Meta announces Horizon Worlds avatars are getting legs using an AI model to predict the body’s position, an avatar store, avatars are coming to Reels, and more (Jay Peters/The Verge)

Wall Street Journal:
Internal Meta docs detail its metaverse struggles; Horizon Worlds has ~200K MAUs vs. a goal of 500K by end of 2022; 9% of worlds are ever visited by 50+ people  —  Most visitors to Horizon Worlds generally don’t return after first month; ‘an empty world is a sad world’

Alex Heath / The Verge:
In an internal memo, Meta’s VP of Metaverse said Horizon Worlds is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much  —  Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues …

Kashmir Hill / New York Times:
A look at life in Meta’s VR-based social network Horizon Worlds, interacting with early adopters including preteens, parents, insomniacs, and aspiring comedians  —  Every hour of the day and night with the gamers, parents, insomniacs, preteens and aspiring comedians who are the earliest adopters …

Luke Plunkett / Kotaku:
Meta says the segment at Connect announcing the addition of legs to Horizon World avatars “featured animations created from motion capture”  —  A subsequent statement from Meta says ‘the segment featured animations created from motion capture’  —  Earlier this week Meta CEO …

Wall Street Journal:
Internal Meta documents detail Instagram’s struggle to compete with TikTok; users spend 17.6M hours per day watching Reels, far below TikTok’s 197.8M hours  —  Reels faces formidable competition from the leading short-video platform; creators follow the views

Alex Barinka / Bloomberg:
The head of Instagram Adam Mosseri talks about balancing the urgency to make Reels work for Meta and not making “any mistakes by pushing too hard or too fast”  —  As Meta Platforms Inc. pursues an expensive, unproven metaverse strategy, success will depend in part on whether Instagram can pay the bills.