 Hello everyone, and thank you for having me at Open Source Summit North America. I'm so excited to talk about the Metaverse on this really exciting track, and I'm here to share with you how the team at Ethereum Engine has built an open code collective that's creating the social spatial web. Well what do I mean by that? Well I think that the true version of the Metaverse that's coming is the web, and it always has been. The web is unique in the sense that it's the only digital experience where it's completely federated. Anybody can create and link their website, their domain, to others without any gatekeepers, no governments, no app stores, keep you from the web. You can instantly hyperlink from one experience to the other. It sounds like the Metaverse to me, and our web right now is very 2D, but it can be 3D and immersive. I'm going to show you how and why that's the best course of this immersive future. You know, we're walking down a long road. You know this is a sort of Damocles, which I'm sure many of you know. It really started off the augmented reality virtual reality revolution over 50 years ago, just with simple vector diagrams, vector rendering to show, you know, just being in a spatial box, you know, north, south, east, and west. And in the last 50 years we've put out many more capable and competent devices and software. You know, really the immersive tech stack is a really deep stack, you know. If you want to build in a crazy, beautiful, immersive experience like Red Matter or Pokemon Go or VRChat, you have to jump through a lot of hoops on this stack to get it to the devices that all the consumers have, but you know, where the users are. You have to get into an app store. You have to write towards against proprietary libraries and frameworks. You have to use that to be an intermediary to the lower level systems like Vulkan and DirectX that you're actually driving your application on. And those are yet another intermediary to the low-level driver languages that sit on all the specialized sensor and compute and display hardware that we use. And it's a giant lift to penetrate this deep stack, to build performative and to perform it, to build capable experiences really. And most developers do this with a game engine. They jump over much of the stack with Unity and Unreal, which come with advantages, but also their own limitations. They cost an extreme amount of money, taking a large amount of your top line gross on top of the app stores themselves, and they have a lot of baggage and limitations. Most people in the immersive space see this as the only way is to sign your field to one of these proprietary platforms, but there's actually an alternative. The web browser is extremely accessible and extremely capable, quickly becoming the most accessible and capable platform ever built, where the web browser can do anything that the underlying operating system can do, accessing all the sensors, all the immersive technology in the device, just through a link. This idea is nothing new. It started in 1994 with Vermel, VRML, really trying to extend the web browser. Then Janice came along in WebRTC, which really enabled real-time immersive communication. Janice was an incredible project, really attempting to build the first version of the spatial web before the standards of WebVR and WebAR were there. Then WebVR came around in about 2014, led by Mozilla, to standardize virtual reality in the web browser. A-Frame came as the first major framework, which allowed us to build the first multiplayer worlds a few years later, like Mozilla Hubs. Then WebXR came out, bringing augmented reality to the browser along with virtual reality and one unified framework. Now WebXR devices are all over. In fact, the majority of immersive devices are WebXR devices. Mozilla showed how in 2018, how we could actually extend responsive design, design that takes a unified experience for the desktop and mobile, and extend that to augmented reality and virtual reality. They did an incredible blog post in April of 2018 that really laid out how this could be done and how it's the future. It's really where our team was inspired to take this idea further. That leads to WebXR today. WebXR is on dozens of devices now, a majority of immersive devices. Here's a list of them. You'll notice that they're augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality devices, all supported by WebXR. WebXR is really built on the open XR standard, which, if you haven't seen, it's a single cross-platform, high-performance API between all the applications and devices. It targets game engines, it targets apps directly, and it powers the underlying tech that enables browsers to do immersive experiences. This diagram just shows all the companies who really made this capable. What is going on with WebXR? Well, it's actually under the hood powered by WebGL angle and WebGPU. WebGL has been around for about a decade now, and it's been turbocharged by the almost-native graphics layer engine, really pioneered by Google, which makes WebGL near-performance as native code. WebGPU has come along, and it just became a ship standard in Chrome, I think it was last week or this week, and it allows even more deep and generalized access to GPUs, including compute, cryptography, AI, not just graphics. It's really built on the strong foundation of Vulkan, even though Microsoft's moving to make it more directly supported by DirectX. There's also the GLTF, which is the graphics layer transmission format founded by the Kronos group, who I know is participating in this conference, and is the 3D format of the Metaverse. It's actively being extended and worked on. Our team is extending it for dynamic logic, instancing, level of detail, all things that you'd see in Unreal Engine 5, and bringing it to this open format. There's also computer vision and machine learning in the browser. Thanks to WebGPU and WebGL compute shaders, great frameworks like TensorFlow.js and MediaPipe that allows us to do machine learning training inference, which means running models like the post-tracking object detection face tracking that you see here, and also you can tune it for different device capabilities, like high and low performance, go for accuracy over speed, all sorts of things you can do in training, and actually record data, like these facial tracking and motion tracking to become motion capture and facial capture. All done in the browser now, and it's extremely, it's mature and in many ways easier to use than a lot of the native machine learning frameworks. We use it intensely. And because this machine learning framework powers computer vision, this allows us to do all sorts of magic in the browser. And the web metaverse works today now, thanks to these tech technologies. We extend open frameworks like WebXR with other frameworks like LightShip and Eighth Wall, we've looked at others that are out there. But if you haven't heard, the web is popping off. And now you can do world scale augmented reality, social virtual reality, full body, IK avatars on top of Web3, all sorts of things are now capable in the web, just as capable as the major game engines. And it's all through this magic of the fusing of sensors, high low level, high performance graphics layers on top of different devices, all powered by all major browsers. So I'm just going to take you through here, this is the kind of network of different rendering engines, different sensor platforms that browsers use to target different operating systems. Firefox uses Vulkan, OpenGL, DirectX, Metal on top of ARKit and Native Sensor APIs to target all major operating systems. Safari building deeply in WebXR on top of Metal and ARCore, it's growing more and more every day. Same thing with Chrome. Chrome has taken a very large approach. If you have any questions about this reach out to me, I'm going to go in deeper on how these systems actually work under the hood and how to tune them to be performant. And the same thing with Edge. Microsoft is working deeply to bring DirectX 12 support to WebXR, allowing Windows to be even faster as this spatial web platform, the spatial web standards evolve and platforms are built on top of it. So we focus very heavily on trust and control. Something that's hard to find with a lot of these opaque frameworks. And trust and control is really accelerated by the transparency of open source. And being able to see the code gives you trust and allowing everybody to publicly audit and critique the code allows for us to add security, compliance, control, performance all openly and then really build trust. And it also means control, control by customization, control by all the massive options we give you. And this is why many people have joined us on our journey to build this open framework. So if you don't know what a ethereal engine is, it's a high performance 3D engine built on WebXR and WebGPU. It's really a three sided experience. We have our creator side, which is this collaborative web editor where you can build, like Google Docs, you can build together a 3D world. You can add incredible cutting edge tech like volumetric capture, digital beings like virtual, you know, virtual beings powered by AI. There's tons of third party plugins like maps, and shopping has an entire dev API and project toolkit. It can be hosted in the cloud on all major cloud platforms or self hosted, has a deep analytics stack, scalable multiplayer with dedicated server back ends, and everything is powered by this immersive telecommunication back end that allows full voice chat, HD 4k video and full body tracking and recording. It's pretty wonderful. And there's nothing quite like it as far as an in the box, opinionated, easy to use solution on native game engines or web. And it's really benefited from this thriving ecosystem. We've tracked over 200 projects built on a ethereal engine. We have, I think, more than 80 contributors now. It's been deployed in over 25 companies, probably a dozen countries, and it's been used for all sorts of projects from immersive ads, brand activations, concert games and other entertainment stuff. We've actually seen it in healthcare now. And these are a list of some of the great companies who have worked with us to solve their problems in an open collaborative way, use, you know, contributed to our open code collective and built towards the common dream of the social spatial web of the web metaverse. Here's a video of what it looks like inside. This was a party the team had, I don't know, a couple months back. We had somebody screen share. It's one of a concert. We just jumped into one of our worlds and went dancing and you can see it's full body IK in the web. You know, we have immersive menus. It's really cool. It's giving you a bit of a flavor as we flip through. Here's our collaborative world editor. You can actually at the top right, you can see we're actually connecting to a world server in a shopping world and playing back some data of players checking out the store and seeing the layout. It really feels like the Sims. Here's some other interesting things we do. This is a passport wallet. So you can come in here, pick up a key, use this key elsewhere, give you access to volumes. This is essentially a key that you get after you finish the tutorial. It's a key credential. We call it a key, but it's actually a credential. You can have one that says, I finished the tutorial or I'm over 18 and I should have access to the adult worlds. We use these open credentials everywhere in the ethereal engine. They're extremely cool because they work in a federated environment. So if you have two different worlds on two different domains by two different companies in two different countries, and you can use, say, this age credential or tutorial credential can be honored everywhere. And this allows us to do all sorts of interesting things as far as building federated experiences such as you can put your avatar on your wallet and go from one world to another. And your avatar and your name and your height and your right hand in this all persist and can be automatically fluidly moved. This goes for parties, all sorts of groups, extensions, and really fills out the capabilities of the spatial web. Here's a bit of our team. We have 16 core members. We're actually growing. So please reach out to us if you're interested. We have some dedicated artists and many artists in our community and a lot of community contributors. I think we have a dozen community contributors as well. Here's just another taste of the type of experiences you can build. This is a scanned in virtual digital being, or this is actually a volumetric capture, excuse me, of a woman who was kind enough to be one of our fashion artists. And then we put digital clothing on her using an olympic and put her in this virtual world for a really cool fashion activation we did. And if you check out our demos, you can go into this cavern of chic, we call it. But this is a level of quality you can get right from the web browser. Thank you guys for your time. If you'd like to check out our demos, go to XRTI.me, XR time, and that will take you to our portal page. We have about eight virtual worlds and four augmented social augmented reality experiences. They're all multiplayer. They all work on mobile desktop, augmented reality, virtual reality, especially great on the Oculus Quest. And if you have any questions, reach out to me. I'm Liam Broza at etherealengine.com. Yeah, so I'm going to finish in our shopping mall. Well, you'll actually see a sales representative who is a real person who notices somebody coming into one of our virtual stores and she's here to actually help answer questions and guide you through the complex task of buying a high end laptop. You can check this out on our YouTube. But this is actually a square space, excuse me, a Shopify site, a Shopify catalog spatialized in this store in this multiplayer store. And you can actually go shopping. You can make a cart and check out. So I'm going to skip here to the end, but you can see he actually buys, I think it's a laptop and headphones and is able to check out right there. And this works for Wix and all sorts of other things, all sorts of other e-commerce platforms. And that's really the power of the social spatial web. You can integrate with all these other platforms and actually drive commerce directly from your website. Yeah, here's another brief experience. We call this our Can Your Website Do This Campaign that really shows this is an immersive augmented reality fashion show directly from your web browser. I actually went on a boating cruise and just pulled out my cell phone and shot this. Actually, I shot it on an iPad using Atoll and showed everybody here how we can have a runway shopping experience and buy any of these dresses. It's multiplayer too. You guys should check it out. If you have any questions, if you'd like to contribute, we're at etherealengine.org and we're always looking for contributors to our open source platform. Thank you guys. It's a pleasure talking here at the open source summit and I look forward to-