Can Designers Make the Metaverse Less Awkward?

After Mark Zuckerberg announced expansion plans in summer 2022 for Meta’s virtual reality platform, Horizon Worlds, critics took to social media. They compared the platform’s graphics to those of Second Life, an early 2000s life simulation game: The avatars were legless. The Eiffel Tower sat at the base of a bubbly, pixelated hillside. There was no way the design would be accepted by gamers who had seen what was possible…