We just launched the first public tech preview of Third Room: an open source, standards-based, decentralised vision of interoperable virtual worlds for the open Web, built entirely on Matrix - without cryptocurrencies, NFTs or walled gardens.

It's built on an new opensource game engine for the web called Manifold, which provides a solid 60fps of fullscreen 3D thanks to multithreading across webworkers using SharedArrayBuffers and Atomics, using Three.js for rendering, bitECS as an entity component system, Rapier for physics and Hydrogen for Matrix chat+networking. It requires no servers other than your normal Matrix homeserver.

You can play with it at https://thirdroom.io or hop straight into a world like https://thirdroom.io/world/#terra-1:thirdroom.io. The code is all Apache Licensed up at https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom. We're hoping this provides a much-needed counterbalance to the Big Tech visions of the metaverse, or ones which are entangled with decentralised financial incentives, and might be a genuinely open platform for building spatial web/metaverse apps in future.

Feedback welcome!