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Meta & The Metaverse: Beyond the Horizon

Last Updated: July 20, 2023
Over the past week, Meta has applied for a handful of trademarks as it works to deliver more metaverse-focused products and services.

Meta already promised to expand on its vision of the metaverse with a portfolio of virtual reality products and services, as the company announced at Connect 2021. Boardroom previously published a deep dive on what Meta’s next moves were in VR and sports, most notably its long-term VR project coined Horizon Home.

Now, Meta is making moves to show that it’s not all talk about its ambitious metaverse plans.

In the last week, the company filed two metaverse-related trademarks with the US Patent and Trademark Office, per attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Intellectual Property. Meta wants to trademark the “Horizon Home” and “Horizon Worlds” names.

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What each mark is for:

  • Two-dimensional and three-dimensional head-mounted video displays and application programing interface for computer software for developing VR and AR experiences
  • Online retail store services featuring VR and AR headsets, games and digital media including videos, images, text, pre-recorded music, and audiovisual works
  • Augmented reality arcade services, video production, and entertainment services and augmented reality game services provided online
  • Application service provider services including hosting computer software applications of others and computer programming services for creating augmented reality videos and games
  • Business identification verification services, identification verification services, providing social networking services for entertainment purposes, and providing computer databases for social networking, social introduction and dating

These filings come after Meta also filed trademark applications for the “Meta Portal” and “Meta Horizon” names recently, per Gerben.

Here’s what each of the Meta Portal and Meta Horizon marks are for:

  • Entertainment services including VR interactive entertainment and virtual reality content
  • Computer services to provide online pages featuring user-defined personal profiles, VR, mixed reality, and AR content and data
  • Providing access to computer, electronic and online databases for VR, AR and social networking
  • VR, AR, and mixed reality software to use in enabling computers and mobile devices as well as providing VR experiences

Meta also filed for physical and online retail store services featuring computer software and VR and AR headsets, games, content, and digital media for its Meta Horizon trademark. An interesting tidbit with these trademark filings is that they also include foreign applications in Jamaica. The company’s recent trademarks were filed in California, with attorneys Mark Jansen of the Fenwick & West law firm and Anthony Malutta of the Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton international law firm.

Meta gave us a sneak peek into what its latest version of Horizon Home could look like at Connect 2021. Think of this project as Meta’s small-scale version of the Sandbox or Decentraland. Horizon Home lets users create virtual homes, display NFTs and other digital collectibles, display and watch videos, and more. Meta already offers a majority of these services to Quest users but the biggest change is that they no longer have to enjoy them alone.

The company said the next iteration of Horizon Home will come as an update to the existing experience.

Horizon Home is an extension of Horizon Worlds, where developers and users can build virtual environments to hang with friends. Last month, the Verge reported that Horizon Worlds’ monthly user base had grown to 300,000 people following the platform’s launch in December 2021.

Soon, Quest 2 users will be able to bring their virtual friends together to watch videos, play arcade games, interact in custom-built virtual homes, and listen to music, creating an even more immersive experience in the metaverse.

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Michelai Graham

Michelai Graham is Boardroom's resident tech and crypto reporter. Before joining 35V, she was a freelance reporter with bylines in AfroTech, HubSpot, The Plug, and Lifewire, to name a few. At Boardroom, Michelai covers Web3, NFTs, crypto, tech, and gaming. Off the clock, you can find her producing her crime podcast, The Point of No Return.