Meta may soon launch Horizon Worlds mobile app

SAN FRANCISCO: The long-awaited mobile version of Meta's social virtual reality (VR) platform Horizon Worlds, could launch soon.

According to Lowpass newsletter from Janko Roettgers, when Horizon was launched, Meta executives had said that they were planning to launch a mobile app for it as well.

Now, Meta's metaverse VP Vishal Shah claimed that the company had actually built a working version of the app a year ago.

"We ended up not shipping it," Shah said.

"It was a little bit too much of a VR game on mobile as opposed to a mobile-native experience," he added.

The Horizon team completely rebuilt the application, according to Shah.

He didn't tell Roettgers when exactly the app will launch.

Shah said that one of the first games to be beta tested on mobile will be the first-person shooter game 'Super Rumble'.

He also promised that mobile users will be able to engage with VR users through cross-platform play.

"We're going from a world where we are VR only to a place where we're going to be VR first," Shah said.

Earlier this week, the company had released a new 'v120' update for Horizon Worlds, which included quests and rewards for all users, a new quick actions menu to Pause and more.

Meanwhile, last month, Meta had introduced a new text-based 'world chat' feature, a way to communicate with other people in the same world session, for its social VR platform.

In addition to voice chat, users can now communicate using text with this feature.

Also, users can @mention others in world chat who are in the same world.