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When Mark Zuckerberg claims that the metaverse is a priority for Meta, the person responsible for the first draft of this virtual world, Horizon Worlds, has just left the company. He only remained in his post for a year.
© Getty — Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket
The construction of the metaverse is far from being a long calm river for Meta. In addition to costing the American group a lot of money, this project is disrupted by the defections of certain key executives. Vivek Sharma, the boss of the Horizon Worlds platform, the first draft of the metaverse of Meta, has decided to leave the company, according to information revealed by Reuters, before being confirmed by the Menlo Park firm.
Passed by Microsoft, Vivek Sharma joined Meta in 2016. He took over as head of the company’s Horizon division in August 2021. A position he therefore held for only one year. In addition to Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social platform accessible via Meta Quest headsets, Vivek Sharma also oversaw the Horizon Venues application, dedicated to virtual events.
Meta said Vivek Sharma’s team would now be overseen by Vishal Shah, who heads the US group’s metaverse branch. If a regrouping of Meta entities working directly or indirectly on the construction of the virtual world of Meta’s parent company may seem logical, this reorganization also reflects the chronic instability that has recently reigned within the giant’s staff. American.
As a reminder, Meta has seen most of its senior executives slam the door of the company in 2021, like David Fischer, Chief Revenue Officer, David Marcus, head of an ultimately aborted cryptocurrency project, from Fiji Simo, who was at the head of the Facebook application, or Hugo Barra, head of the division dedicated to virtual reality. A strong symbol of the change of era taking place at Meta, the group’s No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, has decided to leave the company after 14 years of good and loyal service. After having proclaimed loud and clear his ambition to make the social networking giant the world leader in the metaverse, Mark Zuckerberg has seen his close guard crumble for several months.
Avalanche of mockery after Zuckerberg’s selfie in Horizon Worlds
Moreover, the virtual parallel world of Meta is far from convincing the general public. In the wake of the launch of Horizon Worlds in France and Spain in mid-August, an image posted by Mark Zuckerberg to celebrate this announcement sparked a wave of mockery on social networks. Indeed, Internet users have not failed to tackle the graphic quality of the selfie taken by the boss of Meta in Horizon Worlds in front of reproductions of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada Familia.
Visibly upset to have become the laughing stock of the Web, the CEO of the American giant reacted a few days later by acknowledging that the photo published was “pretty basic” and promising improvements. He explained that a graphic overhaul of the platform should be announced during Connect, Meta’s annual event which should once again take place around October. If the metaverse is a sector that should weigh 5000 billion dollars by 2030, according to McKinsey, the road still looks long and full of pitfalls for Meta to take advantage of it. which Mark Zuckerberg intends to welcome a billion people into his virtual world. However, it will be necessary to offer something other than a version low-cost of Second Life to achieve this…