Pico Is Planning A Horizon Worlds Clone For Early 2023

Pico Is Planning A Horizon Worlds Clone For Early 2023

Pico says it is planning a world-building toolset for making content in VR much like Meta’s Horizon Worlds.

In Pico’s announcement video today, immediately after confirmation that Rec Room is coming to Pico 4, the company showed what looked like conceptual mockups for the tools. You can see them below around the 56-minute mark.

Labeled “Project Pico Worlds”, the work is pitched as offering avatar customization and world-building tools. They also say their avatars have legs.

“When we were developing the Pico social experience it isn’t about creating a new platform,” a Pico representative says in the video. “But instead we want to make use of existing platforms to connect and facilitate more intimate interactions and a more emotional experience.”

If you have no idea what that means you’re not alone.

Meta’s own Horizon Worlds tools are some of the company’s most criticized work in VR, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently pressed into promising “major” updates to the platform at its forthcoming Connect conference. Pico is owned by the same parent company that develops TikTok and cross-national social interaction using VR headsets is one of the ultimate promises of the technology, but world-building with a VR headset on smartphone-class chips is an extraordinarily challenging area. Rec Room and VRChat, for example, take completely different approaches to how their interconnected spaces operate across widely different platforms. Meta, meanwhile, has promised both Web-based and mobile phone support for Horizon Worlds.

The existing platforms mentioned above have been in development for years while Pico says its tools — announced for the first time today with a conceptual video — are coming in early 2023.