Arium

Arium was used repeatedly by some of the most influential NFT artists, curators, and collectors to create unique and engaging social virtual experiences for their communities. Some highlights of its usage include:

• Leading cryptoartist Hackatao used Arium to host virtual exhibitions for their drops on Superrare and Nifty Gateway, in collaboration with Blondie, the Museum of Crypto Art, and Christies.
• The Whale Community held monthly exhibitions for their community in Arium, showcasing shows curated by Breezy Art featuring artwork from artists such as XCopy, Giant Swan, and Pak. They eventually built a networked universe of exhibitions connected by portals.
• Vertical Crypto Art held their quarterly artist residency auction in Arium, featuring live-streamed DJ and VJ performances spread across multiple spaces built by their artists. They also held multiple physical events with virtual twins held in Arium.

How it was made

As CTO and co-founder, I built the tech stack from the ground-up and mentored junior devs on the team. The browser-based collaborative virtual world builder was made with react, @react-three/fiber, and @react-three/drei for the 3d scene composition and rendering. Firebase firestore and cloud functions were used to store and synchronize content across user sessions.

For peer-to-peer webrtc video and audio communication, we built a horizontally scalable server cloud and Google Cloud using node.js and MediaSoup, with Firebase realtime db and cloud functions used to orchestrate state between the servers and the browser clients. The platform was designed to be highly performant and scalable, with much of the browser based computation offloaded to webworkers, and we were able to support up to 100 concurrent users in a single world.

Features

• Create a highly-cusotmizable, unique virtual world as big as you want.
• Invite friends to your world and chat with them using real-time spatial video and audio communication.
• Host a live event with up to 100 people.
• Broadcast your voice or screenshare into the space.
• Edit and build a world collaboratively with friends in real-time.
• Upload and place 3D models, images, and videos to your world.
• Load NFTs from your wallet and place them in your world.
• Create and place 3D text and placards.
• Theme content in your world, where the same styles be applied to similar types of elements in the scene.
• Easily update the skybox by dragging and dropping an image.
• Easily curve videos, providing optimal viewing angles for many people in a space and an ideal display for ultrawide videos.
• Seamlessly embed live streams into the virtual world, project them onto any 3d surface.
• Add environmental elements such as water or mirrors.
• Have complete control over the lighting; place any kind of light into the world.
• Connect worlds together with portals, creating a networked universe of experiences.

The video below goes through the features available in the world builder:

Video highlights of experiences created in Arium

Tweets

Here is what has been said about Arium around the twittersphere: