"There was a bit of a sense in 2020 and into 2021 that this was a technology that was ready, that it was finally going to hit the big time," said Gebbie. "We've had a lot of false dawns in virtual reality in the past."

In December 2021, Horizon Worlds launched in the U.S. and marked Meta's entrance into the open-world virtual reality platform space. Meta had a short-term goal of 500,000 monthly active users in Horizon Worlds by the end of the year. But its long-term goals were more ambitious. In June 2022, Zuckerberg told CNBC's Jim Cramer that he expected one billion users by the end of the decade, doing "hundreds of dollars of e-commerce each."