At Agoraverse, we believe the metaverse to be dependant on two factors : accessibility and quality. With this idea in mind, we had to design our product with the intent of reaching the masses.
Accessibility in the metaverse
The metaverse comes in various styles and shapes. Cartoonish, realistic, voxel, third or first person view and even virtual reality – everyone can find what they like. When it comes down to it, there is really only one thing that matters : how easy is it to jump in the experience ?
We realised this quite early on in development, when we released the alpha for the lofts. While initial attendance was quite encouraging, the days following the release showed that close to no-one was connecting to their virtual property. The main reason for that : joining a loft was too much effort.
What the user had to do was the following : Download the Agoraverse launcher, run the application, connect the Solana wallet that holds the correct NFTs, enter the Agora and then move your character to the lifts that take you up to your Lofts. This was obviously way too tedious, especially for a product that was still in alpha.
We had to take a different approach to the question of accessibility, and looking at different popular exemples such as Roblox or Decentraland, it was clear to us that we should set a maximum amount of clicks required to enter our experiences.
E-commerce and marketing focused metaverse
As you may know from our product pages, Agoraverse specializes in the creation of metaverse environments for brands and companies. The idea is to offer a new communication and revenue channel to our partners and fully immerse their audience to their product or services.
This requires us to adapt to the existing circumstances, meaning to what the audience is used to and where it is. Our solution has to be accessible on web browser, integratable to a client’s website and easily sharable on social media. These factors are essential to attract and retain as many users as possible.
That being said, we see a lot of metaverses already being on browser and working very well on a technical level – experiences load quickly, and performances are usually quite decent ! 3D experiences inside of a browser are nothing new, with online games already existing before the metaverse was even a thought. The issue here is that visual quality, sound design and interactivity tend to be subpar compared to what can be done in a proper application.
We have all seen the memes about how the metaverse “has the same graphics as an early 2000s game” and it is hard to disagree with that sentiment. But why is that the case ?
The traditional way of developing browser native experiences is through WebGL, a method that has not really evolved over the years and limits game developers and 3D artists in their vision and creative process. We had already came up with great looking environments with the Lofts, and the thought of downscaling our content left a sour taste.
We decided that we had to do both : Better visuals and greater accessibility.
In comes local streaming
The team brainstormed with the previously mentionned parameters, with the added difficulty that the maximum amount of clicks a user would have to do to enter an experience was 3. Unity HDRP, which is the renderer we use to achieve our visual quality, was not compatible with WebGL but is what makes our experiences stand out. We looked at Unreal Engine 5, which showed promise but did not suit our team’s expertise or our focus on interactivity and gamification.
Our Senior developer, Quentin (who is always up for a challenge), came up with an idea. Why not give the illusion of being on a browser ?
How it works on the outside is actually quite simple – an app streams its visual content to a browser window. There was no other reference (that we knew of) to develop this feature, so the process was quite experimental. The end result was worth the development time.
The user journey is now similar to Roblox – users downloads our app from any metashop experience they click on, and when installed, returns to the browser he came from where the experience automatically starts.
Our first metashops will be releasing in Mid December. If you would like to learn more about Agoraverse, make sure to check our whitepaper, product pages, and social media.
