Mixed reality headsets have gotten their fair share of hype this year, with Apple finally revealing its plans for the Vision Pro and Meta keynoting its new, genuinely impressive Meta Quest 3. But over the past few years, the cofounders at mixed reality company Spatial.io noticed a disturbing trend.
In 2019 Spatial partnered with companies like Microsoft to develop workplace software for the HoloLens AR headset and the following year released a collaboration-cum-hangout app that ran on Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset. Either way they sliced it, Spatial discovered that software made for VR headsets was a hard sell. By late 2021 Jacob Loewenstein, a Spatial cofounder and the company’s head of business development, was giving a talk at a VR conference at a Silicon Valley convention center, telling the VR-enthused audience that 75 percent of people using Spatial’s virtual hangout rooms weren’t using VR at all. They were just hanging out in their browser, opting for a 2D experience instead of a 3D one.
So Spatial did something that was extremely on-brand for late 2021: It pivoted to building virtual showrooms for NFTs. (“For those of you who have used Spatial, you might be wondering, ‘WTF? What has Spatial become? How many more buzzwords can they throw out …’” Loewenstein said at the time. “And the answer is, infinitely more buzzwords if it helps us make money. Just kidding.”) Again, there was a VR app for this pivot to NFTs. Few people used it; most of Spatial’s engagement was happening on mobile or in web browsers.
Now, venture-capital-backed Spatial is pivoting once again. This time it’s turning to social gaming, after eyeing the massive success of Epic Games and Roblox and seeing more of its own users organically gravitate toward games in recent months. The company just hired a new head of gaming, mobile gaming industry veteran Charles Ju. Today it’s releasing several proprietary, browser-based games on its platform, including titles like Punch Hero, Racing Empire, Infinite Ascent, Mostly Only Up, Buddy Blitz, and Cyber Punk. And it plans to support user-generated games, too.
“Gaming is the new medium for content on the web,” said Anand Agarawala, chief executive and cofounder of Spatial. “User-generated content drives the internet—think TikTok, YouTube, Instagram—and we think this is the future of gaming. So the goal is to bring the magic of UGC and the Roblox model to more than 5 million developers and 200 million web gamers.”
Spatial is specifically supporting games developed for the game engine Unity using the C# programming language. These games can then be ported easily from Unity to Spatial. By doing this, Spatial thinks it can enable millions of game developers to immediately start building stuff for its app. “We’ve essentially cracked the nut on enabling this cohort of unity developers to publish games in the same way that people are currently publishing on Roblox or starting to publish in Fortnite,” Loewenstein says.
