BREAKING: Somnium Space WEB WORLDS, a New Metaverse Creativity and Experience Layer

Somnium Space announced a new feature, Somnium Space WEB WORLDs, which promises to give parcel owners ultimate flexibility in enhancing their SomniumWEB parcels and/or creating entirely new standalone experiences.

Somnium Space WEB WORLDs are PlayCanvas scenes that can be created using the Web Worlds SDK. With it you will be able to build complete custom experiences that can be traded or provided access to by others and/or be used on your own parcel(s).

PlayCanvas

Built for modern browsers, PlayCanvas is a fully-featured 3D game engine with resource loading, an entity and component system, advanced graphics manipulation, collision and physics engine (built with ammo. js), audio, and facilities to handle control inputs from various devices (including gamepads).

Types of Worlds

Somnium mentions different types of Web Worlds:

Augment Worlds, which append themselves to the normal parcel build and is useful for adding extra buildings or event space around a parcel build.
Holistic Worlds, which is a full scene that visitors spawn into. Useful for providing fully unique experiences to web visitors.
Hybrid Worlds (which are coming soon), which adds a PORTAL to the world onto the normal parcel build. Visitors can explore the normal build, but can also enter the portal to load into the standalone world as well.

In short, Web Worlds are plugged into the Somnium Space parcel system so that visitors to parcels immerse into the PlayCanvas experiences, either as augmentations to the ‘normal’ parcel build or as a complete replacement.

The applications are sheer limitless.

Try it (from any device)

A number of Somnium WEB WORLDs have been prepared for you to try:

Showroom World: https://somniumspace.com/parcel/3077
Auditorium World: https://somniumspace.com/parcel/158
Cityscape World: https://somniumspace.com/parcel/359
Island World: https://somniumspace.com/parcel/361
Photogrammetry World: https://somniumspace.com/parcel/43

Note that if you have a VR headset like the Oculus Quest, you can visit these parcels with the browser app and switch to VR mode. If using your mobile phone, try switching to AR mode and you can walk around the builds and PlayCanvas scenes.

Interactivity

On the topic of interactivity, Somnium mentions that by default, Web Worlds are “art-only” and do not load or execute scripts or WASM modules.

However, Somnium Space is currently testing interactivity. Whitelisted Web Worlds are allowed to load scripts and WASM modules. To apply to get your custom Web World whitelisted, join the Web World creators community on Discord.