Metaverse leaves virtual reality

The Meta announced a major update to its immersive virtual world, Horizon Worlds, on Thursday that will see it leave the Metaverse behind. The tech giant said it is shifting its focus on Horizon Worlds to be “almost exclusively mobile” and that it is “explicitly decoupling” its Quest VR platform from the virtual world.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, developing virtual reality and smart glasses, has lost nearly $80 billion since 2020. The update to Horizon Worlds, and other recent moves, suggest that Meta is significantly rethinking its VR ambitions.

Last month, the company reportedly laid off nearly 1,500 employees from its Reality Labs division — about 10% of the unit’s employees — and shuttered several virtual reality game studios. Additionally, it has been reported that virtual reality fitness app Supernatural, which was acquired by Meta in 2023, will no longer produce new content and will move into “maintenance mode.”

Horizon Worlds originally launched in 2021 as a virtual reality platform and later rolled out to web and mobile. “To really change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going fully mobile,” Meta said Thursday.

By focusing on mobile first, Horizon Worlds positions itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite.

“We are in a strong position to deliver synchronous social gaming at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games to billions of people on the world’s largest social networks,” Samantha Ryan, vice president of content at Reality Labs, said in the blog post. “You saw this strategy start to take shape in 2025, and now, that is our main focus.”

Ryan noted that Meta is still focused on VR hardware.

“We have a robust roadmap for future VR headsets that will be tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures,” Ryan wrote.

The ambitions of the Metaverse have been effectively abandoned in favor of AI. After shifting its Reality Labs investments away from the Metaverse, Meta is now focusing on developing wearable AI devices and developing its own AI models.

During Meta’s latest earnings call last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “It’s hard to imagine a world in a few years where most of the glasses people wear aren’t AI glasses.”

The CEO also stated that sales of Meta glasses have tripled over the past year, calling them “some of the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history.”