Megga World (2017–2018, Spinteractive)
An Early Prototype of the Metaverse
Overview
Megga World was a persistent, multi-user VR environment developed in High Fidelity, a platform years ahead of its time. The vision: create a virtual city where users could buy land, own homes, interact with NPCs, and participate in a shared economy. This project was one of the earliest explorations of what we now call the “metaverse,” blending interactive storytelling, avatar customization, and persistent systems into a living, virtual world.
Core Experiences
Onboarding Journey : Users spawned at the door of a house, greeted by a butler NPC, and guided by green footprint markers triggering scripted animations and interactions.
Interactive Props: Picked up a newspaper announcing them as the first citizen, found a key to unlock a safe, and retrieved a map to orientation.
Flight to Orientation: Stepping outside, users saw sky arrows and gained the ability to fly like Superman toward the city center.
The Auditorium: The Mayor of Megga World gave a scripted introduction to the city, complete with animations, speech, and event triggers.
The Bank: Users placed their hand on a sensor pad to access a vault and collect their initial currency, introducing the economic system.
The Body Shop: Inside an avatar hall, players selected their permanent identity, choosing from dozens of avatars before fully entering the open world.
My Role
As Lead XR Developer & Experience Designer, I:
Modeled and textured 3D assets, environments, and props.
Programmed interactions, triggers, and animations using JavaScript (High Fidelity’s scripting language).
Designed UX flows for onboarding and progression, ensuring each step felt natural and rewarding.
Integrated sound, animation, and interactive events to create a cohesive experience.
Collaborated with a small, agile team to architect systems for economy, NPC behaviors, and persistent world logic.
Impact
Helped built one of the first multi-system onboarding flows in VR (spawn → tutorial → economy → avatar identity).
Demonstrated how a VR city could integrate storytelling, social interaction, and economic mechanics.
Pioneered an early metaverse prototype years before mainstream adoption, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of persistent virtual worlds.
Provided valuable lessons in engine limitations, user onboarding, and system architecture that inform my XR practice today.
Future Vision
Megga World was one of the early experiments in persistent multi-user VR city building. While it remained a prototype, the creative and technical lessons learned, from onboarding flows to NPC-driven storytelling, continue to inform today’s XR applications. These early explorations proved invaluable in shaping how immersive worlds can balance interactivity, narrative, and technical resilience.