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RP1 has been trying to make the metaverse happen for a while. It was touting its tech for bringing a lot of people into a digital space in 2022, and it’s still trying hard to make it happen today.
And this time, RP1 CEO Sean Mann believes that the world needs a metaverse browser. And he and his cofounder Dean Abramson touted the idea at the Augmented World Expo 2025 show this week in Long Beach, California. Back in 2021, they showed me tech that could bring thousands of people together in an online space at the same time.
“It’s funny how things start and how things come back around, and just how things evolve,” Mann said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Obviously, companies like Netflix started off as a company that just got you DVDs in the mail. And the they figured the future is going to be a little bit different, and they pivoted using the same ideas, but created something obviously revolutionary as far as how to deliver video.”
He added, “When we started with you, it was a game changing scaling technology, which is still a very important piece of what we’re doing. But as we’re building out the components and depth and building out the demo and building out a lot of things we really figured out that we’re actually building the first metaverse browser, and the importance of that was obviously for the on demand aspects, not a pre-compiled application that you have to download through a traditional App Store.”
The web analogy
The metaverse browser is coming, says RP1.
I asked Mann what he meant by a metaverse browser. He said it was mirrored in how Google Chrome works. If you had a metaverse server with assets and services, then the browser’s job is to connect the population with those assets and services, along audio and six degrees of freedom controllers that help you navigate a 3D Chrome space, if you will, Mann said.
“Our main goal is to get people to understand what is the nature of the metaverse browser,” Abramson said in an interview with GamesBeat.
The metaverse browser is the collection of technologies for accessing the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. The metaverse browser gets you wherever you want to go in the metaverse, just like a web browser gets you anywhere on the web.
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