We’re excited to announce an official Hubs integration with Discord, a platform that provides text and voice chat for communities. In today's digital world, the ways we stay connected with our friends, family, and co-workers is evolving. Our established social networks span across different platforms, and we believe that shared virtual reality should build on those relationships and that they enhance the way we communicate with the people we care about. Being co-present as avatars in a shared 3D space is a natural progression for the tools we use today, and we’re building on that idea with Hubs to allow you to create private spaces where your conversations, content, and data is protected.

In recent years, Discord has grown in popularity for communities organized around games and technology, and is the platform we use internally on the Hubs development team for product development discussions. Using Discord as a persistent platform that is open to the public gives us the ability to be open about our ongoing work and initiatives on the Hubs team and integrate the community’s feedback into our product planning and development. If you’re a member of the Discord server for Hubs, you may have already seen the bot in action during our internal testing this month!

The Hubs Discord integration allows members to use their Discord identity to connect to rooms and connects a Discord channel with a specific Hubs room in order to capture the text chat, photos taken, and media shared between users in each space. With the ability to add web content to rooms in Hubs, users who are co-present together are able to collaborate and entertain one another, watch videos, chat, share their screen / webcam feed, and pull in 3D objects from Sketchfab and Google Poly. Users will be able to chat in the linked Discord channel to send messages, see the media added to the connected Hubs room, and easily get updates on who has joined or left at any given time.

We believe that embodied avatar presence will empower communities to be more creative, communicative, and collaborative - and that all of that should be doable without replacing or excluding your existing networks. Your rooms belong to you and the people you choose to share them with, and we feel strongly that everyone should be able to meet in secure spaces where their privacy is protected.

In the coming months, we plan to introduce additional platform integrations and new tools related to room management, authentication, and identity. While you will be able to continue to use Hubs without a persistent identity or login, having an account for the Hubs platform or using your existing identity on a platform such as Discord grants you additional permissions and abilities for the rooms you create. We plan to work closely with communities who are interested in joining the closed beta to help us understand how embodied communication works for them in order to focus our product planning on what meets their needs.

You can see the Hubs Discord integration in action live on the public Hubs Community Discord server for our weekly meetings. If you run a Discord server and are interested in participating in the closed beta for the Hubs Discord bot, you can learn more on the Hubs website.