Here’s my interview about Viverse’s Open Metaverse Strategy built on WebXR frameworks as well as the new WebXR game by James C. Kane called In Tirol. Kane is a Director in Emerging Technologies with a Focus on Immersive Tech, AR/VR, & WebXR, and this interview was conducted on Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continue my series of looking at AWE past and present. Today's interview is with James C. Kane, who is a director in emerging technologies and focusing specifically on immersive technologies like AR and VR, as well as WebXR specifically. And so in this conversation, I had a chance to talk to James around his latest game called Interol. And so he was actually commissioned by Viverse to develop this as an independent WebXR project. And so we also talk around like what's happening with Viverse because it's actually really quite exciting in terms of like having a platform that's really embracing the open web. And so having like all the different major industries. 3GS, Babylon JS, Play Canvas, and WebGPU eventually. But right now they're starting to have this platform for all these different frameworks and Adnostic to those different frameworks have a platform to start to build not only the community of audience for these different types of bite-sized experiences, but also to fund a lot of artists to create these different works, but also have the capability and the infrastructure to do more social types of experiences that We would see in something like Mozilla Hubs in the early beginnings of this interface between social experiences and WebXR technologies. But with the demise of Mozilla Hubs and falling by the wayside by now, Fiverr has really started to pick up that torch and start to promote this open vision of technology. the metaverse that, you know, is building upon all these different XR technologies. And so lots of different artists and lots of creative innovation that's happening there. So definitely go check out some of the different experiences that are happening on Five Verse and had a chance to catch up with James just to hear a little bit more around his own journey and how he's kind of working with Five Verse as this consultant capacity and kind of an in-house artist in residence of sorts. And also just a So overcoming all that and more on today's episode of Voices in VR podcast. So this interview with James happened on Wednesday, June 11th, 2025 at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:20.442] James C. Kane: Hi, I'm James C. Cain. I'm a director in emerging technologies with a focus on immersive tech and AR VR for the last five or six years. And I've built Webby winning or honored work for five years straight. And yeah, I have a real focus on WebXR in particular. So whether that's mobile AR, whether that's fully immersive VR stuff and games like the Escape Artist, which is featured on the Meta new tab page. And my first game was Above Par Mini Golf, which is also on the new tab page there. That's how I kind of distribute. And yeah, I really think it's a great channel, super accessible, super easy to there's no gatekeepers. There's really no fees leveraged on any kind of in-app purchases you are able to set up, although monetization has been an issue to this point. But I see that improving. And yeah, it's a channel I'm invested in and excited to keep exploring and Yeah, I just released my new game. It's WebXR, so it's available on desktop, mobile, and VR browsers. It's called Intirol. That's I-N-T-I-R-O-L dot game is the full URL. So that's a custom domain, Intirol dot game. I mean, yeah, you can try that on any device, but best experience probably in VR in a Quest 3. That's where the most time is spent with the interactions and six DoF controllers and all that. So it's the first WebXR game that I'm aware of that's making heavy use of full post-processing layers. You can't quite do that in Vanilla 3.js yet, but I built my game in Play Canvas, and so Yeah, this game has a heavy kind of grainy look and feel, almost reminiscent of like CRT graphics on an old PlayStation or something. And it really adds to the look and feel of the setting, which is Manor Grounds in 1914 Salzburg. So kind of tracing some similarities between, you know, that pre-war era then and what we're looking at on a global stage now. looking at that through the lens of art and design and the Vienna secessionist art movement that was taking place around then. And the piece borrows heavily from German expressionist film in terms of like look and feel and how I'm literally hand painting lights in certain places in the same way that the expressionists did. So yeah, that's probably a good overview of where I'm coming from. Yeah.
[00:04:43.769] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Totally.
[00:04:48.950] James C. Kane: So I have a winding road, I guess. I have a journalism major and, yeah, comms background. I was kind of a freelance writer in the music world for a while. Eventually, though, pivoted more into agency world, creative and ad agency spaces. And it was there that I kind of realized my tech background and lifelong interest in the web and tech was really what was most valuable on the job market. So I kind of pivoted into a full-time developer about 10 years ago. And that was right around when the first consumer variants of Oculus Rift were first coming out. I got the first, I wasn't quite DK1 era, I was CV1, the first consumer model is when I got my hands on it. And I kind of never looked back. It was a hot button, I was in the events space then and it was big in that world. kind of pivoted into more generic marketing purposes, and then really found my stride in what I love to do with the original content. With some of our downtime in my last agency job, we were able to make some of the most popular WebXR games ever to this point. The Escape Artist was probably our biggest hit to date. It's an escape room game where you play an artist trying to get out of their own work, which they've become trapped in. And I think that's pretty relatable content for a lot of people in this space. And yeah, that had a million players in 2024 and was best narrative experience at the Webby Awards. I was technical director, designer and developer on that project with a lot of talented people on my team at Paradowsky. But yeah, now I'm a more solo developer. I went solo in November and quickly got hooked up with the team at Viverse, which is a new web gaming platform by HTC. And yeah, they're making significant investments in like small and medium scale creators that are really meaningful for people in this space that I think it's kind of been hungry for that. a platform looking to cater to that world for a while, so that's been really exciting. I'm now, after the game launched at GDC, at the Viverse kind of mixer and WebXR event there, I'm now supporting them as creator in residence, which is kind of a support role, kind of a product management and consulting advisory role. Yeah, I'm really impressed with the overall strategy of the platform, where they're taking it, and yeah, super excited someone is making a bet on this field because it's wide open and there is a market there that I see growing year over year.
[00:07:20.931] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know we had a chance to talk around the Escape Artist while you were still with Paradosky, and it's an unpublished interview that I hope to release as a part of either the AWE coverage and this conversation or a whole series of WebXR conversations. Because I do think that there is a lot of really exciting potentials for WebXR. Always have, but it's always felt like waiting for the big green light to come with Apple coming into the scene. And now that they're there, they do have some limitations, but then maybe not as full as you would like to have everything cross-platform, working on everything. And so just curious to hear some of your reflections on this moment of if you think that everything is there that is needed. I know that Apple was saying that they're really going to be making a push for a web GPU at WWDC instead of WebGL. Also, Hugo Swart was talking around the commitment of Android XR to have different support integrations with WebXR, OpenXR. So yeah, just curious to hear some of your state of WebXR right now, where it's at, and where you see it going.
[00:08:21.941] James C. Kane: Well, that's the promise of WebXR, isn't it? That it is cross-platform and you can have 95% of your code be the same on Apple or Meadow or Pico or wherever you land, wherever the audience is, right? I want to just be in front of audience and have maximal reach. So yeah, that's the promise and the goal. I think as you've alluded to, it's still, it's not, we're not there yet. Apple is kind of an interesting case, isn't it? I'm super interested and it's the best display I've ever seen. There's some intricacies with the hand tracking and transient pointer feature that they added to Vision Pro Safari. I did add that feature to the Escape Artist midway through last year. So you can use the eye-based, gaze-based pinch pinch and move kind of thing that they do for teleportation in our Escape Artist game. And it really is great for teleportation. I think that's a fantastic use case. You just look where you want to go, and you're kind of there in a pinch. And I love that. And that's just a paradigm nobody had really exposed before. But you've got to think that's going to be important in headsets in the future, right? Whether it is the pinch, gaze and pinch, or broader eye tracking features. So this kind of UX stew, we keep throwing new ingredients into it and stirring it around a bit. And just kind of where we are broadly, I think I use this analogy a lot and I actually think I got it from your podcast like five years ago. It's the cinema of attractions era in film history, which is like, early days when there were no standard best practices for everything. It was all just experimentation and wild try and fail attempts. So I still feel like that's somewhat where we are, but I think it is changing and it's going to change the most with monetization of WebXR content. So Apple did, to their credit, launch with like you can use your Apple Wallet through Vision OS, through Safari, on launch. It's that same great two-click Apple Pay experience that it is on iOS. So that's fantastic, and that's what I want to see Meta do, to be totally honest. They are moving in the direction of monetization for WebXR by opening up PWA publishing through their app store. And if you do that, then you can get access to their identity system and purchases and things like that. That's still though almost, you're still having to go through the app store though at that point, which is kind of defeating the purpose of distributing over the web and avoiding that like potentially 30% app store fees and things like that. So I hope they adopt a web wallet approach at some point. I feel like it's inevitable. How do you not do that somewhere along the line? So yeah, that's what I'm looking for to really make the space grow once dollars can more easily flow in. I think it's starting to happen. But yeah, I mean, I want to target Apple more fully. I think it's still just a quite small user base, if we're being honest, right? Like the Vision Pro 1 is somewhat of a dev kit, as has been mentioned on your podcast many times. Incredible device, don't get me wrong. Really excited about the future. I think they'll definitely get there. They have the wherewithal in business and tech to make this market happen, I think. So I want to stay along for the ride and be building for that. But gosh, it's hard right now to like, as an independent creator, one man shop right now to even justify full freight on a two year old Vision Pro device if I wanted to get into that market is a bit of a stretch for folks right now, I think still. So that's how I feel about them. And then Pico, I think, is coming on too, and they've been pretty proactive about WebXR, but of course it's not available in the U.S., so that's my primary market, I suppose. Yeah, that's where I see things currently.
[00:12:15.015] Kent Bye: And here's to hear from your perspective of, like, with the Vyverse, there's... Three.js options, Play Canvas, and then also Babylon.js. So there's WebGPU that's coming on. And it seems like that there's a variety of different levels of support for each of the different JavaScript frameworks. And so just curious to hear from your perspective if you feel like all the different frameworks are moving towards porting over to WebGPU. Or I know for Three.js, they're pretty tightly coupled to a lot of WebGL concepts and just even the way it's implemented. Just curious to hear, from your perspective, if it's on a pathway that you feel like it's eventually going to all switch over into WebGPU, or if there's some of the code base that's too tightly coupled to WebGL.
[00:12:57.749] James C. Kane: I think there'll be legacy WebGL projects running for another decade or so, but yeah, it does seem to be headed, all the energy seems to be heading toward WebGPU. I think the 3 team has said they're, maybe I shouldn't be quoting this, but I think they've said they are not really even working on the original WebGL renderers much anymore. So that spec is mature and stable. And if you want to build content now, you're still using that pretty much. But yeah, I'm excited for the possibilities of WebGPU. I mean, I think it's like the things that it's going to unlock are like a thousand x little use cases very specific use cases like this one type of animation i'll be able to speed up or i'll be able to run 500 of them at once or something with minimal it's going to be like very but it will at least give experienced graphics developers way more tools to address performance and to be like yeah more modern language To be honest, I'm on the edge of graphics programming. I can do it, and I can do shaders and stuff, but I'm not on the implementation side of Chromium and deciding how to build that architecture out or anything. So I'm a consumer of these APIs. And so my attitude is, I'm going to wait till it's ready and wait till it's healthy and stable, available cross-platform, and then I'm going to start building. And I'll take those gains as they come. I'm still very focused on what can I do right now, and I think that spectrum is enormous, even if I don't have the full powers of WebGPU quite yet. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at. I'm excited about it, and I'm learning more about it, but yeah, headed there.
[00:14:40.714] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it is nice to see Vyverse really promote different aspects of the open web and all these open technologies. And so just curious to hear what you're seeing in terms of being both an evangelist and the ambassador to Vyverse. And yeah, just the ecosystem and who they're bringing in from different communities and kind of vibe check of Vyverse is right now.
[00:14:59.949] James C. Kane: Absolutely. Yeah, like I said, really impressed with the overall company's strategy, and by the time this comes out, Vyvers will have launched support for Unity WebGL builds, for Godot WebGL, and have more full-fledged examples for A-Frame, for Wonderland, 3JS, R3EF, React 3 Fiber, that is. So yeah, they're moving in a direction of being truly engine agnostic, and as long as you can run a WebGL or WebGPU build, they'll be able to publish it. WebGPU, not quite yet, because again, that's not fully cross-platform supported, but yeah, that's the goal is to get there, and it already works for any working WebGL content. So yeah, I think there's a wealth of creators out there who have been waiting for an opportunity for funding and who have just kind of applied this platform as a hobby and out of passion or maybe out of seeing the future business potential have invested in it prematurely. But I see it, yes, turning a corner more and more. And Vyvers, they have as great a chance as anyone to be a big winner in that field. You see a Poke or a Crazy Games out there who are these web gaming distribution platforms with numbers in the millions and very Roblox-like content sometimes. There's a Minecraft clone that's an enormous hit on those platforms and such. So there's a mix of playing to the audience and playing to the strengths of the platform, which is kind of quick, replayable games. and a healthy mix of pushing boundaries on WebGL content and what you can do in WebXR. I think my game, like I said, I've tried to do that, introducing post-processing as a game layer. And not just for visuals, but actually there's a hallucination sequence in T-Roll where you hold up a potion and as you drain it, I use the post-processing to drive this kind of wild, wavy effect where you feel like you're under the influence of something. so yeah i'm trying to push bounds in that way there are other people here too like cause and christy are here they're awe staples they made ship happens which is a really great and hilarious and fun escape room happening on a spaceship awesome graphics awesome vfx and animations in that a lot of really good comedy in that game too and they're supporting vr as well so Peter Adams to the limbs, I would say. You interviewed him recently, yeah. And he won a Webby for, I think, Best Indie Music Experience or something to that effect. Incredible artists and content. And you would never look at the trending content on Pokey and make to the limbs, you know, by Peter Adams. That's just an expression of who he is, right? Like it's his artistic intention. And Viverse is making room for content like that, too, which I think is a really great thing. And so, yeah, it's running the gamut and providing a variety. And yeah, I'm excited to see where it goes. It's cool.
[00:17:58.134] Kent Bye: Yeah, I also just noticed that there's a lot of world builders and content creators from other platforms, from VRChat to refugees from Altspace and Mozilla Hubs and lots of other, maybe even from meta platforms. So just curious to hear some of your reflections on how Vyverse is bringing together people from all these disparate communities and providing a context where there's funding that's happening, which is also something that is not happening in a lot of other contexts, even on the VR chat platforms in terms of funding and making these worlds. A lot of it has been driven by social currency, where people feel like they want to build stuff and share it to big, large communities. But it seems like there's opportunities for artists to come on and actually get paid for pushing the edge for what's possible with these open web platforms on Viverse. And so just curious to hear some of your reflections on that.
[00:18:45.339] James C. Kane: Totally. Yeah, lots of creators coming in from other communities and platforms and such. And I think the ones that have operated on kind of the closed ecosystems out there, they have seen that, you know, an entity like Meta can just close down this version of the tool system you're using. Like, I think they recently closed the VR only creator tools for Horizons in favor of the new desktop editor, and that might be the right move for meta long term, but it still displaces a lot of people who invested a ton of time and energy in the original tooling. I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but That is a risky run when you're working on a closed platform, and so everything Vyverse is doing so far, moving more towards projects that are built on open source tech, built in the browser, so very easily accessible and distributable with low gatekeeping, no fees, and Yeah, I think that's been something people have responded to and Viverse as well, I'll say, in their creator program. So that's viverse.com slash creator dash program. That's where you can learn more about applying for funding and Yeah, what we're looking for in a pitch and the format of that and everything. You own the content you build there. So you own all the IP, you own the code, you own your assets. Vyverse is just a publishing contract essentially for the creator program. So people love that too, I think.
[00:20:15.899] Kent Bye: That's very unique.
[00:20:17.970] James C. Kane: Definitely.
[00:20:18.450] Kent Bye: I can't think of anyone else that's doing that.
[00:20:20.891] James C. Kane: I know, yeah. Creators have really responded to it. And so, yeah, it's trying to get the word out and get that around. And, you know, I think so far it has been, like, they're figuring out the SDK. I think we've already kind of figured out some systems within Vyverse that aren't going to scale super well as we move forward and trying to address those. So the community is growing already, but we're preparing for it to scale, you know, even higher and... be on the level of potentially a Roblox or a YouTube where there's hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of creators coming to the platform to publish and build cool stuff.
[00:20:56.910] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of XR, spatial computing, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:21:05.339] James C. Kane: So as I said, I am very focused on what it can do now. And yeah, I want to stay focused on driving XR forward a meter at a time. To address your actual question, I will say, it's not an original response but i think star trek gets it right essentially the holodeck it's used for training it's used for entertainment it's used for yeah real relief and therapy and relaxation it can also go terribly wrong sometimes and people can get addicted and there can be accidents and i think in star trek it really occupies the appropriate place in their universe and world and that's where i i hope we're headed versus you know Keiichi Matsuda's hyper-reality where everything's an ad flashing in front of you at all times. Yeah, I think that of course we're going to have AR glasses and I'm looking forward to that, but a future of control and empowering users and good user experience rather than the hyper-reality vision of things. Yeah, that's where I see it going. And like I said, I'm excited about the day-to-day progress and what can we do now and how can I help get toward that eventual cool holodeck future I'm talking about. So, yeah.
[00:22:24.539] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else left inside that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:22:29.958] James C. Kane: I'll just say thanks to you, Kent. Big fan. I've learned so much from your podcast over the years. And yeah, thanks for talking to me. It was a pleasure. Appreciate it.
[00:22:38.242] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, James, for continuing to believe in the WebXR aspect of the open standards, open platforms. It's really great to see that Vyverse has come onto the scene to really support this community ecosystem and create a publishing platform where people can really use all these open source tools to push forward what's possible with these platforms and to Also to implement some of these social features, which are not always easy to do. So yeah, just to have a context where they can have these group social experiences. And yeah, just excited to see where it all goes here in the future. And look forward to when I get back home to playing through your game and checking it all out. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down. Wonderful. Thanks, Kent. thanks again for listening to this episode of the voices of your podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a, this is part of podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
