Mark Zuckerberg defends metaverse and promises it won't be 'basic'

The internet collectively rinsed Mark Zuckerberg earlier this week when he shared a dodgy photo of his metaverse avatar posing in front of a digital Eiffel tower.

The post marked the launch of VR platform Horizon Worlds in France and Spain, but many consider the graphics to be pretty poor considering the metaverse is valued at more than $200 billion, and on Friday (19 August), Zuckerberg addressed the backlash and promised Horizon’s graphics wouldn’t be ‘basic’.

Zuckerberg said: “Major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics coming soon. I’ll share more at Connect.”

He added: “Also, I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic – it was taken very quickly to celebrate a launch. 

“The graphics in Horizon are capable of much more – even on headsets – and Horizon is improving very quickly.”

Twitter was quick to roast Zuckerberg after he posted the selfie this week, with one person calling the graphics ‘eye-gougingly ugly’.

Another added: “When you're feeling down just remember Mark Zuckerberg spent billions on his metaverse just for it to look like a low budget snapchat filter.”

A third person quipped: “Mark Zuckerberg and Meta spent BILLIONS on their #metaverse and this is their latest update. Mind boggling.”

Back in June, Zuckerberg told CNBC that his aim is to eventually have one billion users spending time and money in his metaverse.

"We hope to basically get to around a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that’s clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall," he told CNBC’s Jim Cramer

Meta – formerly known as Facebook – has spent eye-watering amounts on ushering in the new era of digital living.

Back in 2014, Facebook forked out $2 billion to take control of virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR, according to Forbes.

Although Oculus failed to catch on, Zuckerberg told CNBC the latest version of virtual reality headsets are 'a hit'. The latest VR headsets are Meta Quest 2, which starts at $299 as per the Meta site.

"I’ve been really happy with how that’s gone. It has exceeded my expectations," Zuckerberg said.

"But I still think it’s going to take a while for it to get to the scale of several hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the metaverse, just because things take some time to get there.

"So that’s the north star. I think we will get there. But, you know, the other services that we run are at a somewhat larger scale already today."

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