Meta’s Horizon Worlds Chief Leaves Company
The head of Meta’s social VR platform Horizon Worlds, Vivek Sharma, is leaving the company, Reuters reports.
Meta’s head of virtual reality social platform Horizon Worlds, Vivek Sharma has left the company for a new opportunity. Horizon Worlds is Meta’s main getaway to the metaverse, a technological frontier in which Meta has pumped tens of billions of dollars so far.
Sharma’s departure was confirmed by a Meta spokesperson who also revealed that Sharma’s team would now report directly to Vishal Shah who is the company’s vice president of Metaverse.
Sharma spearheaded the development of Horizon, a persistent and immersive virtual environment that users can immerse themselves in inside Meta’s metaverse. Horizon Worlds is a work in progress and is still regarded as a proto-metaverse world. Horizon is accessible primarily via Meta’s VR hardware like its Oculus headsets.
The company’s metaverse business is still in its infancy and it is aiming to make these worlds the main platform where both brands and third-party developers can access Meta’s user base when the metaverse eventually explodes.
Sharma’s team created the expansive virtual reality Horizon Worlds and the virtual events-focused Horizon Venues. There is also Horizon Workrooms which is a virtual conferencing technology that targets enterprise users. The Horizon Workrooms is currently being run by Meta’s “home and work” division which is focused on the enterprise market.
Sharma’s departure comes against the backdrop of a recent Mark Zuckerberg avatar which drew widespread ridicule for its graphics quality after Zuckerberg shared a screenshot of it on Facebook.
A few days later, Zuckerberg shared a second image of a more sophisticated avatar, acknowledging that the first image had been “pretty basic.” He went on to promise major updates to Horizon Worlds as well as improvements in the avatar graphics that he promised would be “coming soon.” Sharma was previously the vice president for Facebook Gaming and Facebook Marketplace and spent five years with Meta.
https://virtualrealitytimes.com/2022/08/27/metas-horizon-worlds-chief-leaves-company/https://virtualrealitytimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Horizon-Worlds-600x336.pnghttps://virtualrealitytimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Horizon-Worlds-150x90.pngBusinessThe head of Meta’s social VR platform Horizon Worlds, Vivek Sharma, is leaving the company, Reuters reports. Meta’s head of virtual reality social platform Horizon Worlds, Vivek Sharma has left the company for a new opportunity. Horizon Worlds is Meta’s main getaway to the metaverse, a technological frontier in which...Rob GrantRob Grant[email protected]AuthorVirtual Reality Times - Metaverse & VR