One reason the half-time Super
Bowl ad-break attracts so much interest each year is because of how much it costs to buy the air-time .
We assume that any company willing to burn around $ 5.5m to premier a 30-second TV spot must either have the mother of all creative ideas up its sleeve or , a message so important that 112 million people ( many of whom are opening the door to the pizza delivery guy or have left the room to put the kettle on ) should all be exposed to it at exactly the same time .
In the case of Meta ( the company formerly known as Facebook ), it saw its Super Bowl 2022 ad as an ideal opportunity to pitch the genesis of the metaverse , or more specifically a social Virtual Reality ( VR ) platform for its Quest headset called Horizon Worlds .
One day , historians may well look back on 2022 and Meta ’ s slightly disturbing Super Bowl commercial featuring an animatronic dog that ’ s past its prime - only to be given a second-chance to relive its heyday when someone catapults it into the metaverse by strapping a VR headset to it - and decide that this was the moment humankind ’ s appetite for engaging in virtual worlds began .
The thing is , those future historians may turn out to be fairly accurate in their assessment of when the first metaverse seeds were sown .
According to Meta , since Horizon Worlds was rolled out to all Quest headset owners in the US and Canada in December last year , its monthly user base has grown by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people . The increase includes Horizon Venues , a separate app for attending live events in VR that uses the same avatars and functionality .
The metaverse ’ s moment in time
Will 2022 go down in history as the genesis of the metaverse ? Mike Fletcher looks at the progress to date of hosting events in new digital worlds
Prior to December , Horizon Worlds was in private beta mode for creators to test its worldbuilding tools . Comparable to how the gaming platform Roblox or Microsoft ’ s Minecraft works , Horizon Worlds lets people build custom environments , where legless avatars can hang out and play games .
In February 2022 , Meta announced that 10,000 separate worlds have been built in Horizon Worlds to date , and its private Facebook group for creators is now populated by over 20,000 members .
Unfortunately , Meta doesn ’ t disclose how many Quest headsets it sells so it ’ s hard to gauge Horizon ’ s popularity relative to the underlying hardware platform it runs on .
However , analysts estimate total Quest sales to be around 10 million units and Meta CEO , Mark Zuckerberg said recently that a version of Horizon would be released for smartphones later this year , in order to “ bring early metaverse experiences to more surfaces beyond VR .”
He said : “ So while the deepest and most immersive experiences are going to be in VR , you ’ re also going to be able to access the worlds from your Facebook or Instagram apps as well , and probably more over time .”
Accessing metaverse worlds from mobile and social will be a game-changer , opening digital experiences and environments up to millions more people and setting a future course for mainstream usability .
Brands are already buying-in to Zuckerberg ’ s shared vision