Wevr - A new day

Wevr was founded with a mission to build “a next-generation interactive software studio.” Our first product was TheBlu. That was 2011. A decade later, we are proud to have produced a body of highly regarded interactive work. This includes the following:

• The recently launched Harry Potter immersive experiences with Warner Brothers
• Gnomes and Goblins, in collaboration with Jon Favreau, nominated for best VR Game of the Year 2020
• Our beloved TheBlu ocean franchise.

We are more passionate and emboldened than ever to push the boundaries of virtual worlds and spatial computing. We continue to grow an enduring and thriving interactive software company.

The world is tilting more virtual. In recent months we have been seeing increasing references to the Metaverse. There is much debate about the what, when, and how of the Metaverse. At Wevr we’re content with simply saying the Metaverse is the next evolution of the Internet.

It is clear that the confluence of spatial computing, multiplayer social gaming, and Web 3.0 developments are resulting in a series of inflection points towards mass scale creation and consumption of interactive content. We find ourselves in a perfect spot to contribute to this wave. It’s a new day for our company.

Building the Metaverse together

We believe the world is going to see a Cambrian explosion of interactive 3D data over the next decade as computing shifts more to 3D/spatial. Virtual worlds and 3D assets will become as ubiquitous as 2D images and video, as media itself becomes 3D computational assets.

Games have already become the prevalent pop culture medium, with Gen Zers spending more time in games than social media. And it is clear that the Metaverse ecosystem is evolving rapidly. The upcoming generation is going to spend more time and money in the Metaverse as well as co-creating it.

And though still early days, tokens on the blockchain may likely become a standard means by which virtual content is traded with commissions for the creators, yielding an opportunity for a virtual creator economy on a scale we haven’t seen before. The protagonist in the Metaverse is the creative participator, and the underlying canvas of the Metaverse is real-time 3D data.

New software services are needed to provide seamless data management for today and tomorrow’s interactive creator. We are tireless students of the interactive/3D artform and are passionate about enabling creators everywhere to build the Metaverse together.

Introducing Wevr Virtual Studio (WVS)

We are super excited to share that we are working on our next product. The Wevr team is striving to empower interactive creators and developers around the world to more easily collaborate and share their creations. We are developing a cloud software platform to do just that – we call it Wevr Virtual Studio (WVS).

Having produced several interactive experiences for multiple platforms using both the Unity and Unreal engines, our teams of artists, designers and engineers kept running into the same set of production challenges over and over again. The problems had nothing to do with achieving immersion nor pushing a higher quality bar, but rather with the most basic production plumbing… 3D/interactive data management.

As we engaged with our community of interactive developers we found that we are not alone in dealing with these costly problems. Some of the most talented creators continue to be hamstrung by arcane and error prone workflows. Moreover, this data management problem was exacerbated by the pandemic with artists and developers having to work remotely across local file systems and multiple repositories. We are developing WVS to solve these problems. We want to see interactive creators and developers around the world collaborating and co-creating projects together seamlessly.

We are a team of hardcore 3D interactive software veterans and product makers, including:

• Marcel Samek, who led game team process improvements as CTO at Electronic Arts
• Jake Rowell, Art Lead and Cinematic Director for Call of Duty
• Anthony Batt, consumer internet product leader through Web1, Web2 and now Web3
• Scott Yara, who pioneered and led cloud software computing solutions for decades
• Neville Spiteri, formerly a producer at EA, technical director at Digital Domain, and on the R&D team on the precursor to Maya 1.0 animation software.

We are committed to developing WVS hand in hand with interactive creators and aspire to provide a software service that is valuable to the community.

Sign up at wvs.io to get on our private beta list.

TheBlu and WVS

It is in this context that we continue to be so passionate about TheBlu, our flagship product. It started out with a mission to collaboratively create an art simulation of the ocean on the web. TheBlu is already 10 years in the making, and is available today as both an in-home and a location-based experience. And we couldn’t be more excited about the 10 years ahead.

We are making TheBlu franchise available in more formats and new devices. Wevr is collaborating with artists and developers globally to expand TheBlu with new habitats and species as a blueprint for the Metaverse. With the WVS cloud platform, we are providing creators in TheBlu a secure distributed repository, a means to showcase their creations, and the ability to get paid directly for their works.

WVS + Labs

Courtesy of Warner Brothers, 2021.

We are dogfooding WVS today with artists and developers who are using the platform to build Wevr’s products, like TheBlu. We are designing WVS for any creator to easily iterate and share their own interactive projects. In order to do this effectively we are organizing the company into two teams: WVS, the software team developing the cloud platform itself, and Wevr Labs, the production team developing interactive experiences using the platform:

• WVS:  Wevr’s dedicated software team is focused on developing the WVS cloud platform. As interactive product makers ourselves, our team of stellar engineers and artists are passionate about empowering the creator. Whether you create in Maya, Blender, or Houdini and build your experiences in Unity, Unreal, Godot, O3DE, or RealityKit, we make it easier for you to create and share projects and manage your data. We are excited about enabling the participatory Creator economy, where independent artists and power users can join projects and contribute through WVS.
  Sign up here to get on the private beta list.

• Wevr Labs:  Wevr has developed several innovative immersive projects such as the recently launched Harry Potter virtual experiences. We’ve excelled at every aspect of immersive production from 3D dome projection to multiplayer VR rides. We offer a full range of production services from creating immersive stories and games to virtual production, training simulations and developing spaces and events in the Metaverse. Our productions leverage the WVS cloud platform providing increased collaboration and optimized workflows. We are building profitable franchises that stand the test of time with new exciting projects ahead. Our Labs team is available to help craft and develop your experience or application. We look forward to hearing from you. Learn more and please reach out to us at: labs@wevr.com.

With both WVS and Labs, we are committed to super-serving our customers and providing you the best possible experiences, as we do our bit to shape the coming Metaverse.

Leading the way

Wevr’s leadership team has been working together for the last decade compounding on our learnings and pushing forward. As the industry evolves to the next level we are embarking on the next phase of the company. And we are excited to share the following company leadership updates:

• Marcel Samek (CTO), Jake Rowell (EVP Creative), and Luis Blackaller (ECD Labs) are joining the co-founding team along with Anthony Batt, Scott Yara, and Neville Spiteri.
• Marcel Samek is heading up WVS, Jake Rowell is leading TheBlu, Anthony Batt (EVP Labs) and Luis Blackaller are running Wevr Labs and Shane Robinson is EVP Finance/Operations/BizDev.
• Scott and Neville continue to lead Wevr, and as co-CEOs, couldn’t be more excited and honored to chart out and serve the next phase of the company.

It’s a new day for Wevr. With our top-notch leadership team, Wevr is in a stronger position than ever to continue to serve our fans, build value and make meaningful contributions to the industry.

We’re always looking to meet new talent and grow our team, so please reach out, we’re hiring!

We’re excited to apply our learnings in virtual worlds and interactive software systems towards future product iterations. We’re eager to share more about our WVS product roadmap, Wevr Labs, as well as TheBlu, very soon.

Here’s to building the Metaverse together!

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