Tech giant Meta announced it is opening its social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, to teens aged 13 to 17 in the US and Canada in the coming weeks.
Meta noted in the announcement that “Teens have already become fans of popular virtual experiences across the industry—this makes it crucial that we build age-appropriate, safe, and positive experiences for them in VR.”
Meta states that it has enhanced its VR parental supervision tools to now cover Meta Horizon Worlds, providing parents and guardians with more convenient ways to oversee their teenagers’ VR experiences.
The company has crafted and developed the Horizon Worlds experience for teenagers with a comprehensive range of safeguards and default safety measures.
According to Meta, teenagers can determine who they follow and who can follow them back. By default, teens’ profiles are set to private, allowing them to personally approve or decline any follow requests they receive.
Meta ensures that a teenager’s active status and Meta Horizon Worlds’ location remain private from other users on the platform. Teens have the option to decide whether their connections can view their online activity status and which public world or event they are currently in.
The latest addition to Horizon Worlds is the voice mode feature, which modifies the voices of unknown individuals into soft, friendly tones, allowing teenagers to have greater control over their communication.
Additionally, it distorts the teen’s voice, preventing it from being heard by unfamiliar individuals. By default, garbled voices are enabled for all teens within voice mode.
Meta has implemented measures to prevent interactions between adults and unrelated teenagers such that Meta ensures that adults whom a teen does not know are not displayed in their “people you might know” list.
There is a Family Center feature where parents can access supervision tools, tips, and resources from experts and other information about online safety and well-being to support their teens’ experiences across Meta technologies.
Meta added “We use content ratings to ensure teens have an age-appropriate experience within Worlds. For example, mature world and event ratings prevent teens from finding, seeing, or entering spaces that contain mature content. Our policies prohibit teens from publishing mature worlds or events. Worlds violating this policy will be removed.”
Last October it was reported that Meta’s Metaverse Horizon Worlds is struggling to attract new users. Reports came in that most of the Horizon Worlds visitors never return to the app after the first month, and the user base has steadily declined since the spring.
If Meta plays their cards right, their new vision to attract teenagers could be a lucrative opportunity without a doubt.
