MBI Metaverse
A virtual world for the biggest beer company in Indonesia, light enough to run on a mid-range phone and hold an event for twenty people at once.
- Client
- Multi Bintang Indonesia
- Year
- 2022
- Role
- 3D assets, texturing, animation and interaction
- Built with
- Blender · Substance Painter · Mozilla Hubs · GLTF/GLB · Metaverse
What it is
Not long before this project came along, you would hear the word Metaverse everywhere. The hype kept rising after Mark Zuckerberg started promoting it and talking about its prospects. The COVID outbreak helped that hype along too, because meeting someone in person was limited and a lot of events were cancelled.
This came onto the radar of a company called Multi Bintang Indonesia, the biggest beer company in the country and part of the Heineken group. We got the opportunity to create their virtual world, a place where they could hold an event while also educating visitors about responsible drinking.
The problem
I had never developed a metaverse before. Keeping it light became the main challenge. This virtual world had to be accessible from anywhere, whether VR, PC or even a low to mid-spec smartphone, while still giving presentable visuals and handling multiple visitors at once.
What I did
I got this as one of my tasks on a six-month project-based contract. I became the one taking most of the responsibility: making the 3D assets, texturing, animation and the interaction. I learned a lot of things on this one, and one of them was preparing an asset for a web-based application by packaging it as GLTF/GLB.
Outcome
The project passed the production stage and was reviewed and tested with more than 20 visitors in a single session with no problem. Unfortunately it never made it to the public. Part of that was the launch clashing with Ramadan, and eventually the Mozilla Hubs service was shut down.