**Open Interop**

How often have you experienced the frustration of a cherished MMO shutting down, resulting in the loss of your rank, characters, and any in-game assets purchased with real money? It's a tale as old as the gaming industry itself – services closing their servers and erasing the time and money players invested, offering no return on the players' investment. This issue is pervasive in all conventional, isolated web-based services, where a studio or company must continue to uphold servers for their online games to remain playable. Unfortunately, these games, once past their prime, are often the first casualties when cost-cutting measures arise.

https://kotaku.com/game-preservation-server-dead-apex-battlefield-mobile-1850083031

In recent years, with the emergence of blockchain technology, a new concept for distributing content has surfaced: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), typically in the form of images, videos, or audio files on the web. Any web-native content format can be easily tokenized and presented as an NFT. The primary advantage of NFTs is that they are hosted on the web in a decentralized manner. Each token points to a JSON metadata file, which, in turn, links to an IPFS location where the content is stored. This ensures that the tokens persist on the blockchain indefinitely, with decentralized servers providing hosting for them.

So, what does this mean for the gaming industry? If you're not familiar with the term "interoperability," here's a brief explanation. Web interoperability refers to the ability of your web browser to handle images, videos, and audio formats like MP3 and WAV in a way that is compatible with other browsers, your operating system, and various software designed to run them. These file formats act as wrappers for content, ensuring that it can be viewed seamlessly across a wide range of programs. Web interoperability is characterized by a web browser's capability to render content consistently on all devices, ensuring that webpages and their content load as intended by their creators. Open and interoperable web standards are the driving force behind the web's functionality.

Where does gaming fit into this? While the web has necessitated the development and enforcement of open web standards to enable its existence, the gaming industry has not had the chance to establish shared open standards to integrate into its processes. Games are intricate and demand substantial programming, unique artwork, and often employ in-house proprietary file formats tailored for the specific game engine in use. Moreover, game studios frequently create their own engines, which may entail the development of specialized 3D model formats, image formats, and audio formats designed to meet their engine's specifications. When game studios spin up an online game, it’s frequently dependent on these in-house proprietary “siloed” formats that will not run elsewhere.


https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792

With the growth of the web and compute power, interactive content has become more ubiquitous, allowing for so much more than static web pages to be displayed, including 3D content. Developed by the Khronos group, the same people behind the OpenGL standard, the GLTF (Graphics Library Transmission Format) was designed for efficiently transmitting 3D graphics and scenes on the web. It serves as a compact and standardized format for storing and sharing 3D models, animations, and textures, and has been adopted as the de-facto standard for 3D on the web by the the vast majority of web platforms hosting 3D models.

https://www.brandxr.io/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gitf-files

GLTF presents a marked improvement over traditional 3D formats in its performance, ease of distribution and cross platform support, not to mention that it's open source where FBX is still a proprietary format. It was also designed with extensions in mind which is where we come to the VRM format (Virtual Reality Model).

Built ontop of the GLTF spec, VRM is an extension that presents a new standard for how humanoid character rigs can be made and used. Designed originally with virtual reality and V-Tubers in mind, it has grown into a very sophisticated humanoid avatar format with support for a range of platforms and game engines. Character Expressions, hooks for facial tracking, materials, textures, everything is packed into a single VRM file, and is read by game engines the same way providing for true cross platform Interoperability.


https://hackmd.io/@XR/avatars

Why is this important? Have you ever tried modding a game or ripping character assets? You will probably know that each game supports custom character formats that contain their own naming conventions for bones and armatures and other 3D content. If you are bringing assets from one game into another, you will typically need to manually retarget and convert your mesh so that it follows the naming conventions of your target engine and can be read by it. VRM solves this by providing a universal character format that will be read and loaded the same way cross-platform, so you no longer have to worry about doing prep work on a model before importing it into your target engine. It turns loading 3D characters into as simple a process as uploading an image to the web.

https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1715051379092275361

As already mentioned, VRM was designed to allow for highly articulate expression. If you've ever watched a 3D V-Tuber video, chances are their model was created in Vroid Studio and then exported to a V-Tube face-tracking application as a VRM file. But its applications are not restricted to the complexity of a V-Tube avatar, you can use the VRM standard as necessary for your application, if your model does not need advanced articulation features or you don't want the overhead that comes with it, you can use as basic of an armature configuration on your models as needed.


https://vroid.pixiv.help/hc/en-us/articles/4405597663385-Getting-Started-with-VRoid

Examples of VRM avatars can already be found on scatter. Its first VRM project [Frutiger Anons](https://www.scatter.art/frutiger-anons?tab=mint) marked the introduction of the technology to the platform, and by the release of [Chuddies 3D](https://www.scatter.art/chuddies-3d?tab=mint) scatter supports a 3D VRM and GLB model viewer for collections. Other collections using the GLTF format on scatter include [Tuners 3D](https://www.scatter.art/chuddies-3d?tab=mint) and [Plushie Tuners](https://www.scatter.art/plushie-tuners?tab=mint), Tuners 3D being the first of its kind to support the Hyperfy vehicle spec. All of these models come with a GLB file in their metadata so that they can be viewable as 3D models on platforms such as Opensea and Rarible.

Owners of VRM NFTs can use their avatars right out the gate on a range of metaverse platforms. [Hyperfy](https://hyperfy.io/), [Oncyber](https://oncyber.io/), [Monaverse](https://monaverse.com/), [Nifty Island](https://niftyisland.com/), [Upstreet](https://upstreet.ai/) and many more. VRMs will show up in your in-game inventory and are playable right away. Alongside avatars, active work is being done to develop new standards for virtual pets, wearables and vehicles. Defining JSON metadata is easy, however platforms need to work together to implement and read data in a universal way to have assets be interoperable, which means lots of communication and planning to lay out an agreed upon spec, which takes time. As more and more platforms adopt GLB model viewers and VRM avatars, the interest contributes to accelerated development.


Important development Standards have also been created for NFTs. From the ETM Standard Github:

> "We propose a standard which allows NFT authors to define their metadata in a way which tells consumers what to expect, and provide a framework for extending the simple metadata specified in the ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards with well-defined specifications. This enables content creators to use and contribute to a set of "extensions" which specify the structure of a token's metadata."
>

> As NFTs grow in popularity, additional use cases have arisen for which there are no widely-used standards, such as NFTs which represent 3D models, or groups of assets all governed by a single token (such as a skin pack). The extensibility of this standard will allow adaptation of metadata standards in step with the needs of the NFT community.

https://etm-standard.github.io/ETM_v1.0.0

3D Interoperable assets that work seamlessly across many games and platforms brings with it new challenges and opportunities. Games, metaverse worlds and platforms will need to come up with new moderation and whitelisting tools to foster an intended user experience. Parameters such as weapon damage, health, multipliers and any other statistics could be searched for in the avatars metadata, by target platforms, but wont need it for basic avatar interoperability. Platform devs have a range of game design decisions to make upon implementing VRM support.

3D Avatars opens up a new market for creators. There are many beloved CC0 or Copyleft / Viral Public License projects such as Milady that allow for transformative content and derivatives to be produced around their IP. This means that 3D modelers, gamedevs and teams already have an easy and accessible pipeline for creating 3D collections, that once on chain, can be imported into games and metaverse platforms that already exist, or be imported into projects slated for release in the future. Scatter is one of the few marketplaces right now to provide a distribution platform for VRM avatars NFTs, VRMs are shaping up to be the key technology that powers the open metaverse, and teams and projects that adopt it soon might find themselves with an indespensible leg up and competetive advantage to other projects as the NFT marketplace gets more competetive and requires even more sophisticated value propositions to remain marketable.


Like with collectible games, cards, characters, mounts etc, as new games with support for VRM avatars emerge, markets for avatars will emerge too. Traits built around game mechanics can potentially determine an NFTs success, opening up new metas for 3D collections. Many exciting new opportunities are already available to artists on scatter to get involved!