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Matterverse has secured 10 partnership for its cloud-native metaverse platform. It also raised a second round of funding on the idea that the metaverse doesn’t have to be complicated.
Matterverse is also launching a beta version of its open metaverse and it has added 10 metaverse and Web3 brands to its community. They include Digifun, Magipop, MetaStreetMarket, NetEase, StarHeir,
AptosYo, WonderfulDay, Voka AI and more.
The partners’ exhibits have are featured in the Open World in the Matterverse platform, FutureCity. The
Matterverse can be experienced through downloading the beta local version and a fully cloud-native version is coming soon. It’s coming out as an interesting time, as Google said it would close its Stadia cloud-gaming service.
Shawn Pang, CEO of Matterverse, said in an interview with GamesBeat that it’s very simple to get started in Matterverse. Pang is based in Vancouver, Canada, though the company is virtual.
“Matterverse is a cloud-rendered metaverse editor. Essentially, what we do is we try to make it easy so that anyone on any device can very easily create a photorealistic next-generation metaverse. In a matter 30 minutes, they can show it with anyone through just a link.”
LD capital, a crypto fund in Asia, led the second round of funding. Matterverse previously raised money from MiraclePlus (former YCombinator China) in the fall of 2021, and it has several other angel investors in a pre-seed round.
The company previously helped many leading luxury, fashion and real estate businesses and brands to shape their metaverse strategy and build their first branded metaverse to better engage their customers and form a community in the virtual world.
What does Matterverse do?
Matterverse has created an on-chain platform and creation tool that aims to address some of the main complaints about the metaverse – lack of high-fidelity visuals, confusing creation tools and hardware restrictions. The core of it is the MatterCreator, used to create cloud-rendered worlds that can be shared via simple web site URLs and viewed by any browser.
The company is trying to lower the barrier to entry so anyone can create their own compelling, awesome-looking virtual space using tools built from the ground up to be simple and intuitive. Pang walked me through a demo using a mobile phone. We wandered around in different 3D worlds that looked reasonably good.
Pang said that the visual fidelity of today’s metaverse experiences isn’t that much better than those from 10 or 15 years ago. In a demo of MetaCreator, Pang said his aims to create photorealistic metaverses where you can import or build your own avatars. The worlds are built on WebGL, which enables lightweight 3D graphics run on a browser.
“When people think of creating the metaverse, they think of something that may be too technically advanced for them. One of the things that’s great about Matterverse is that it’s drag and drop. It’s very user friendly. You don’t need to be a developer to actually create these kinds of things. So the barrier to entry is quite low for those who don’t have this kind of experience,” he said.
But it can look better as Matterverse renders the 3D images in the cloud using WebRTC and sends video down so that the processing power of a mobile phone or tablet will be adequate in rendering cool-looking 3D graphics, Pang said. The mobile device will do something simple like render the user interface.
The heart of the city has a leaderboard. You can build on your own virtual land and save a copy. Each piece of land is a programmable non-fungible token (NFT). You can perform certain tasks in he world to claim a piece of land, as Pang said he doesn’tlike financial speculation. Building on the land is easy. There will be places where you can hold meetings and post pictures or make donations and view NFT art in a gallery. You can also build a store in a virtual mall.
“This is a sandbox environment that anyone can create. This is just place for you to have fun. You can create a virtual storefront or showroom,” he said. “You can create minigames and embed them into the pen world and it as interactive as possible.”
If you want to do something fancy, Pang said that is doable as well.
“The limit is only your creativity,” he said.
For now, it’s a small metaverse. The company has a team of 10 people and it has raised close to $1 million. The team got started in 2021. In August, Matterverse made some tools available and it has about 1,700 downloads and around 100 active developers working on it.
“Our plan is to work with all the creators that we have right now and learn and explore,” Pang said. “Hopefully they can host events where they will make money from the content they’re creating.”
But the company is confident.
“In the upcoming years, all brands or businesses will each have their own virtual space,” Pang said.
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