Development of Web-based Metaverse Platform

Abstract

Most of the metaverses need to install programs or buy some equipment for entering the world. These processes reduce the accessibility of metaverse. To improve accessibility, this work develops a metaverse for service on the web environment using Unity and web development. The developed web-based metaverse has two advantages. The first advantage is increasing accessibility, when the metaverse is servicing on a web environment, users can connect to the world by typing the specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL) in an address bar. The second advantage is to mix the advantages of Unity and web development. Unity has many methods and assets for generating and controlling the metaverse, and web development has the good ability for communicating between browser and server, controlling information in the database, etc. To interact between Unity and the web, React was used in this work. React provides an Application Programming Interface (API) for interacting between Unity and the web. API makes the metaverse can use functions of the web in Unity. In summary, the goal of this paper is to build a web-based metaverse platform for improving the accessibility of metaverse. To achieve this goal, this work used Unity, Photon, Socket.IO, React, Node.js, MongoDB, and Express for building a more accessible metaverse. For accessing, this work built metaverse, the URL is provided as https://busanmayor.org/.