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Hadean has recently achieved $30m in Series A funding to power the metaverse. This included a significant investment from Epic Games, who share our belief in the flourishing creator economy that will open up in the new era of the internet.
Hadean allows creators to build, run, and monetise engaging experiences that capture the immersive potential of the metaverse through scalable, interoperable, and secure virtual worlds.
With these tools at creators’ fingertips, a new realm of possibilities for immersive content will arise, no longer hampered by technical limitations nor controlled by large data monopolies.
A New Creator Economy
The internet has revolutionised communication, allowing individuals and brands alike to release content into the world at whim. With Web 1.0, it was just static web pages, but things evolved with Web 2.0: a new form of interactive websites and apps changed the way we work, build, buy and consume.
Since the advent of Web 2.0, creating and consuming content has gone hand in hand. Many of our entertainment, shopping, educational, and professional choices are driven by interactivity in the digital sphere, whether through user input such as comments, reviews, and forum posts, or through the rise of social media and other platforms primarily driven by user-generated content.
In this way, the internet has provided a vehicle for interactions that would not have been possible otherwise, allowing companies, creators, and audiences to engage with each other in ever more seamless, creative, and value-generating ways. The benefits and outcomes of this have become inextricably tied to our activities in the real world.
The metaverse and Web 3.0 promises to evolve this to an exponentially more powerful level: it will create a new internet of immersive digital worlds that harness the human being’s natural experience of the world in 3D. By doing so, it allows for the creation of virtual experiences that not only mimic reality in creative ways, but also are able to map onto our present reality to create unprecedented, life-improving functionalities.
Importantly, the creation of the metaverse will be driven by a new awareness of the limits of data monopolies and control that large corporations hold over the internet’s creative ecosystems, including the ultimate dangers to privacy and individual sovereignty. Novel technologies such as the blockchain will enable the decentralisation of data, giving agency and ownership of data and assets over to the end user. Ultimately, this will facilitate the formation of an open and equitable creator economy that will benefit everyone.
Open ecosystems + interoperable assets + truly engaging worlds = a larger creator economy for everybody to play in.
This creator economy will be underpinned by two things:
· Infrastructure that is able to support virtual worlds with a real sense of immersion, interoperability, and persistence, including giving ownership and agency over data and assets to the end user, and bringing people together into highly connected, visually stunning virtual environments.
· Creators and brands that are able to harness this technology to create virtual worlds and assets that engage audiences and break boundaries. These will be the ultimate providers of functionality and delight to the end user.
The decentralised virtual worlds of the metaverse will allow creators to engage audiences in novel ways, guiding them on immersive journeys, providing novel functionality, or setting the scene for free interaction and social community around a creative or purposive vision. This way, the metaverse encourages genuine connections between users and creators that interlace with the real world more authentically than ever before.
For this to become a reality, creators need to be given the tools to build, run and monetise incredible virtual experiences in the metaverse.
The requirements for creating truly valuable metaverse experiences – how Hadean is changing the game
It is clear that legacy Web 2.0 infrastructure tools are not suited to achieve the vision of the metaverse detailed above.
To start with, consumer platforms and proprietary spaces alike suffer from limited concurrency, with users often capped at no more than 100 in a single space, and severe compromises needing to be made to the rendering detail for unique avatars.
Secondly, they suffer from limited fidelity, with computational limits enforcing the use of ugly, blocky, and unflattering graphics that do little to showcase brands or to inspire users through visual appeal.
And even despite these stringent limitations on their scale and fidelity, metaverse experiences built on legacy infrastructure are still all too often plagued with performance issues that render them not only unappealing, but unusable.
Finally, from an architectural standpoint, platforms and experiences built on web 2.0 infrastructure exist as isolated ‘walled gardens’, failing to connect creators and users into broader value-sharing and value-generating ecosystems. As such, they also fail to make the most of blockchain technology like NFTs, which currently are seldom integrated into a broader interactive infrastructure with practical utility, and do not provide users with much value besides the capacity to be bought and sold on a marketplace.
At Hadean, we are flipping this on its head, giving content creators access to the tools required to build, run, and monetise virtual worlds in the metaverse with an unprecedented degree of scale, fidelity and flexibility.
Here are the fundamental features that Hadean is powering to unlock the full potential of the metaverse:
· Smooth performance and user experience, with minimal reliance on individual users’ hardware
· Massive concurrency in a single virtual space, bringing people together into a truly shared experience (no sharding or instancing!)
· Top-class graphical fidelity for more realistic rendering of objects, environments, and avatars
· Robust security integrations and agile distribution for patch rollouts
· Persistence across virtual worlds
· The capacity to interlink these metaverse worlds into ecosystems, unlocking network effects and laying the groundwork for an open and interoperable metaverse
With these tools at creators’ fingertips, a new realm of possibilities for immersive content will arise, no longer hampered by technical limitations or controlled by large data and hardware monopolies.
Creating value in metaverse ecosystems – Persistence is key
The ultimate driver of long-term value in metaverse ecosystems will be users’ sense of persistence as pertains to their identities, transactions, and interactions.
This is to say that their endeavours in the metaverse will not be refreshed with each new session, start from scratch when moving from one world to the next, or reset at the whim of a centralised server controller. Rather, an underlying metaverse infrastructure will empower the end user to maintain a single persistent personal identity and history that is reflected across the virtual worlds that they engage with.
This kind of persistence adds a new dimension to the creation of content in the metaverse. Engagement with content will not be fleeting or one sided; rather, it will present users with choices over how to interact with it and will alter the user’s digital identity in a tangible and universally recognised way.
Empowering users in this manner increases the value and longevity of digital content exponentially. Creators can make content that really matters, whether it be in the form of digital assets or of new immersive worlds, with a lasting impression and value that extends into the physical world.
Building, running, and monetising virtual with persistence is central to the Hadean vision. It is this that bridges physical and virtual worlds, encouraging users to connect with each other and with content in authentic, value-sustaining ways without giving up great user experience.
A fully realised open metaverse will create long-term value and outstanding experiences for audiences and creators alike. Let’s not let technical limitations hamper this ground-breaking potential.