Over the last few months, the open metaverse has seen a resurgence in media coverage and technological developments. This has led to immense collaborations between major tech firms, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and organisations leading the path forward.
Numerous partnerships across the XR Association, Metaverse Standards Forum, and XR4Europe have set the stage at the macro level for extended reality (XR) standards building. Conversely, at the enterprise level, Lamina1, Croquet, Siemens, Unity, Meta, Ready Player Me, and others have leveraged their technologies at the grassroots level.
Companies like Crucible have put their hat in the ring to develop the open metaverse and partner with like-minded entities across the tech industry. This will create sustainable, interoperable, and profitable Web3 ventures for all.
XR Today has the pleasure of interviewing the following:
- Ryan Gill, Founder and Chief Executive, Crucible
- Aleissia Laidacker, Head of Product and Technology, Crucible
In our interview, we discuss the challenges Crucible’s Emergence software developer kit (SDK) aims to resolve. We also cover the company’s open metaverse strategy and the role that the creative content and avatar economies will play in the near future.
XR Today: What challenges did the Emergence SDK aim to resolve for the gaming industry?
Crucible: Web3 opens up so many new possibilities for game developers and creators, but Web3 is still a very new technology to build for, and the technologies haven’t been built specifically for 3D developers.
Emergence is an SDK for game developers to allow them to easily build with this new technology through the engines and tools that they are already accustomed to building with.
Emergence lets developers easily access interoperable assets like game objects or avatars, create player personas, and read and write to any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible chains. These are usually complex challenges, but Emergence can get these up and running in less than 10 minutes.
You can imagine how this can open up so many opportunities for XR experiences. Players can bring their wallets, avatars, and inventories into any game world. They can also do things like tap into the music that a player owns to create a unique experience or allow their players to build content and own that content in their wallets.
We’re helping to make the gaming industry more open, with more options for both developers and players. We’re doing so by providing easy access to previously difficult technologies to work with.
XR Today: As an end user for Unreal Engine and Unity, how will this partnership develop interoperability for gaming companies?
Crucible: Our presence within the major game engines and their marketplaces means that we’re providing tools for innovation across today’s major platforms. Unity and Unreal underpin most of today’s XR experiences, ranging from the Apple Vision Pro to mobile apps and from PC games to AR/VR devices.
But what’s interesting about this is that it means that we’re helping to create the infrastructure to make interoperability possible across engines, platforms and blockchains.
Maybe you create a game in Unity and then a more immersive experience in Unreal. Maybe you built a game for mobile and then a separate experience for augmented reality. Emergence provides one set of tools to let players have interoperable experiences, no matter what engine the developer has used.
It’s great for the user but also great for developers to be able to use content across engines and platforms. They can benefit from our solution by saving lots of money and time.
XR Today: In gaming, the role of bespoke avatars has become prominent. Why is identity such a powerful vertical in gaming, and how can companies monetise this?
Crucible: Gaming has shown us the power of our avatars. Think of Fortnite and the amount players invest in their extended identities — buying skins, sure, but also earning a reputation ‘attached’ to that avatar.
With gaming already exceeding film and television as an entertainment medium, the identities we express in XR ‘spaces’ will become possibly more important than our presence on social media.
This offers a new economy. We call it the direct-to-avatar economy, which will become part of an economy that will possibly exceed that of global GDP, at least according to NVIDIA.
In it, we’ll buy skins, clothing, game items, and other assets for our avatars. This will create an incredible opportunity for brands, creators and intellectual property (IP) holders.
XR Today: What can you tell us about your partnership with Lamina1? What will their blockchain technologies offer your platform, and conversely?
Ryan Gill: The driving force of this partnership is the people. We’ve been inspired by the Lamina1 team, their vision, and their history in building and thinking about the Open Metaverse.
Lamina1 includes some of the great thinkers about XR and Open Metaverse technology. This includes Neal Stephenson, who coined the term ‘Metaverse,’ and Rony Abovitz, a pathfinder in AR. They’re building a blockchain and infrastructure based on a vision of a Metaverse that’s open.
[Laidacker] originally worked with Neal and Rony while leading the Developer Experience Teams at Magic Leap. Our vision at Magic Leap to build an open metaverse through spatial computing is even more important today. With blockchain being the backend technology, doing so will allow for interoperable experiences across virtual, augmented, and physical world experiences.
This all aligns with Crucible’s vision, and we’re pleased to be Lamina1’s preferred SDK partner. Now, any game developer who wants to build for the Lamina1 ecosystem can use Emergence to get started easily.
XR Today: What trends have you observed about the Metaverse? How is it developing, and do you see a future for it?
Crucible: Hype cycles come and go. It’s important to remember that it does not depend on a single company and doesn’t rely on a single device like VR.
Media coverage is not what defines the shift we’re in the middle of, where all types of XR technologies are advancing at an accelerated rate, and hundreds of millions of people are participating in user-generated content (UGC) world-building.
We’re at the beginning of an emerging shift in the tech landscape — from XR to artificial intelligence (AI). Our digital experiences are shifting past yesterday’s siloed and often unsatisfactory social experiences.
The Metaverse represents experiences that not only exist in the virtual world but also translate to the physical world through augmented reality, the Internet of Things (IOT), and other technologies.
To allow for these experiences to exist across platforms, hardware, and devices, the need for decentralisation technology like Web3 is key to this.
Game developers are rebuilding the Internet. Spatial computing, especially when combined with AI, is the next revolution in computing and will dwarf the web that came before.
XR Today: Are there any specific challenges people should consider for the open metaverse?
We also acknowledge the challenge that exists around language. This includes terminologies such as blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), web3 and, more recently, AI.
These have become buzzwords that trigger many people negatively, based on some bad experiences and even more preconceived fixed ideas. We have chosen to continue to build through market crashes, sentiment peaks and valleys, and the proposed declaration of the “death of the metaverse.”
We believe these web3 technologies are the only way the Metaverse can stay open and scale safely. Emergence is the cornerstone of new rails to make an easier choice for developers to build with that in mind.
Until now, web3 has been a nice-to-have. Those interested in the tech and who could profit from it paid attention. However, these technologies are very quickly becoming a must-have in an AI-powered world of creation tools and infinite copiability — of not only assets, but also identities.
