Meta (formerly known as Facebook) has added a "Personal Boundary" feature to its Horizon Venues live event service and Horizon Worlds creation platform in an effort to prevent harassment in virtual reality experiences. Thus, users' avatars will not be able to approach each other too close, and it will feel like there is a 4-foot distance between them, the company's blog post reads.
The new feature essentially creates an invisible barrier around virtual avatars, preventing them from invading other users' personal space, which would help avoid unwanted interactions. However, avatars can still reach out to each other to high-five or fist bump.
Personal Boundary is enabled by default on the Horizon Worlds and the Horizon Venues services. In the future, the developers plan to add new controls and change the UI, as well as let people customize the size of their Personal Boundary.
Personal Boundary will begin rolling out today inside of Horizon Worlds and will by default make it feel like there is an almost 4-foot distance between your avatar and others. We’ll continue to make improvements as we learn how this affects your experiences pic.twitter.com/WjxtTmHvki
— Horizon Worlds (@HorizonWorlds) February 4, 2022
Personal boundaries for virtual avatars are being introduced two months after the company opened access to Horizon Worlds. Even though the company has been testing the platform for a long time and considered it an environment where you can gather with friends, there were reports of problematic behavior of other users after its launch.
Horizon Worlds is now open to more people in the US and Canada. We’ve been amazed at the spaces creators have made and we can’t wait to see what you build next! pic.twitter.com/Dz95WmXES6
— Meta (@Meta) December 9, 2021
On October 28, 2021, during the Facebook Connect conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta. He also unveiled a new company logo.
Announcing @Meta — the Facebook company’s new name. Meta is helping to build the metaverse, a place where we’ll play and connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection. pic.twitter.com/ywSJPLsCoD
— Meta (@Meta) October 28, 2021
Zuckerberg said the name change was intended to reflect Facebook's new goal of building a "metaverse" around its products, the purpose of which is to bring people together in a virtual world and let them communicate in many ways.
The names of Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp will stay the same, and the name change will not affect them. The rebranding of the parent company will not affect the social network Facebook – it will also keep its current name and logo.
