Until very, very recently, you could still go to worlds.com, a 3D online chat program that launched in the mid 1990s, and navigate through its almost entirely abandoned virtual space, like an endless, pixellated Angkor Wat. Academic literature came to call spaces like these, and there are many, “Digital Ruins”. Will we be left with any similar remnant of Horizon Worlds? Meta’s virtual reality social network was once sold as a key piece of the puzzle that would eventually cohere as “the Metaverse”, and early last week Meta announced that it was effectively shutting it down.
