Menlo Park, CA, April 12 (U.S.) – Facebook owner Meta Platforms has begun testing tools for selling digital assets and experiences within its Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform, a key part of its plan to create the metaverse, it said.
In a statement, Meta said that the tools will initially be available to a carefully selected group of users who create virtual classes, games and fashion accessories within the company’s immersive platform, which can be accessed via virtual reality headsets.
With a single tool, those specific users will be able to sell their extensions or offer paid access to the niche digital spaces they’ve built, the company said.
The social media giant is also testing a “Creator Bonus” program for a small group of Horizon Worlds users in the US, through which it will pay participants monthly to use the new features the company is launching.
“We want there to be a lot of great worlds, and for that to happen, there must be a lot of creators who can support themselves and make this their job,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a conversation with early users, preserved within Horizon Worlds using avatars.
Facebook’s parent company, which changed its name to Meta last year, has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality to reflect its new bet on the metaverse, a futuristic idea of a network of virtual environments accessible across different devices where users can work, socialize and play.
The company competes with the emerging virtual world players where land, buildings, avatars and even names can be bought and sold as non-fungible tokens or blockchain-based virtual assets. The market for these assets has exploded last year, with sales sometimes fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Meta Horizon Worlds, a large-scale virtual reality social platform, and Horizon Venues, which focus on virtual events, are early iterations of metaverse-like spaces.