HTC announced today that its VIVERSE immersive social platform has reached 1 million monthly-active users, a major milestone. The platform is accessible on flatscreens and VR, so it\u2019s unclear what portion of users are visiting with headsets.<\/p>\n
The News<\/p>\n
HTC\u2019s Viverse<\/a> is a user-generated immersive social platform, quite similar to Meta\u2019s\u00a0Horizon Worlds. It was launched less than a year ago<\/a>, but the company says the platform has already reached 1 million monthly-active users. While still miles from the likes of\u00a0Roblox, that\u2019s still a pretty big milestone.<\/p>\n The milestone was helped, no doubt, by the platform\u2019s web-based approach. Viverse worlds can be visited on any device with a compatible browser, including browsers on VR headsets with WebXR support.<\/p>\n The announcement of the 1 million monthly-active user milestone comes alongside the culmination of a Viverse student hackathon, which saw students from some 40 schools submitting experiences powered by Viverse across three categories:<\/p>\n Immersive Storytelling<\/p>\n Games<\/p>\n Social Experiences<\/p>\n HTC also recently announced that it has teamed up with Open Brush\u00a0to make it easy for artists to share their\u00a0immersive artwork.\u00a0Open Brush <\/a>is an immersive art tool which allows people to paint and sketch in 3D. Historically, it\u2019s been difficult to share this kind of immersive artwork in a way that\u2019s widely accessible. But a new version of Open Brush now has one-click sharing to Viverse, meaning immersive artwork can easily be viewed on the web across a wide variety of devices (including VR headsets). Here\u2019s one such scene if you want to check it out<\/a>!<\/p>\n My Take<\/p>\n Similar to issues faced by Horizon Worlds, the cross-device nature of Viverse means creators building for the platform are faced with the challenge of creating interesting content for vastly different modalities (flatscreen, mobile, and VR).<\/p>\n While HTC hasn\u2019t shared the breakdown of flatscreen vs. VR players, a quick look through the platform\u2019s top content shows few experiences that are marked as specifically compatible with VR headsets. That means they\u2019re either sub-par experiences when seen in VR, or outright incompatible.<\/p>\n It\u2019s great seeing the web-based approach working, and HTC\u2019s commitment to maintaining WebXR compatibility, but it doesn\u2019t look like VR makes up a meaningful portion of users on the platform to date. That probably won\u2019t change with the\u00a0Open Brush integration, but it\u2019s a win-win for both; Viverse gets some cool immersive artwork and\u00a0Open Brush users get an easy way to share their works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HTC announced today that its VIVERSE immersive social platform has reached 1 million monthly-active users, a major milestone.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[85,46,125,340,341,342],"class_list":["post-176739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}