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’s unclear what portion of users are visiting with headsets.
The News
HTC’s Viverse is a user-generated immersive social platform, quite similar to Meta’s Horizon Worlds. It was launched less than a year ago, but the company says the platform has already reached 1 million monthly-active users. While still miles from the likes of Roblox, that’s still a pretty big milestone.
The milestone was helped, no doubt, by the platform’s web-based approach. Viverse worlds can be visited on any device with a compatible browser, including browsers on VR headsets with WebXR support.
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:
- Immersive Storytelling
- 1st – The Knight Watcher, University of Houston
- 2nd – Day X, Royal College of Art
- 3rd – Mission Miss, Royal College of Art
- Honorable mention: VR-Story & Dream Maker, National University of Kaohsiung
- Games
- 1st – Office Crashout, Academy of Art University
- 2nd – Ditto, Academy of Art University
- 3rd – Car Repair Simulator, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Honorable mention: Axolotl Adventure, University of Houston
- Social Experiences
- 1st – Nimbus, Royal College of Art
- 2nd- Restaurant world, University of Cincinnati
- 3rd – OTR 12th and Vine, University of Cincinnati
- Honorable mention: Interverse, National University of Kaohsiung
HTC also recently announced that it has teamed up with Open Brush to make it easy for artists to share their immersive artwork. Open Brush is an immersive art tool which allows people to paint and sketch in 3D. Historically, it’s been difficult to share this kind of immersive artwork in a way that’s 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’s one such scene if you want to check it out!
My Take
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).
While HTC hasn’t shared the breakdown of flatscreen vs. VR players, a quick look through the platform’s top content shows few experiences that are marked as specifically compatible with VR headsets. That means they’re either sub-par experiences when seen in VR, or outright incompatible.
It’s great seeing the web-based approach working, and HTC’s commitment to maintaining WebXR compatibility, but it doesn’t look like VR makes up a meaningful portion of users on the platform to date. That probably won’t change with the Open Brush integration, but it’s a win-win for both; Viverse gets some cool immersive artwork and Open Brush users get an easy way to share their works.
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