Mark Zuckerberg responds to Metaverse avatar criticisms

Meta was once again the butt of several jokes on social media when billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an image of an in-game screenshot of the company's metaverse platform, Horizon Worlds, last week. The image accompanied Meta's announcement of expanding its metaverse app to Spain and France.

The screenshot showed Zuckerberg's avatar in a green field standing in front of virtual mini replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Tibidabo Cathedral. The image's janky and outdated graphic quality resulted in criticisms from the online community.

'It's genuinely puzzling that Meta spent more than US$ 10 billion on VR last year, and the graphics in its flagship app still look worse than a 2008 Wii game,' tweeted Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

'Mark Zuckerberg launches Horizon Worlds in France and Spain with an eye-gougingly ugly VR selfie. Meta's metaverse ploy is surely dying in the dark,' read another tweet, which did numbers, from user @ordinarytings.

Other Twitter users made memes and compared Horizon Worlds to older games with more appealing graphics.

The backlash prompted Zuckerberg to do some damage control a few days later.

'Major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics coming soon. I'll share more at Connect,' he wrote in an Instagram post showing improved images supposedly from Horizon Worlds.

'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,' he added.

Social media is generally disappointed that despite Meta sinking billions of dollars into the Horizon Worlds project, the graphics remain what it is. But according to Zuckerberg, there is still more to come from the game, and we probably shouldn't write it off yet.

Photo: Instagram