Horizon Worlds: Sexual Harassment in Facebook’s Metaverse

Meta’s VR platform Horizon Worlds for Meta Quest VR goggles (formerly Oculus) has just launched and is already coming into focus with negative headlines. Within days, a sexual harassment case that became public overshadowed the Metaverse.

Horizon Worlds has a sexual harassment problem

As reported by the website Technology Review, a user of the Meta VR platform Horizon Worlds experienced sexual harassment. The platform, after a beta test, was opened for the North American market by Facebook umbrella company Meta just about a week ago.

Horizon Worlds allows virtual meetings of up to 20 avatars simultaneously. In addition to meetings, users can also create digital worlds together. The VR game is strongly reminiscent of a (visually more modern) Minecraft. However, the online platform does not seem to be quite as child-friendly.

This was reported by a beta tester who was sexually harassed on November 26, 2021. She was touched indecently by a stranger and shared her experience with the official beta tester group of Horizon Worlds.

Bubble of protection remained disabled

According to Technology Review’s report, Horizon Worlds has a protective shield feature called the Safe Zone. With the help of this feature, a bubble is created around one’s avatar, which users can activate if they feel threatened.

Within this bubble, it is not possible to talk to the user or interact with him or her in any other way. Horizon’s Vivek Sharma, speaking to The Verge, indicated that this bubble does not appear to have been activated in the case of sexual harassment. Said shield feature should be particularly easy to find and activate, according to the company, Sharma said.

Sexual harassment has long since ceased to be a minor issue in VR activities and games. Again and again, assaults occur. Like in the VR game Quivr, for example, where Jordan Belamire made a case of sexual harassment public back in 2016. Other women have already described similar experiences, so this is truly not an isolated case.