Open Beta Announcement
Over the past few months, our team has been building, testing, documenting and getting feedback from our Closed Beta Community and we are now in the final stages before launching our Open Beta for the Emergence SDK. More news to come in the next few weeks, along with a new branding launch of our website. But we’re very excited to be putting the Emergence tools into the hands of new users around the world.
What can you expect? Our first version of the Open Beta will have a full Unreal supported SDK plugin for Unreal 4.26, 4.27 and Unreal 5. That covers all of the features we’ve spoken about over the past few months.
WalletConnect
Persona Creation and Management
Inventory Service
Avatar System with VRM Support
Be sure to join our Discord to find out more and be able to be one of our first open beta users.
https://discord.gg/openmeta
VRM and Unreal
Getting VRMs working for Unreal has been a challenge for the team over the past month. We’ve seen some GREAT examples of VRM working in Unity, but Unreal less so.
So what is VRM? VRM is a platform-independent file format designed for use with 3D characters and avatars for virtual experiences. In addition to conventional information such as textures and bones for 3D models, the file format can also handle information necessary for first-person avatars such as gaze settings, etc.
Why are we interested in VRMs? For one, the platform-independence and potential for Interoperability. VRMs however are relatively new to the market, where FBXs have been the more standard file format that game makers, movie makers and virtual production creators have in the past more readily used. But VRMs are definitely gaining popularity especially in the Web 3 space.
VRMs were first introduced through the VRM Consortium, where their mission in part is to unify standards and technical specifications for 3D Avatars. If you check out their website, there’s some great information and some developer documentation but as we dove into this, the majority of their tutorials and docs are in Japanese. We’ve had a lot of fun translating, getting feedback from partners to help us navigate the technology.
Now when it comes to game engines, 2 of the major plugins available for VRM are UniVRM and VRM4U. UniVRM is made for Unity, and thankfully there’s some documentation and tutorials out there, you can check one of them out here if you are interested! But the only plugin that works for Unreal is VRM4U, which has a lot less in terms of online help and sources.
But after a few weeks of debugging, getting help from the VRM Consortium and partners. We were able to get the plugin working, not only for built in Avatars but for any Avatar at Runtime. We’ve spoken about our Avatar System in the past, that we’ll be releasing as part of our Open Beta. But with VRM4U working at Runtime, now any user, collection owner, nft owner can use our Emergence Avatar System (EAS) and load in their VRM avatars seamlessly in any game world. We’ll also be releasing some tutorials about How to use VRM4U in Unreal, so others in the space who are keen to use this plugin for anything in the future, will have well documented steps on how to get everything set up yourself!
Focus on Developer Experience
We’re seeing a number of other companies working towards building protocols for Web 3, which is great to see! But one thing that specifically our team has seen from past experiences, is that Developer Experience is key. You can build the best technology in the world, but if it isn’t accessible, readable to your user, and wil great tutorials and documentation, that amazing technology can go unnoticed. So Developer Experience has been a major focus for us over the past month.
We’ve been focusing on updating all our Developer Documentation. Gathering feedback from new users. Building Tutorials, videos and Sample Projects with code and snippets so our Developer Community will be able to use our Open Beta seamlessly.
Our goal right now is for any Creator, excited about the Web 3 space to be able to get up and running with Emergence in under 5 minutes.
And with a number of advanced, easy to read and implement tutorials for advanced features.
Paris Metaverse Summit
The first Metaverse Summit happened July 16-17th in Paris, France. Where Ryan and Aleissia from the team both attended and spoke on 3 panels about the future of the Metaverse, Web3 and AR/XR technologies. We got to meet with so many great creators, companies and partners of ours! Maybe it was that we all got to connect in a city as beautiful as Paris, but this was definitely a great few days getting to meet with so many great thought leaders in this space and talk about the future of the Metaverse. We even got to catch up with some of our friends from companies like Lamina1, Altered State Machines, MetaMundo and Augmento. We love those guys.
Similar to NFT.NYC, there was a huge emphasis on Interoperability, Persistence and Open Standards. Many in the space are really excited about where Web 3 is going. How we’re in this forcing function of companies and individuals having to collaborate. As we build out Web 3 Protocols and Platforms, and with Interoperability in mind, the need to work together, to create open standards and technologies is becoming more and more important. It was so refreshing to hear how many, from different backgrounds and experiences, are all embracing this philosophy.
Big thank you to the organizers for inviting us both, and for putting on such a great event!
You can see the recap video here from the event, and be sure to check out some of the talks (including ours) that have been posted on the event’s Youtube Channel.
Product Offsite - Ibiza
With all the upcoming releases and with the team looking towards the future of our product and community, some of our team members were able to gather together in Ibiza, Spain for an offsite, so we could all go through the Emergence SDK Developer Experience together, talk about the future of our product and state of the industry… and of course to enjoy some time together as a team 😛
The Prince and The Metaverse
Right after our Ibiza team offsite, Ryan was invited to speak at the Monaco Crypto Summit 2022, and dive into what is the Open Metaverse to an intimate room including Prince Albert of Monaco.
You can see an interview that Ryan gave after he got off stage here where he dives into everything from Standards, Game Engines, and to opportunities for creators in the space.. along with a few things that we’ll dive into next month.
‘Till next time…
Aleissia Laidacker & Ryan Gill