Image: Meta
Meta’s text-based chat feature for Horizon Worlds will be available for all users beginning this week, Meta said in a blog post on Tuesday. The text chat, which Meta dubs “world chat,” offers a way to communicate with other people inside a Horizon Worlds experience without using your voice. Meta first launched world chat in a limited way in June.
The world chat feature is accessible from the options you can pick from when you lift your left wrist while in VR; it’s a little world icon inside a speech box. And to make text chat a bit easier, Meta says it offers quick replies so that you don’t have to take the time to manually spell out messages, which can be a big pain in VR.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to world chat myself just yet, so I can’t vouch for how well it might work or how useful it might be. And I’m not sure if it’s an exclusive feature for the VR version of Horizon Worlds or if it’s also available for the recently launched mobile and web versions, but I’ve asked Meta to clarify.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Horizon Worlds has been struggling to keep users, but Meta has been improving the social playscape with features like world chat, improved moderation tools, and avatar legs. For me, Horizon Worlds still has a ways to go to compete with similar social apps like Roblox or Fortnite, but it is getting better.