‘We stand on the shoulders of giants’: How Meta’s Vivek Sharma plans to transform Horizon into a cohesive metaverse platform

This story is part of Digiday’s Masters of Uncertainty series, a look at people and companies at the center of media’s defining storylines. Find the rest here.

Vivek Sharma likes to play video games on company time.

Fortunately, this qualifies as research. Sharma leads Meta’s Horizon team, which is tasked with constructing the company’s place in the metaverse — the persistent, immersive virtual space that Mark Zuckerberg sees succeeding the modern internet.

In spite of its new name, Meta is not trying to become the only metaverse platform in town. Sharma acknowledges that a true metaverse is more likely to take shape as a spread of interconnected platforms, not a single dominant virtual world. As vp of Horizon, the major sub-brand encompassing all of Meta’s VR products, the 43-year-old will have to thread the needle of establishing Horizon’s position as a leading metaverse builder without staking an outsized claim to the metaverse itself.

The former vp of product for both Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Gaming, Sharma has already succeeded in envisioning virtual economies, courting creators and reimagining user experiences. For Horizon to deliver, Sharma will have to do all of the above once again, while also playing catch-up.

It’s not just a place for games; it’s not just a place for people to build creative stuff.

Vivek Sharma

Under Sharma, Meta created three different Horizon apps: Horizon Workrooms, the first to go live earlier this year, is a coworking app; Horizon Venues operates virtual events; and Horizon Worlds allows users to build and play in custom-designed spaces. Eventually, Sharma plans to stitch these applications together to create a cohesive virtual world, though he didn’t offer specifics about the timeline for this union or what the overarching platform would be called.

“You can imagine us building out an entire ecosystem where creators can earn a living, where communities can form and do interesting stuff together,” Sharma said. “So it’s not just a place for games; it’s not just a place for people to build creative stuff; it’s all of the above.”

But Meta is not the only company building the metaverse. A robust creator economy has already started to take shape on Roblox, and studios such as BeyondCreative have sprung up to work with brands in Fortnite’s Creative Mode. With developers already turning their hobbies into a living on these platforms, Horizon Worlds is already behind — and it doesn’t help that its colorful avatars and game-like controls are reminiscent of its competitors.

It will be years before the race to build the metaverse has any winners or losers. But in Sharma, Meta has chosen someone who has experience in launching all of the things that an idealized virtual world might offer.

Sharma was born in Iran in 1978, into an ethnically Indian family. “My family had the pleasure of seeing the overthrow of the Shah first-person,” he said. Shortly after, …read more

Source:: Digiday