The rise of the metaverse is prompting businesses and customers to shift to virtual reality (VR) amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and increasing levels of burnout from videoconferencing platforms.
XR Today spoke with Sonya Seddarasan, Founder of UPWorlds, a firm which creates virtual worlds for users to interact, allowing people deeper immersive experiences for meetings and social gatherings.
XR Today: Can you tell us a little about your business? Why was it created and what value do you find in the metaverse?
Sonya Seddarasan: UPWorlds is a platform to connect people and event hosts with metaverse worlds for different activities, and was born from a common problem I spotted in conversations from fellow world builders roughly eight months ago: the underutilisation of the creations themselves.
With COVID-19 accelerating the rise of different social and collaborative metaverse platforms, many early adopters began learning how to build worlds, using different methods, to deliver the best immersive environments aimed at increasing awareness of the user’s physical self in the metaverse.
Ironically, with the rise of these platforms, builders have scattered to different ones. Some amazing metaverse worlds out there are tucked away on various platforms, and many times we’ve encountered problems jumping from one to another and spent a lot of time doing so.
Here, we offer an agglomerated platform where users can simply focus on the preferred activity they need and have numerous optimised immersive envrionments to book and rent from builders. If they like the world, they can also request builders to customise it.
This is a new way for content creators to monetise what they love to do, which is building immersive environments, and event hosts can have greater access to impressive bespoke worlds on demand.
XR Today: Could you tell us a little more about the technologies you use for your immersive world?
Sonya Seddarasan: Builders must address three things — the first being the activities you wish to facilitate, whether in education, performance, or tourism, and choosing the best world to support it.
Developers must also determine their target audiences based on the community they believe will benefit from each immersive world, and lastly, select a platform to support the first two conditions.
Every platform has its own limitations and capabilities, which we must factor in before starting work, to achieve the desired metaverse based on the limitations presented.
Many of our builders use common 3D building platforms such as Blender, Unity, Rhino, and Unreal Engine. Scalability creates the initial challenge as environments are built in 2D and later, exported to the metaverse, which poses a major learning curve for builders.
Many learning curves existed in the early days of the metaverse as well as virtual and augmented reality, for us and other builders, so we must experiment to see what works best to strike a balance between building realistic and optimised environments.
If builders decide to create a specific immersive world with a certain level of realism, but fail to understand its limitations, there will be a lot of inconsistencies when uploading content to the platform.
Mesh models in some platforms may be too detailed, compromising the world, but with experience, developers can learn which degree of detail they can deliver while preserving optimal performance.
Suppose these builders chose to create a certain type of world with a specific level of realism… if they do not start by understanding the platform rules and limitations, some of the mesh models may be considered too fine and may compromise performance after being uploaded to the platform.
Nevertheless, most builders learn how much realism to apply in the platform with experience, and can still deliver a high-performing world that looks incredibly detailed.
XR Today: Could you explain the processes for designing, building, and launching these 3D environments? What is the typical turnaround for building such experiences?
Sonya Seddarasan: It really depends on the complexity of the environment as well as the experience of developers, and can range from two weeks to two months.
Building metaverses is a mix of art and engineering, and once you start modelling and uploading them to the platform, the last steps take the longest time to complete. Issues such as usability can create the most challenging problems during this stage of the development process.
When hosting new worlds, we launch an ‘open house’ to invite testers on multiple headsets, including the Oculus Rift, Quest, and HTC Vive, to trial them. We monitor conditions such as frames per second, comfort, design and realism, among others.
This is a very subjective experience that, in the early stages of development timelines for clients, we could typically complete in two weeks to two months, but usability testing can take longer.
Some complex worlds we’ve tested have had zero issues, but simple worlds can create issues, so there’s still a major learning curve in the building process.
XR Today: What are the most common reasons your clients give for joining your bespoke immersive worlds? What specific feedback have they given you about their virtual experiences compared to meeting in physical spaces?
Sonya Seddarasan: Wow… I’ve not met a person that has not said they love experiencing metaverses! People are excited to immerse themselves in a headset to stimulate their imaginations, and we commonly receive feedback on how realistic and immersive the environments are.
The beautiful and intimidating thing about these experiences is that they are subjective, and different individuals have completely unique experiences compared to one another.
One reason behind the popularity of avatars compared to ‘Video Conference Zombies’, as people are calling them in the pandemic climate, is the first-person experience. When people have meetings or social interactions, we can experience first-person interactions, but not as much in videoconferences.
The metaverse aims to resolve this by enhancing the audience’s imagination and make people feel as if they’re present through their worlds as avatars, which has improved human interactions online and made them less intimidating as they become friends and have conversations with complete strangers.
As a builder, it is a beautiful thing to offer people a shared experience, and this has inspired me and the team to launch UPWorlds, which was created to provide spaces for these amazing, creative people by reimagining the use of their creations as a way of coexisting in the future.
