Highlights:

  • Meta also announced that it would launch Horizon Worlds in the UK on Quest 2 for people 18 or older.
  • The new feature is yet another tool to help Meta battle disruptive and inappropriate behavior on the Horizon Worlds platform.

Meta is working rapidly to have more people hop onto its playful virtual realms, especially Horizon Worlds. In line with this, Meta announced that it would launch Horizon Worlds in the UK on Quest 2 for people 18 or older. With the launch, Horizon Worlds will now be available for 18+ people to be downloaded for free on Quest 2 in the UK, besides being available in the US and Canada. The company also plans to roll out Horizon Worlds to more countries in Europe later in the summer of 2022.

Furthermore, the firm also announced a new setting known as Voice Mode that will confer more control to people over their Horizon Worlds experience.

As this feature gets rolled out, it will allow users to choose how they hear people who are not on their friends’ list. This means they will have the option not to hear unwanted conversations at all. As a default setting, users will be able to hear all nearby users at the same volume, but when the Voice Mode is on, they can switch to Garbled Voices, where non-friends voices come across as incomprehensible, friendly sounds.

Meta markets Horizon Worlds as a platform where people can come together to create and explore. Users can do anything – from setting up a comedy club, going bowling with friends, and learning about diverse lifestyles and languages. Since its launch in 2021, Meta has been blown away by its imaginative creator community to make Horizon Worlds a success.

But the latest move to add voice chat with strangers enabled by default has received mixed reactions. People who have played an online multiplayer game in the last decade, especially women, attest to having a harrowing experience, opening the floodgates for harassment and hate.

Users can choose to garble strangers’ voices

Though Voice Chat is inexplicably enabled by default, it will now be enabled with some more options that will let users opt-in to disable audio from nearby strangers. There will also be an option to “garble” strangers’ voices, turning them into “unintelligible, friendly sounds”.

If a user chooses to enable garbled voices, strangers will see an indicator to show this. But if users want to hear what is being said, they can just raise a hand with the controller to their ear to temporarily un-garble strangers’ voices without adding them as friends.

The new feature is yet another tool to help Meta battle disruptive and inappropriate behavior on the Horizon Worlds platform. In line with this, in March, Meta introduced a “personal boundary,” which allowed users to maintain a small 4-foot buffer of space between avatars and others to minimize personal space invasions. Additionally, Horizon Worlds Community Guides now has a tool that empowers them to send educational warnings as a pop-up to users who are behaving disruptively.

Users will now have several options on the platform if they are being bothered by someone else. From the wrist menu, users can tap the shield icon and pull up Safe Zone, which allows them to take a break from their surroundings and block, mute, or report anyone engaging in unwanted behavior.