Meta holds updated Horizon Worlds, its main virtual reality/”metaverse” app, to make it easier to report bugs. If you see something going wrong while using the app, you can now press and hold the A, B, X, and Y buttons on your controllers to bring up the “report a problem” window, where you can also attach a screenshot showing what went wrong.
If the experience seems familiar, it may be because it’s been in testing for a while; according to Meta spokesperson Kelsi Horn, there were early tests available to “a subset of creators” as far back as April 2021.
Since then, according to Horn, Meta has improved the UI and is now rolling it out to everyone. Horn added that “bugs reported through this tool are individually triaged by members of the Horizon Worlds team,” so it seems like Meta’s trying to pay attention to the reports.
Just mash all the face buttons on your controllers at once, which you may have been doing out of frustration anyways.
That’s not necessarily a surprise. In the blog post announcing the update, Meta admits that a competition ran in the app couldn’t be pretty judged because “the platform was unstable and had too numerous bugs near the end of the competition.”
A current report from my colleague Alex Heath reveals that Horizon’s bugginess has been a sore spot within the company; the team behind it is in a “quality lockdown” for the rest of 2022 to iron out the bugs before more people start using the app.
In a memo, Meta’s VP of the metaverse, Vishal Shah, told employees: “feedback from our creators, users, playtesters, and many of us on the team is that the aggregate weight of papercuts, stability issues, and bugs is making it too hard for our community to experience the magic of Horizon.”
Meta’s flagship metaverse app is too buggy, and employees are barely using it, says the exec in charge. So, Meta is also making it a priority for its employees to start using Horizon “everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds,” Shah wrote. It is questioning why the team who built the app doesn’t spend more time on it themselves.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose vision has primarily driven the company’s metaverse efforts, has promised to share details about “major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics” at the company’s Connect conference on October 11th.
The company’s also set to announce its next-gen headset, the Quest Pro, which seemingly leaked spectacularly last month. But, of course, new graphics and hardware could also mean a host of new bugs, so this upgrade to the reporting system is well-timed.
When Horizon Worlds was first reported in 2019 under the title Facebook Horizon, it has been other social virtual worlds like The Sims, AltspaceVR, Second Life, Dreams, Roblox, and the fictional “OASIS” described in the novel Ready Player One.
While Sam Machovech writing for Ars Technica, emphasized parallels to Rec Room and VRChat. Machovech noted a pivotal distinction between different social virtual worlds in Facebook’s schedule to let employees welcome new users.