Facebook on Thursday introduced that it’s opening up Horizon Worlds, its digital actuality world of avatars, to anybody 18 and older within the U.S. and Canada.

Horizon Worlds launched in beta final 12 months to a choose few Oculus VR customers for who needed to have invitations so as to be part of the digital world. With the announcement on Thursday, customers will not want invitations to enter the Horizon Worlds beta.

The broader launch of Horizon Worlds is a vital step for Fb, which formally modified its title to Meta in October. The corporate adopted the brand new moniker, based mostly on the sci-fi time period “metaverse,” to explain its imaginative and prescient for working and enjoying in a digital world.

In Horizon Worlds, customers of Fb’s Oculus digital actuality headsets can create a legless avatar to wander round within the animated digital world. There, they’ll play video games and work together with different customers’ avatars.

Fb acquired Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, and has since struggled to get market traction past a distinct segment viewers. However Fb has made constructing applied sciences, services for the metaverse its central focus transferring ahead.

In July, the corporate announced the formation of a workforce that will work on the metaverse. Two months later, the corporate stated it might elevate Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who’s presently the top of the corporate’s {hardware} division, to the role of chief technology officer in 2022. And in its third-quarter earnings results in October, the corporate introduced it should get away the Actuality Labs {hardware} division into its personal reporting phase beginning within the fourth quarter.

In October, the corporate stated that it’s going to spend about $10 billion over the following 12 months growing the applied sciences required for constructing the metaverse.

“Our hope is that throughout the subsequent decade, the metaverse will attain a billion individuals, host a whole lot of billions of {dollars} of digital commerce, and assist jobs for hundreds of thousands of creators and builders,” Zuckerberg wrote in October.