Story aesthetic perfected by Pixar. Currently, in an indefinite invite-only beta testing period within the US market. With its charming and brimming user-created possibilities, Facebook is very much aware of its impending irresistible potentials.
According to Ari Grant – Product Management Director at Facebook Reality Labs says, “It is a ‘do’ social network vs a ‘share’ social network.” The next wave of social is being with the people that matter to us, doing experiences that matter to us and building relationships with the Horizons’ suite of creation tools designed to allow its users to create games, worlds, and experiences which they can share with other Facebook users that come to inhabit its plaza.
I do believe Horizon is an imaginary world where you interact with people right now; there is a split interaction mode. People around us from real-life who are close to us, and then people from the internet we get to nerd out about passions, hobbies, areas of mutual interests, etc. and then people on internet we get to nerd out what you aspired to be and get that in an imaginary world living your unfulfilled desires. Horizon allows people to have the best of both; people who have similar interests as ours and want to create memories.
Potentially in Facebook Horizon, you not only can explore virtual worlds as they evolve and grow, but you can also discover all sorts of new things that inspire and interest you.
a. Discover your inspiration – Explore what inspires you and bring your creations to life. Whether it’s new worlds, unique communities, fun events, or exciting activities, you can make them in Horizon. Covid-19 Pandemic has stranded everyone literally to their computers; learning can be made fun by leveraging Horizon, especially for kids and children who are unable to focus, since their attention span is limited.
b. Defy Distance: Connect with people from all over the world to solve puzzles, play team sports, test your imagination, and create new worlds together. In Horizon, you can build the things you want to see and places you want to visit too.
c. Explore Ever-Evolving Worlds: Horizon is continuously growing with extraordinary creations made by the community. You can also create communities with specific interests and together can leverage the platform for increasing your knowledge base and learning new subjects.
In my opinion, this platform, with its advanced features and unique capabilities, will enable individuals from compromising their identity and personal data. People can express and voice their opinions and speak-up more fearlessly without disclosing their identities. Therefore, one can explore worlds of possibilities in an ever-expanding universe of virtual experiences which is designed and built by the entire community for the common good of the human-kind. With the Covid-19 Pandemic where social distancing is the new normal, Retailers can leverage this platform to give a better customer experience for online shopping geeks. Besides, the customer also can get a similar experience of shopping in a mall or just doing window shopping in the real-time like a mall environment to spending their time. Corporates also can leverage this platform to develop and work on unique, exclusive, and confidential projects where you don’t want your identity to be revealed to the world.
To summarize, Horizon is interesting in itself and as a big experiment into the future of online socialization. But it’s also possible Facebook wants to make more of the tool at a time when in-person socializing is so much more challenging. I believe it can’t be a better time than now since I firmly believe the “New Normal is Virtual Reality.”
