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Building the Open Metaverse: 3D on the Web

Sarah Chow

In episode five of Building the Open Metaverse, hosts Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit spoke with Vladimir Vukićević, the director of Lightweight XR at Unity Technologies. As the inventor of WebGL, Vlad has been influential in foundational web graphics development and increasing the accessibility of interactive 2D and 3D experiences. 

The episode gets into the details of how the metaverse will be built: what programming languages will be used? Will it run natively or on the web? How will we deal with constraints and requirements around security, instant access, and low power devices? How do you give developers the greatest flexibility and lowest barrier to entry so they can build a truly rich, varied experience? 

"What I hope we get to is a lot of companies, individuals, really whoever, experimenting with a bunch of these areas, but really doing it in the open, not trying to recreate that walled garden that we somehow ended up with in the mobile ecosystem."

Vladimir Vukićević

Unity Technologies

The episode explores the mechanics of making tools accessible to developers so they can create the assets, the attributes, and the behaviors that will make up the metaverse. Vlad and the hosts delve into when to standardize so as best to support that development. They agreed we need what Patrick called “experimentation in the open”—trying many different approaches to find which model will work best. As Vlad said, “I hope somebody does try to build the all-in-one metaverse that is a single native app and somebody tries to build the fully distributed, every dynamic, downloaded, everything metaverse as well, because we need to try every spectrum in between.” 

Listen to the full episode and subscribe for future discussions about building the metaverse.