astlouis44

Our venture backed startup is actively working on integrating web support back into Unreal Engine, as we see a huge opportunity for a easy cross-platform export target for developers.

We're working on a WebGPU backend right now for both UE4 and UE5, and have already upgraded UE4 to support WebGL 2.0 from 4.24-4.27, as support for HTML5 was removed back in the 4.23 release.

Another major innovation is we've imported a more improved compression format (Basis) as part of our pipeline, we've also created an asynchronous set fetching that only grabs the required data that a user needs to see at any given moment, streaming the rest of the assets in the background as necessary. This dramatically reduces load times, which was one of the biggest complaints with Unreal on the web previously.

Website for more info - https://theimmersiveweb.com/

Our Discord: https://discord.gg/cFJV6Yu

Scannings apps like this already exist though, like Scaniverse (recently acquired by Niantic) and Polycam. Both seem to output higher quality scans than RealityScan:

https://poly.cam/

https://scaniverse.com/

100% this.

Did they export to WebAssembly?

Does anyone know if this is cloud-streamed, WASM, or do you download a native binary to play it?

For any developers interested, our team at Wonder Interactive is working on WebGPU support for Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5.

Games and real-time 3D applications in the browser will form the basis of the open metaverse.

You can register here on our website for early access - https://theimmersiveweb.com/

Yup. Wish more developers would realize this.

This. Especially with the advent of technologies like WebAssembly, WebGPU, and WebXR, developers can now distribute real-time 3D applications like games universally via the open web, without having to sacrifice 30% to a walled garden.

Very excited to see this, my ongoing prediction is that the metaverse will be WebXR based. No 30% cut from walled gardens, and sites can evolve from static, 2D flat experiences to immersive ones. Of course, apps will work day one on any headset in a platform-agnostic manner. And for the spark, just wait until the Apple headset ships with WebXR and WebGPU supported by default....

Also, my team are currently working on bringing Unreal Engine to WebXR.

What’s your point? All of that can be done on the web, besides it isn’t really targeting the Steam audience at the end of the day. Think the mobile audience, but on the web. You can do a Sims or PUBG in HTML5 today, and all that’s required is a hyperlink to share it with others. Same strategy that made Wordle go viral and get acquired today for over $1M.

Thoughts on gaming’s role to play with WebAssembly..?

My team and I are current working on Unreal Engine WASM support, with WebGPU integration on the way. Personally, I believe native games on the web is going to disrupt Steam and the app stores and enable a whole new distribution channel for developers, especially indies. No 30% cut, works on any device with a browser.

Have you ever tried VR..?

The next wave is 3D. Not just games, but in enterprise, shopping, communication. Satya and team realize this, and the Activision-Blizzard buyout was just setting the stage for what's to come. That's why Microsoft's next acquisition MUST be Epic Games, due to their market leadership in everything real-time 3D.

This purchase would cement Microsoft firmly in the upcoming metaverse race, and provide a real set of legs to stand on to face off against Meta and Apple. Microsoft could also go after Unity, but this would make less sense as the acquisition price would be about the same as Epic, and with Unreal Engine they get a software suite that's getting scarily close to photorealism with Nanite, Lumen, and Metahuman.

100%, was just about to comment this. Combined with WebAssembly, we're going to see a brand new distribution channel emerge to distributing compute intensive apps (especially real-time 3D ones!) in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox.

Look out Steam, because traditional desktop apps like games and even VR applications will start migrating to the web, because that's where users are. My startup Wonder Interactive is working on exactly this.

https://theimmersiveweb.com/

The metaverse will be born from the open web and emerge as a 3D, immersive internet.

Are you a full time developer? Our startup is currently working to bring Unreal Engine to the web, we've also done various ports of classic games to WebAssembly. We're building a platform and suite of optimization tools to enable any game developer to be able to deploy 3D games and apps to the browser. WebAssembly, WebGPU, and WebXR are going to disrupt the games industry and create a whole new platform category that doesn't revolve around 30% fees or walled gardens. It's also the path to the metaverse.

Our Discord if you're interested: https://discord.gg/3t8bj5R

Plenty of other WebAssembly ports that are online, another one online is The Curse of Monkey Island: (press escape key as soon as it loads to skip to playing!)

https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html

Epic deprecated support back in the 4.23 release of Unreal Engine, so developers haven't been able to export to HTML5 unlike Unity which has to this day maintained the abilit to target the browser, and in fact they are in the process of building out support for WebGPU. Check out this job ad:

https://careers.unity.com/position/software-developer-unity-...

Our startup is working on support for Unreal to support WebGPU from 4.24 onwards, and we've already upgraded support so developers can use WebGL 2.0 instead of WebGL 1.0 like was available previously before Epic made it a community supported platform extension.

WebGL 2.0 today runs on not just desktop browser but also through the web on Xbox, which has a Chromium-based Edge which can run browser games and will get turbocharged with near native performance with the arrival of WebGPU.

So you now have a platform target with one codebase that developers can target PC/Mac/Linux, mobile/tablet, and one of the biggest console platforms. I'd say that's pretty powerful.

Agree 100% on gaming, which is why my team and I at Wonder Interactive are creating a suite of optimization tools and a hosting platform for Unreal Engine developers to to target the browser using WebAssembly, with WebGPU and WebXR support on the way for UE4 and UE5. We’ve already got some demos online that are really impressive despite only being WebGL 2 (OpenGL ES 3.0) for the time being. With WebGPU, it’ll enable desktop quality on par with what you’d except from Vulkan, Metal, or Direct 3D 12, except in Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox.

The future of gaming and the metaverse is cross-platform and free of walled gardens, with developers empowered to distribute directly to their end users online without a middleman required. The reinvention and subsequent golden age of high fidelity 3D browser games will be upon us sooner than most realize.

Links for anyone interested:

https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/

Our Discord:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

Have you ever heard of WebGPU? It's the equivalent of Vulkan, Metal, and Direct 3D 12 in the browser, and it's shipping in less than a week in Chrome, with Safari not far behind.

Forget gaming, their end goal is a metaverse monopoly.

The Verge penned an article a few months back that mentions WebGPU and hinting at the impact it will have on next-generation 3D browser games.

Chrome 99, which is scheduled for January 26, 2022, will enable WebGPU support. Our team is bringing Unreal Engine back to the browser, with support from 4.24 all the way up to the latest release, and we're currently building out support for targeting WebGPU. Enabling developers to be able to fully tap into a user's hardware will enable a whole new era of games and real-time 3D webapps. Super excited!

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/30/22649214/chrome-94-beta-b...

Uhhhh… what are you talking about? Have you ever heard of Oculus VR (now called Meta Quest) or Facebook Portal? They are most certainly in hardware.

WASM support?

Great article. I'm bullish that the metaverse will be built on top of our current 2D web as a 3D, immersive overlay where creators, companies, and consumers can freely navigate from one virtual space to another seamlessly, using hyperlinks.

WebAssembly, WebGPU, and WebXR are the cornerstone technologies of an open, interoperable by default metaverse.

Our team at Wonder Interactive is working to bring one of the biggest native game engines, Unreal Engine, to the browser use the above mentioned technologies. For anyone interested in our tooling and hosting platform, you can check it out here:

Our website: https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/

Discord server: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

This platform uses Unity WebGL, for anyone wondering.

Few people (especially developers here on HN) really understand how massive and disruptive the metaverse is going to be. It's going be a combination of a live, 3D social network, and an embodied, real-time immersive internet where your virtual identity becomes as valuable as your real life one. When billions of people are accessing it, whether it's through computers, mobile devices, or mixed reality hardware, how you express yourself will be at the very core of it all.

Nike sees this, and wants to be well prepared for it.

Bingo.

As there seems to be a lot of confusion lately around what the metaverse is and isn't, it's important to take a step back and realize we already live in a form of the metaverse, only that it's primarily in 2D mode right now. Examples of this are Zoom, Instagram, YouTube, websites, etc. We currently live in a world dominated by video as the primary file format we engage with, but we're moving quickly to one that's 3D first. Many big challenges here, like how do we enable everyone to seamlessly build 3D content with having the typical skills associated with it? How we do distribute it? This is especially important, with all the walled garden talk going on right now.

Few people (especially developers here on HN) really understand how massive and disruptive "the metaverse" is going to be. It's going be a combination of a live, 3D social network, and an embodied, real-time immersive internet where your virtual identity becomes as valuable as your real life one. When billions of people are accessing it, whether it's through computers, mobile devices, or mixed reality hardware, how you express yourself will be at the very core of it all. Zuckerberg, Sweeney, and others sees this, and wants to be well prepared for it

To really boil it down - the metaverse is not a single 3D/VR social app or group of apps, vendor-locked to an specific platform and OS.

The metaverse is quite simply THE spatial successor to the internet. My personal bet is that one of the primary ways we access it is the same way we do with traditional content today - the web.

Because of protocols like HTTP, TCP/IP, and HTML, you can read and view text + photos + videos on webpages because of agreed upon standards.

The metaverse will most certainly utilize old standards, but it will also need entirely new ones built from the ground up.

The way users currently navigate the web via hyperlinks will be mirrored in the metaverse, but instead of shareable URL's we will have portals instead, so as to not break immersion and to deliver a sense of seamless teleportation from one immersive destination to another.

We'll also need a universal SDK and API that every world can hook into in order to tie all of this together, so as to share data back and forth and to allow for true interchange of virtual goods. Blockchain will provide the base layer to enable this.

WebGPU will allow us to render using modern hardware, as the browser equivalent of Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12.

WebAssembly will allow for programs to be compiled to a universal bytecode.

WebXR brings all of this together, enabling a true sense of presence inside a webpage. To be clear, the metaverse will be best experienced utilizing mixed reality hardware, but it certainly won't require it. Computers and mobile phones should and probably will be access points for users too.

As more headsets by Meta, and new ones like Valve (and Apple!) are emerge and they become a part of our daily lives, it will become apparent that we need a way to link worlds together.

The web seems like the most straightforward, obvious solution to this problem.

My team at Wonder Interactive is working to build the 3D web. We have a community Discord for anyone interested in discussing the metaverse, and where you can engage with us:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

Few people (especially developers here on HN) really understand how massive and disruptive the metaverse is going to be. It's going be a combination of a live, 3D social network, and an embodied, real-time immersive internet where your virtual identity becomes as valuable as your real life one. When billions of people are accessing it, whether it's through computers, mobile devices, or mixed reality hardware, how you express yourself will be at the very core of it all.

Nike sees this, and wants to be well prepared for it.