San Francisco, Oct 8 (IANS): Facebook has announced a $10 million Creator Fund to encourage people to build experiences on its Horizon VR platform, which it is now calling Horizon Worlds.

Although Horizon Worlds is still in beta, the company clearly wants to get more people making content for the platform to offer more experiences that could be interesting to users, reports The Verge.

The funds will be given out "over the next year" in three main buckets -- a series of community competitions to build "the very best worlds in Horizon". Facebook will give up to $10,000 in cash for the top three entrants in the competitions.

A Creator Accelerator Programme that's "designed to give people from diverse backgrounds an advanced crash course in Horizon Worlds creation", Facebook finished a pilot of the programme in September and will accept applications in November for the next iteration of the programme, which will launch in "early" 2022.

Funding for developers who are interested in making "experiences for Horizon in a particular theme".

The report mentioned that the Creator Fund could help Facebook in its big bet on virtual worlds.

The company has invested heavily in its Oculus VR headsets and ecosystem, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants people to eventually see Facebook as "a metaverse company".

But as Facebook is racing to build out Horizon Worlds and get people to create content for it, it faces stiff competition from other metaverse makers like Epic Games (the developer of Fortnite) and Roblox - which both also rely heavily on user-created content, the report said.