astlouis44

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.

Try the web.

What Meta is trying to do is create their own version of a immersive social platform where user-generated content and building is the main mechanic and the reason people us it. However, they want it "Disney style" which means it's free of weird furries and NFSW content like VRCHat currently hosts.

Put simply, Horizon Worlds is meant for the boomer audience (think your parents/grandparents) that will eventually use VR, but currently is on the classic 2D Facebook site and app.

Welcome to the world of Apple.

Tim Sweeney must be throwing a tantrum right now.

Tim Sweeney retweeted the article about this from The Verge:

https://twitter.com/verge/status/1468665277512658951

Creating WebAssembly/WebGPU support for this engine will be fun.

Tried many times and it just gets buried

Thanks for the feedback, but I'm doing this to try to help game developers solve a major problem, half of the show HN and 100% of the launch HN are startups trying to make money anyways and the point you're trying to make never gets brought up.

Think about it this way - if it solves a very real pain point for developers, which is the primary demographics of this site, then why try to suppress that..?

Well old titles that are on Steam have been ported to WebAssembly... and keep in mind these are just straight ports with little to no compression or asset fetching to reduce the file size and load times.

Curse of Monkey Island: https://personal-1094.web.app/scummvm.html (press esc key right away upon load to skip straight to playing)

Baldur's Gate 2 demo: https://personal-1094.web.app/gemrb.html

Diablo demo: https://d07riv.github.io/diabloweb/

Humongous Arts games:

Spy Fox in Dry Cereal demo: https://thatgamedev01.itch.io/spyfoxindrycereal

Pajama Sam demo: https://thatgamedev01.itch.io/pajama-sam-3

Yeah pretty amazing. You should respost it to HN!

Did you put your glasses on..?

"Steam is the money pipeline, and everyone makes native games on Steam." This is 100% it, everyone thinks browser games are a thing of the past and that's it, end of story. Well, they couldn't be more wrong and I'm happy to explain why. The tooling for developers traditionally just hasn't been there. Developers coming from the native game engine world typically don't have a firm grasp of web technologies, so the ones that do target it get massive file sizes which turns off anyone who would actually try it out, but ends up getting frustrated and closes the tab.

Shameless plug, but my team and I are on a mission to solve this for Unreal Engine developers looking to export their projects to HTML5. The potential for the gaming and metaverse opportunity in the browser is enormous, so to this end we're bringing the full power of UE4/UE5 to WASM, in combination with WebGPU + WebXR to deliver experiences that rival anything on Steam or other storefronts or app stores.

In addition to our hosting platform for deploying, maintaining, and monetizing, we offer a suite of tools for optimization that include compression for drastically reduces file sizes, and on the fly asset fetching to keep load times as short as possible. The goal is near native performance, with faster deployment and accessibility than Steam.

For developers and creators, there's no unnecessary 30% cut of your virtual worlds and real-time 3D applications to walled gardens. Add in that you only have one codebase to main that when deployed, it just works everywhere with a browser.

For users, play is a single click away, no local installs or dedicated clients required on computers or mobile.

Link to our website: https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/

Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

This demo is more recent, and FAR more impressive in my humble opinion:

https://doom-portal-in-webgl.vercel.app/

This means there will be PS4/Nvidia 1070 level graphics performance in a standalone headset. That means Half Life Alyx will run on this thing...

Meta should be scared. Qualcomm has no hope of matching the M1, plus the tight integration of hardware and software that Apple has always been best at.

Surprised I had to scroll this far to see this comment. If Microsoft had it their way, they’d have Nintendo and others legacy titles “preserved” by being on Game Pass.

Microsoft has all the pieces they need to succeed as a big player in the metaverse space - Azure, Xbox, an OS (Windows), some of the best gaming IP in the world like Doom, Skyrim, and Halo, and finally Teams 3D+ Microsoft Mesh.

All they need to do is respond to the Quest 2 with their own standalone headset, and bring some of their best selling franchises into VR.

100%.

Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google could easily outspend Facebook/Meta on metaverse efforts if they wanted to.

This x 1000.

The Immersive Web.

Ok, here we go - 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, but more specifically the World Wide 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.

As more headsets by Meta, Valve (and Apple!) are sold and they become a part of our daily lives, it will become apparent that we need a way to link worlds together that are hardware and platform-agnostic. The web seems like the most straightforward, obvious solution to this problem.

Also, now that Facebook has soured the term "metaverse", a term originally termed in Snow Crash and now has connotations with a social media company... may I propose a new one? How about The Immersive Web?

My startup Wonder Interactive is working on building the immersive web, and our current focus is on bridging the gap between native game engines and the web. We're have UE4 support up and running, with WebGPU actively being worked on as well as WebXR. Our 2D web as we know it today has to evolve to become 3D-first and immersive. If you're interested in trying out our platform, you can register your intent here via our website or join our Discord below:

Website: https://www.theimmersiveweb.com/

Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

Our team is working on this as well. We should chat :)

Link to our Discord: https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

You mention the web - does this utilize WASM/WebGL at all?

Yeah interoperability and the ability to travel between worlds is key. Just the other day I implemented a portal between two virtual worlds in WebGL, it works on mobile/desktop but as stated in this thread the experience is ruined when in VR because selecting a link pops you out to a 2D view. To sustain the feeling of immersion, the user's state needs to be maintained when hopping between worlds.

This is something the folks at Oculus Browser/Meta are considering though! Ideally it needs to be a standard, just like HTTP and TCP/IP. I'm incredibly bullish that the metaverse needs to be built on top of our current World Wide Web, so the ecosystem itself isn't owned by any one corporation. The destinations themselves, sure, they can be properties of a startup or larger co like Meta or Microsoft.

https://youtu.be/r07VAb0DFgc

So when does Slack get a 3D mode?

Play fun games, make money. Who doesn't want that..?

This could be one of the biggest consumer trends in history, if executed right.

Every single company will need to adapt, just like with every other paradigm shift.

Every brand/company will need a presence in the metaverse, and to do that they will need easy to use tools to create immersive spaces that are accessible across all platforms, including VR.

To this end, my startup is building the "Wordpress for the metaverse".

No, it is not. Neither is Roblox or Fortnite, or VRchat. A single game or world is NOT the metaverse, what is so hard to understand about that for journalists and companies?

The metaverse is the immersive internet, as a successor to our current one that is more 2D oriented around photos/videos/text today. It's a paradigm shift in how we interact, but most importantly there will be many of these virtual worlds/spaces interconnected together to form an actual network that nobody outright owns. To get to this future, we need protocols/standards to allow virtual worlds to talk to one another and agree that users can hop back in forth between them seamlessly, across all platforms.

More specifically, the way we use the web today to navigate from webpage to another is how we we traverse the metaverse. The core problem that needs to get solved right now is interoperability, to enable the "web of 3D".

Look to WebGPU, WebAssembly, and WebXR as cornerstone technologies here. Our startup is building the "3D/VR web" in this way, and our current focus is getting proper HTML5 exporting from the native game engines, currently Unreal Engine. We're also building out a suite of tooling to empower developers and creators along with our hosting/discovery platform that includes advanced texture compression + asynchronous asset fetching to enable 3D/VR websites that load as quickly as a regular 2D page. If you're a developer and are interested in our work, you can join our Discord here:

https://discord.gg/zUSZ3T8

WebGPU is coming, and VR hardware is only getting better. It seems obvious that WebXR is the path to a distributed, 3D web that is interoperable by default and not owned by any one company. The key here is open standards and protocols.

Here's a thread I made with more thoughts on the metaverse emerging from the web:

https://twitter.com/AlexStLouis10/status/1454641980542095363