Meta's flailing virtual reality social experience is being discontinued in June. It's part of Meta's broader moves to slim down the business that became its namesake. Pour one out from your digital bottle, because Meta is shutting down the virtual reality experience of Horizon Worlds. Meta sent an email blast to Horizon Worlds users today stating that the social VR world will officially end on its Quest VR headsets; starting March 31, Horizon Worlds will no longer be in the Quest store. Some Horizon-specific perks, including Meta Credits, avatars, and some digital clothes and in-world purchases, will also be removed.

Mark Zuckerberg's keynote presentation at the Meta Connect event this week started late. The delay was on-brand for the company's decade-long project to make virtual reality mainstream. Back in 2014, a demo of the then-primitive Oculus VR headset hit Zuckerberg like a lightning bolt, and within weeks he owned the company. He started talking about how a digital version of reality was going to be the next computing paradigm in about, oh, five or 10 years. For a time there was a lot of excitement about an impending Metaverse, but the buzz is now barely audible.

Meta won't say how many content moderators it employs or contracts in Horizon Worlds, or whether the company intends to increase that number with the new age policy. But the change puts a spotlight on those tasked with enforcement in these new online spaces--people like Yekkanti--and how they go about their jobs. Yekkanti has worked as a moderator and training manager in virtual reality since 2020 and came to the job after doing traditional moderation work on text and images. He is employed by WebPurify, a company that provides content moderation services to internet companies such as Microsoft and Play Lab, and works with a team based in India. His work is mostly done in mainstream platforms, including those owned by Meta, although WebPurify declined to confirm which ones specifically citing client confidentiality agreements.

According to Facebook-turned-Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the company's metaverse of dead-eyed avatars has been all but abandoned by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- who, in an added blow, is instead said to be spending the bulk of his time chasing the investor-appeasing Silicon Valley squirrel that is generative AI. "We've been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world," Bosworth told Nikkei Asia in an interview on Wednesday. "We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people." "We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy," he added. That sound you just heard in the distance? A single, pixelated tear, hitting the deserted Horizon Worlds' floor.

The perfect version of the metaverse, to hear tech heads like Mark Zuckerberg tell it, marries social media, entertainment, and--most exciting of all--meetings in one pristine virtual space. Long ago foretold in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, it is a place where the online world offers more experiences than the flesh-and-bone one. But whereas Stephenson's metaverse was part of an apocalyptic future, modern inventors have promised a digital utopia. Unfortunately, the metaverse they've built has, so far, lived up to those expectations about as well as a Craigslist apartment rented based on photos alone. Zuckerberg's Horizon Worlds, clunky and strange, may have been at its most thrilling when Meta informed users that legs for their avatars were "coming soon."

The next big VR avatar performance will be the late Notorious B.I.G., East Coast rap legend. Broadcast in Meta's Horizon Worlds, the show will use a virtual recreation of '90s Brooklyn as a backdrop and will have performances by guest artists like Bad Boy Records founder Sean "Diddy" Combs. It will also feature a narrative journey of Biggie's life by music journalist Touré. Bringing an artist back from the dead in avatar form often meets a wave of criticism – and that was true this time as well. Meta responded, saying it received the blessing of the Notorious B.I.G. We've also seen holograms of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.

It's fair to say that nobody is more excited about Meta's future metaverse than billionaire CEO, co-founder and chairman Mark Zuckerberg. Note his utter delight when, earlier this week, he announced "one more feature coming soon that's probably the most requested feature on our road map." "I think everyone has been waiting for this!" Indeed, the addition of legs to Meta's metaverse was what made the most headlines this week--and not the upgraded haptic and tracking features or integrated web browser of the new Quest Pro mixed reality headset. Zuckerberg explained that Meta will use an artificial intelligence model to predict and depict the positions of a user's whole body. But as delightful as the livestreamed reveal may have been, it appears the Horizon Worlds legs "demo" was more a "screen images simulated" moment. According to Ian Hamilton, editor of Upload VR, a Meta spokesman told him that "to enable this preview of what's to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture."