Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which raised $25 million in Ethereum last August to fund its own development, recently became a web-based virtual world platform. But project lead Ari Meilich tells me that this doesn't mean they've downgraded the world's ambitions. In fact, he argues, it's a necessary move in the team's ultimate goal of making a decentralized metaverse:

"We're betting on Aframe/WebVR, which is a nascent technology and has the potential to bring VR to every device," as Meilich puts it. "This is much more ambitious than using off-the-shelf Unity or Unreal, because the technology is in its very early days (though with some big backers, like Mozilla), but its potential is much larger, since any web developer will be able to build scenes with some basic JS/HTML skills. The safe bet would have been to keep the battle-tested Unity engine. But even though Unity is cross-platform, lots of its plugins and assets are not. Aframe, on the other hand, doesn't even have physics yet. But using a JavaScript/Node.js stack will allow us to provide a uniform experience across platforms. Plus, it is open source. A decentralized metaverse cannot be built by paying license fees to a private corporation."

Hence Decentraland's recent acquisition of Fontus, a web-based proof of concept: "[M]aking it VR ready is trivial, as we're transforming it over to Aframe. It's just not a good growth strategy to hide ourselves in the corner with the few thousand VR headset owners (during the first few months)."

I asked Meilich if they're missing the lesson of OpenSim here: "It's an open source spinoff of Second Life that basically went nowhere precisely because it didn't have any corporate backers driving to make it a consumer ready/friendly product," I pointed out. "Aren't you risking the same fate?"

He argues not so: