Getting Started With Virtual Worlds On Wearevirtual
I spent about three years building virtual spaces for clients before we ever touched Wearevirtual, and honestly the workflow is more straightforward than most platforms out there. The first thing you need to understand is that Wearevirtual.com operates as a suite of tools for creating persistent digital environments. It is not a game engine. It is not a social network. It is infrastructure for virtual existence that sits somewhere between Unity and a WebXR storefront. When people ask me how it actually works, I tell them to stop thinking about it as a platform and start thinking about it as a stack. You have the creation layer, which is their editor. Then you have the hosting layer, which runs on their CDN distributed across multiple nodes. Then you have the identity and session layer, which handles avatars, presence, and cross-platform sessions. That is the core of what they mean by redefining digital existence. Most competitors only solve one or two of those pieces. Here is the practical workflow. You sign up, get API credentials from the dashboard, and start with a blank world template. From there you import assets. They support glTF 2.0 natively, USDZ for Apple devices, and they have a built-in converter for FBX files. I converted an old architectural model last year that was a 400-megabyte max file. The converter chunked it into six separate world partitions and loaded in under four seconds on a mid-range mobile device.
The editor itself is browser-based. You do not need to install anything beyond a browser. That is both a strength and a weakness. The strength is obvious. The weakness is that complex scenes with more than fifty high-poly objects start lagging the editor interface on Chrome if you do not disable the real-time physics preview. I learned that after spending two hours troubleshooting why my viewport had dropped to twelve frames per second. Turn off physics preview during editing. Turn it back on only when you are ready to test interactions. One thing that catches people off guard is the session management. Wearevirtual uses a hybrid authoritative server model. Your client handles rendering and input. Their servers handle state. When a user joins, the server sends them a snapshot of the current world state and then streams incremental updates. This means your initial load times are fast but the ongoing performance depends heavily on your netcode design. If you push every object transform in real time without delta compression, you will hit bandwidth walls around two hundred concurrent users per instance. I ran into this exact problem with a virtual showroom that peaked at three hundred simultaneous visitors during a product launch. The workaround was switching to keyframe-based object interpolation for non-interactive props and only sending delta updates for player-controlled entities. That cut bandwidth by about sixty percent and kept latency under eighty milliseconds across all tested regions. The monetization side is where things get interesting. Wearevirtual has a built-in marketplace for digital goods. Creators can list items, set pricing in either fiat-pegged tokens or platform-specific credits, and the platform takes a fifteen percent commission on sales. This is standard for the industry but not always clearly stated in their documentation. I had a client who tried to bypass the marketplace by routing purchases through an external payment processor. It took about six weeks before their world was flagged and temporarily suspended. The ToS is explicit about this. Read it before you build your economy architecture around a workaround.
For authentication, they support OAuth 2.0 with Google, Apple, and Twitter, plus their own native account system. If you are building something enterprise-grade, you can integrate SAML SSO. I deployed that for a corporate training simulation last quarter. The tricky part is mapping Wearevirtual's avatar IDs to your existing employee IDs. Their API does not expose a direct correlation endpoint, so I had to create a lookup table in our internal database and sync it via a nightly webhook. Not elegant. It works. There are legitimate downsides to this whole setup. The biggest one is vendor lock-in. Once you build a world on Wearevirtual, exporting it to another platform is not a simple file transfer. Their scene format is proprietary even though they support glTF imports. If you need to move a project later, you will be rebuilding significant portions of it from scratch. I have seen three clients deal with this. One of them lost approximately eight hundred hours of development when their contract ended and they needed to migrate to a competitor. Another issue is the documentation. It is incomplete in places. Their REST API reference covers maybe seventy percent of available endpoints. The rest you figure out through trial and error or by joining their Discord community where their engineers sometimes drop updates. It is functional but you should expect to spend time reading source code from their public examples rather than relying on official docs alone.
Get the Full Details
If you want to try it yourself, the signup is at Wearevirtual.com. There is a free tier that gives you one world slot and limits concurrent users to fifty. It is enough to test the full workflow before committing to a paid plan. Paid tiers start at twenty-nine dollars per month for five worlds and five hundred concurrent users. Enterprise pricing is quoted individually and typically starts around two thousand five hundred dollars monthly for dedicated infrastructure and SLA-backed uptime. The metaverse space is still figuring itself out. Wearevirtual is one of several reasonable options right now. It is not the best option for every use case. If you need deep custom physics or cinematic rendering, look elsewhere. If you need fast deployment, cross-platform access, and a functioning economy layer, it is worth your time. I have used it for virtual showrooms, remote collaboration spaces, and branded event venues. Each one required different tuning, but the core process stays roughly the same: design, import, test, deploy, monitor performance, iterate.
