The keynote featured a bonkers video of Zuckerberg jumping between various CGI-rendered depictions of the metaverse in virtual reality. He visited a spaceship where the company’s executives were playing poker, toured a tropical mansion with a floating fireplace and met CTO Andrew Bosworth’s Pixar-esque alien pet Oppy.

You remember it, don't you? The bold declaration that echoed across the globe in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg, standing on a digital precipice, didn't just rebrand Facebook to Meta; he fundamentally bet the entire future of his colossal company on a single,

Meta announced changes that effectively leave Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an immersive digital world based in virtual reality only on life support.

While the VR version is being phased out, Meta has clarified that Horizon Worlds will not be entirely shut down. Instead, it will be repositioned as a mobile-only platform, aiming at reaching a broader audience without the need for VR headsets.

You could buy and sell plots of land and advertising. Soon, brands began appearing in Decentraland, like Atari, Nestle, and Samsung. There was a Metaverse Fashion Week. Paris Hilton hosted a DJ set. Slews of headlines sprung up claiming that people were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for virtual land and that users would one day navigate these spaces the same way they would traverse the real world.