RP1 says that metaverse needs its own browser

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

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.

I joined a demo that showed some of the technologies in action. The tech isn’t graphically appealing, but it can get across the points that RP1 is making.

“The goal that is not just connecting an unlimited amount of virtual world, but also solving for the augmented reality (AR) future. If you’re if you’re walking around with AR glasses, you’re going to need a seamless map, so as you walk around on proximity, as you’re walking near a hotel, you can instantly interact with their service that they build on their own servers.”

He said the reason why this is super important is that there’s probably one of the biggest migrations of software that’s going to be happening where everyone’s going to be moving from web infrastructure to spatial infrastructure. Indeed, folks like Tony Parisi called the metaverse the “spatial web.”

In Mann and Abramson’s vision of the metaverse, it’s not just about games like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft — which some say is a reasonably good idea of the metaverse. Rather, it’s also just how companies will operate.

“And so if you think of just like a Costco or a Home Depot, instead of you staring at a screen, a little manager in a little screen or something, they’re going to be able to manage the entire business, their warehouses,” Abramson said. “More importantly, they can interact with their customers, but also give the ability for when you walk into Costco with your AR glasses, you will just connect to a third party service built by them. They run on their own servers, and they’ll reach you, whether it’s an AI or a person where the nails are at Home Depot.”

This is interesting for a company that is fully bootstrapped, with no outside funding since its inception. The company is looking for strategic partners and funding to help the development of the browser and the open standards for the open metaverse. The company is a member of the Metaverse Standards Forum and spoke at one of the recent events. Supporters include Nic Hill, cofounder of Sawhorse.

“I’m excited about the first metaverse browser solution that creates an open and scalable XR ecosystem,” said Hill, in a statement. “Like Chrome for websites, it has the potential to remove friction/limitations for studios, brands and agencies looking to activate inside the XR and UGC gaming space. It’s early days but the RP1 point of view is fresh, bold and unique.”

All of this won’t run inside a proprietary virtual world like Roblox or, like in the old days, AOL or Compuserve. It’s going to run in the open metaverse, he said.

“It’s just like how web infrastructure runs on the open World Wide Web,” he said. “The Internet is viewed through a web browser. That’s how we’re defining the metaverse. It’s what you see of the spatial internet as viewed through a metaverse browser.”

Mann believes the metaverse should also be open, like the open web. It will be an open ecosystem, not a closed one. The browser’s job is to render the world. Mann expects to see a number of competing web browsers. RP1 wants to create one itself. The main function is to use a game engine to render 3d.

The browser is also supposed to connect to a spatial fabric, which would be a map system and other services. RP1 does both functions right now, like a browser inside a browser. The third element is to allow people to build third-party services for the whole system.

“At some point, we do want to build a native browser, just like Chrome is installed, and that’s going to up level the graphics. Because once you get to the native resources and whatnot, you’ll be able to do a lot more, and we’ll get closer and closer to Unreal level graphics,” he said.

Right now, RP1 is restricted to Web XR, which has limited graphics quality. Defining these elements of a metaverse browser is just as important as defining the elements of the web browser was, based on open standards. Over time, RP1 will get closer to Unreal Engine quality graphics, Mann said.

“Our spatial fabric consists of an unlimited map, and we have a patent for it that allows it to be fully contiguous and persistent. So that means anywhere you teleport or anywhere you go, you can run there, walk there, teleport there, but it’s all fully connected,” Abramson said. “It’s not like you’re going from one snow globe to another, and it includes our entire universe and one to one scale of our solar system and earth. If you own the Louvre museum in Paris, you need to go have access to the same coordinate system to upload or run your own digital twins, your own services on how you want people to interact with your space. But if you want to build an MMO, or something that has nothing to do with a digital twin, that would be outside of our solar system. If Disneyland wanted to build their own planet, like Avatar the movie, or a place far, far away, you’re able to do that and stuff.”

The company has a demo for AR, using the mixed reality passthrough camera of the Meta Quest 3. The company’s goal is to scale of its tech and have 100,000 people in a single shard. It can put a number of people in the same space now, but not with the kind of graphics fidelity everyone expects.

“You can come in as an avatar and connect with everyone,” Mann said. “No matter where you re in the map. There’s just zero sharding as far as the ay the system is built. I don’t have to worry about what shard you’re on. We’re instantly just connected based on proximity. We’re capable of 100,000 concurrent users with full 6DoF and full spatial audio. You can come in on a mobile device, desktop and also VR.”

As for the third party services, Mann said, “If I go near your space, I will instantly connect to your services that you provide, whether those are yours or a third party, and it instantly works. And so inside our demo, we have a couple samples of those services that are not running on the browser. They’re just being connected based on your proximity. So let’s say we do a watch party. We actually have a movie running in demo. As soon as you walk near it, it just connects to you, and you’re running off of a third party service to make that movie possible. We also have a light switch that you can control. You can actually control someone’s light in the UK, inside VR and AR, and you can toggle that. And the importance is, we’re showing that eventually, when you’re wearing AR glasses, you’ll just have a service that’s running by any company that you want to connect with and instantly use it without having to install one thing.”

He said the web sites are real time, where you connect to one or many services built by a third party that you can interact with. RP1 has done its work with just a half-dozen people. In a few months, people will be able to build their own metaverse servers. Big companies will build their own metaverse sites and connect to the metaverse infrastructure.

“The analogy is that I would build my house out on the the internet, but Disney would build Disneyland, their big site, and they would have Tomorrowland and all these things inside it,” said Mann. “Disney could build an AR version of Disneyland and overlay digital services on the real Disneyland. If you go to Disneyland, you could wear AR glasses and a service greets you as you go in. Someone in the digital space could show up in your AR glasses and help you.”

Or they could build an entirely different kind of Disneyland in the digital space, like a galaxy far far away in a virtual space, purely for entertainment or gaming, separate from the real world, Mann said.

“You’ll put on your VR headset. You’ll go off to some planet in their galaxy that they have set up, and you can just go explore and be part of their world,” Mann said. “So there’s the real aspect of Disneyland. There’s the AR aspect. And then there’s the the imaginary aspect of it, which will impact how we play in the VR world.”

At some point, Disney’s own proprietary digital space, perhaps connected to Fortnite due to its deal with Epic Games, could be connected to the open metaverse.

“They’re building their own AOL, if you will, because it’s not an ecosystem where I can build my own tools, or I can add different things into Fortnite. And so the premise of the World Wide Web is that anyone can build components. They can become the WordPress. They can build the assets. There’s not one owner of all these different components,” Mann said. “I think the challenge that we have is the first company to build a metaverse browser, we’re going to look like a just another potential Meta, but our goal is that other people can build a browser, other people can build spatial fabrics. So we’re actually building the standards, and we’re actually working with the Metaverse Standards Forum, to really showcase that this is a path towards a single Metaverse versus a federated one, which is just a whole bunch of standalone walled gardens trying to agree on some type of file types.”

He added, “When you come to our world, RP1 does not own your assets. It does not own your location. We just provide a map system and the ability for people to connect to your content, no different than Chrome gives you a ability to find your website and view it anywhere in the world.”

“Without a definition, how do you build towards it, right? And so I think RP1 has quite an opportunity because we are the first visionaries that are thinking about a single metaverse, and along with the pieces and components, and as you do a little bit deeper dive in what we’re doing, we define spatial fabrics,” Mann said. “Anyone can build these components. We just happen to have one that might be more scalable. But we believe that Google will build their own spatial fabric. Apple will build their own spatial fabric. And the job of the browser is to connect you to the spatial fabric you want to go to. We want to make it seamless for your avatar to interact with people all over the world based on the same standards.”

Mann doesn’t think there will be a killer app for the metaverse. It’s like the World Wide Web had a million different web sites but no single main destination. With the metaverse, there are a million different uses in education, gaming, digital twins and more.

“It’s endless. Just tell me the company or the industry, and we’ll tell you 100 different ways that there it’s gonna change their lives,” Mann said.