• Immersive Wire
  • Posts
  • EXCLUSIVE: Wonderland Engine, a webXR development tool, is now live as version 1.0

EXCLUSIVE: Wonderland Engine, a webXR development tool, is now live as version 1.0

The Immersive Wire - 1 May 2023 (Monday Briefing)

Executive summary

Welcome to your weekly briefing on the metaverse. Here are your snippets to sound smarter in meetings this week:

  • Exclusive: Wonderland is launching Wonderland Engine 1.0, a webXR development tool (The URL to its announcement post goes live later today; in the meantime, features and analysis below).

  • Article: I wrote a piece defending the metaverse in the new age of AI. Long story short, they’re parallel tracks.

  • Awards: AIXR announced that nominations for its VR Awards are now open.

  • Events: Cannes XR is happening 16-24 May.

  • Conversation-starter: Meta’s Reality Labs unit incurred a $4bn loss in Q1 2023.

  • Other stories: Places is a VR festival happening on 5 May, Anything World announced the launch of its AI Creator in Unity, and BP extended its agreement with Aize (more below).

Hot Pot works well for friendship bonding and good times, though it leaves a fiery aftertaste.

Tom Ffiske, Editor of the Immersive Wire

Analysis

Exclusive: Wonderland is launching Wonderland Engine 1.0, a webXR development tool (URL to its announcement post to go live later today).

  • What’s new? It includes a complete rewrite of the Runtime API using TypeScript, translation tools, 8th Wall integrations, and a benchmark framework.

  • What’s the vision? Jonathan Hale, CEO and founder of Wonderland, said: “We see a bright future for the WebXR community, for its developers, hardware support, and content. It was crucial to bring the whole ecosystem with us to test and validate the changes we made. This resulted in a highly reliable base to build upon in upcoming versions. By making it easier to build XR on the web we hope to attract developers and content creators to WebXR. We see WebXR truly being able to rival native apps and offer consumers a rich world of rapidly accessible content to enjoy.”

  • What I think: Its commitment to open source is highly commendable, such as supporting Wolvic, the only cross-device open source browser (alongside the main Meta and Pico ones). It makes business sense too, to become the de-facto tool for developers across multiple headsets.

  • What’s the competition? It enters a market with competitors like 8XR and the newly-announced Mattercraft. It’s difficult to say which one will win out in the long term - that is for its community of developers and enthusiasts to decide. One barrier I did find is that Mac support could be stronger for some, and more video documentation would be appreciated.

Other notable stories

Got any stories? Let me know at tom (at) immersivewire (dot) com.

  • Anything World announced the launch of its AI Creator in Unity.

  • BP extended its agreement with Aize, a digital twin software provider.

  • ENGAGE announced its earnings, and its revenue is up 40% compared to last year.

  • Places is a VR festival happening on 5 May.

  • Valo Motion announced Operation Money Grab, a spy and heist-themed game, for ValoArena.

  • vrisch created six interactive installations for Europe's biggest lighting house in Europe.

  • XRHealth and Amelia Virtual Care are merging to form a combined VR platform.

  • Zappar unveiled Mattercraft, a 3D tooling software for immersive tech developers who are building for WebXR.

    • I came along to the event. This was a lovely meetup, and it was great to see my old employer again.

  • Zesty announced Market 2.0, which improves the process of connecting webXR developers with advertisers.

Help corner

Need some assistance from other readers? Let me know at tom (at) immersivewire (dot) com.

  • Headonists, a UK-based XR community, is looking to compile XR-related events within a single calendar. The calendar itself can be found here, and the submission is here.

  • Lowpass is a new newsletter run by Janko Roettgers, who wrote a multitude of XR-related exclusives at Protocol. Check it out here.