Meta released a new Desktop Editor for Horizon Worlds in preview, giving world creators a Unity-style game development platform for the first time. The PC-based editor is designed to be more robust, and make world creation easier and higher quality than its previous Quest-native VR editor, which Meta says it’s now deprecating.

Meta needs broader reach to make Horizon Worlds a success, which it ostensibly hasn’t found on Quest thus far. While the company made its metaverse platform accessible to mobile and desktop in 2023, bringing non-VR users to the platform for the first time since its initial beta launch in 2021, the maker-centric platform is still largely a VR-first experience. But that appears to be changing.

The newly released Desktop Editor allows developers familiar with traditional game engines, such as Unity, to create and publish worlds. Meta says in its developer resources “the VR creation tools … are legacy tools. We strongly recommended moving your development process to the Desktop editor and other PC creation tools.”

Image courtesy Meta

Granted, Horizon World creators can still preview scenes in VR while tethered to the desktop-based editor, although it’s not a prerequisite. In short, Horizon Worlds users don’t need a VR headset, and now, neither do world creators.

This follows a report earlier this month of a leaked memo from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who said the mobile version of the app “absolutely has to break out for our long term plans to have a chance.”

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More recently, Meta announced last week it’s launching a $50 million fund to boost content creation in Horizon Worlds, aiming to drive engagement as self-contained VR studios struggle.

Moreover, Meta’s strategy signals it’s not only doubling down on Horizon Worlds by tossing out more money to developers and giving them tools they’re mostly already familiar with, but it’s also looking to seize a rapidly growing cohort of younger Quest users. Younger players tend to favor free-to-play content and socially-driven experiences—something Meta likely hopes to capture with Horizon Worlds.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    There are a lot of reason why developing for XR is still way more comfortable on a flat screen than from within a headset, so Meta deprecating their Quest-native Horizon Worlds editor for the newly released Desktop Editor makes sense. But in-headset development still has some advantages, esp. with an iterative process of quickly changing and testing things in the world.

    Fortunately the open source game engine Godot released a Quest version a couple of months ago, based on their Android port, which is available for free on the Horizon store. And this is a fully blown game engine, not just mostly a visual 3D editor that Meta now tries to make more capable by giving developers more control via Typescript and integrating it into existing workflows.

    Unless you are an absolute masochist, you still want to connect a wireless keyboard and mouse, and you will have to deal with the rather low PPD in Quest 3 not really suited for productive work. But if you can handle that, you get what Godot calls a hybrid app that toggles between the 2D editor window and the 3D immersive app. If you use Godot's built-in beginner friendly, Python-like GDscript programming language that doesn't need to be compiled, you can pretty much instantly switch from changing objects, code or parameters to the game world inside the headset, which makes it particularly interesting for experimentation. And as this creates a regular Godot game, you aren't actually limited to distributing your creation only on Horizon Worlds, where Meta takes almost 50% of the revenue, nor are you limited to Quest itself.

    • guest

      User generated content is not going to happen in headsets.

    • NicoleJsd [She/Her]

      What I imagine would be the endgame is to tell voice command prompts and let the world arise around you.

      That would have to connect Game Development AI and VR.

      That's relatively simple for environment design however may pose problems for game mechanics, at least for the foreseeable future.

      however scene design and even some simple animations with voice commands could be a real game changer soonish

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Meta has been working on an LLM that can not only create text, images or videos, but 3D worlds from objects, very likely to longterm allow user content creation based on text/voice input for people that can neither 3D model nor code. Adding simple game mechanics wouldn't be an issue, game engines like Unity already allow binding scripts to game objects and enable certain standard behaviors.

        So an AI capable of creating virtual worlds by placing 3D objects would automatically add any behavior connected to these. As game objects and connected scripts are configured via properties, letting users change parameters like color or speed by voice command shouldn't be difficult to implement either.

        This certainly won't be the endgame though, as getting an LLM to create something based on iterative text commands can get very laborious unless you basically accept whatever output it generated, because you have do describe all the details to be changed. There are already way more efficient game development tools for many use cases, not relying on AI, but simple rules. Dungeon generators have been around for decades, but there are also tools like Archimatix that can create very complex architecture-like structure based on user controlled parameters, making it much easier to get the desired result than negotiating with an AI.

        Terrains are generated by "painting" trees, rivers etc., and systems like Vegetation Studio can populate the world according to rules, for example automatically placing lilies with realistic densities alongside the banks of the painted rivers. These systems could again be fed by an AI to generate a rough draft, but it will be much faster to then switch to direct manipulation to fix details instead of trying this via dialogue. And XR with 6DoF controllers/hand tracking is the perfect medium for doing this.

        I wouldn't expect a revolution from AI generated 3D worlds though, as users still need to understand how systems interact to get results from an AI that go beyond just variations of well known templates. Tools like Roblox that make content creation extremely easy have been around for a very long time, and while this has led to millions of simple games, most of these have at best personal value for the creator. Skill is still required for creating more interesting things. The effect of AI content creation via voice input will have similar effects, though with more variety and less initial effort required.

        youtu_be/aZY0rbVlEV4 Archimatix Trailer

        • NicoleJsd [She/Her]

          The problem is that there is much more designers than programmers. We all know how our perfect game will look like precisely, what we don’t have is time or skill to make it.

          Then we can use English to describe our perfect game to every detail and then tweak it a bit and voila this is the ultimate experience

  • xyzs

    Meta should focus on their now multi-hardware OS provider developer status.

    Horizons OS should be as polished, as agnostic, as optimized as possible.
    If it's just an unpolished android fork with a bloated pile of messy preinstalled subproducts from Meta, it won't survive the Android XR competition. Just make it unbloated and clean.

    Horizon Worlds is awful, it's like a non-native sub app system, that are less good, less clear, less pretty, less independent. Get rid of this garbage or make it a simple VR social network app that just focus on a simpler goal.

    Make Horizon OS attractive for developers and users, not for yourself…

  • As a developer, I think this is a much better approach. When you are creating content, the least you use a headset, the more time you save (of course you MUST use a headset at a certain point, but for many parts of development, it is not necessary). Plus the creation tools of Horizon with primitives could only lead to worlds with simplistic graphics

    • Shuozhe Nan

      Even Snowcrash realized it already.. if you want to get things done, you use mouse & keyboard, or something like that.

      It made a bunch of good predictions about VR worlds

  • Bethicus Townsend

    The only problem is that many of the people are middle aged and just want to play. The togetherness of building will be lost for some, the art of creating with your hands from shapes and all, but if you just like to create things in blender for children's games, you should be fine. There are a lot of children and they are our future.