The Hyperfy Litepaper

Introduction

What is this litepaper?

This document shares our vision for Hyperfy's upcoming ecosystem—a platform we are building where the lines between creator and explorer naturally fade away, where every visitor can become a builder, where portable digital items truly come alive across infinite worlds, and where brands can connect with their audiences in exciting new ways. We wanted to share how we're taking a fresh approach to virtual worlds, breaking down the walls, and the incredible possibilities we see for spontaneous, collaborative creation.

Think of this litepaper as just the beginning of our conversation. As we grow and shape this platform together, this document will evolve into a living guide that we'll continuously update with new discoveries, decisions made, and breakthrough features that emerge from our collective journey.

What makes us different?

Until now, virtual worlds have been static stages—beautiful perhaps, but ultimately limited by what their creators build, often offline. Imagine instead an immersive spatial internet where every object you collect has a life of its own, where a vehicle won in one world can race through any cityscape, where a magic spell learned in a fantasy realm works in any battle arena. This isn't just user-generated content—this is something entirely new, and we're building it today.

The Explorers

Jump In, Play, Socialize

Ready to explore? Just click a link. Any link. You're in. No barriers, no friction—just pure immersion whether you're on mobile, desktop, or VR. Hop between infinite worlds, compete in games, attend concerts, or simply hang with friends. Every journey becomes unique because each world pulses with life from both its creators and the items visitors bring along with them.

Collect Everything

As you explore, your backpack starts filling with discoveries. Win trophies from tournaments, receive gifts from creators, find hidden treasures, complete quests for exclusive rewards. But here's where it gets interesting—these aren't just static assets or badges. That glowing sword? It actually cuts through enemies in any combat zone. That flying carpet? It soars above any world that embraces the skies. Your collection becomes your personal toolkit for adventure.

Use Your Items Everywhere

This is where the magic really happens: you can take your things anywhere. Visit a friend's world and deploy that portal generator you won last week. Join a racing event with the hoverbike you crafted. Cast spells from your grimoire in unexpected places. Some worlds embrace the chaos and allow everything; others curate specific experiences. When you're visiting, your items appear temporarily—but the memories and fun last forever.

Express Yourself Through Avatars

Your identity evolves with every adventure. Discover new species and races created by talented artists—transform into an alien warrior, a mystical creature, or something never before imagined. Collect wearables crafted specifically for different body types: armor designed for your chosen form, accessories that complement your personality, outfits that express your style. Win exclusive emotes that let you dance, gesture, and move in ways that become uniquely yours. It's not just customization—it's finding new ways to be yourself.

Build Your Permanent Space

Ready to create your own corner of the immersive web? Transform from explorer to architect using just your collection and imagination. Claim your own space and make it permanent. No coding required—simply place the furniture you've collected, activate the interactive games you've won, display your trophies, set up that DJ booth from last night's party. Set permissions to control who can build with you, what items visitors can use, and how your space connects with the broader web. Your space, your rules, your personal showcase.

AI Inhabitants

The spatial internet comes alive with AI agents—intelligent characters that live, work, and play within these new worlds. Strike up conversations with AI shopkeepers, seek wisdom from digital sages, or befriend companions who remember your past adventures together. These aren't scripted NPCs but dynamic beings with personalities and purpose. Some AI agents are bound to their home worlds, creating consistent communities and familiar faces. Others can traverse the metaverse, following visitors on journeys or wandering between realms on their own missions. And yes, some specialized AI agents will even help you create—acting as collaborative builders who understand natural language commands like "make this garden feel more magical" or "help me design a racing track through the clouds." They're another layer of life in the living internet, blurring the lines between human and AI inhabitants in ways that make every world feel truly alive.

The Creators

Persistent Digital Labs

Every creator gets persistent spaces that serve as living laboratories. Build games, design social hubs, craft collectables—all in real-time, collaborative environments. Unlike traditional development, everything happens live. Invite collaborators, test with friends, iterate instantly. Your creative space becomes your workshop, showroom, and playground all rolled into one. It's incredibly exciting to see what people create when the barriers come down.

From Idea to Living Object

Here's where creators work their magic: drag in interoperable 3D assets. Attach scripts to your models to bring them to life with interactivity using HyperScript, our innovative new JavaScript runtime. Add physics, particles, AI behaviors, game mechanics, whatever you can imagine. Watch your creations come alive instantly. No compile times, no deployment pipelines. Create a spinning cube, a companion pet, a puzzle box, a vehicle, a weapon, a musical instrument—if you can imagine it, you can build it, and we can't wait to see what you come up with.

Crafting: Making Magic Portable

When your creation is ready, it's time to craft it. This transforms your world-bound object into a portable collectable that works across all worlds. Complexity scores help architects balance world performance and deliver richer experiences, or skip scoring entirely and distribute through back channels. It's your creation, your choice, your path forward.

Shape New Life Forms

We're especially excited about avatar creation. Break free from human constraints and design entirely new species and races—create the base forms that define how beings move, act, and exist in the metaverse. Watch as other creators build wearables for your species, spawning entire fashion ecosystems around your designs. Create signature emotes that give life to your characters. When you invent a new race, you're not just making an avatar—you're introducing a new form of digital life that others can adopt, customize, and make their own.

Distribution & Monetization

The best part? You decide how to share your creations with the world: stock your shops with limited editions, create scavenger hunts with exclusive drops, reward quest completers, gate them behind achievements, sell them for platform currency, or give them away to build your following. Embed microtransactions, create subscription items, build entire economies around your creations.

Core Pillars

Web-Based Everything

No downloads. No installations. No app stores. Pure web technology means anyone, anywhere, on any device can jump into any experience instantly. One link is all it takes. We believe this is game-changing for event attendance, brand activations, and viral growth—and we're excited to prove it together.

Instant Frictionless Access

Click and you're in. Share a link and your entire audience arrives. No signup walls, no account creation, no tutorial zones. We think the immersive web should be as accessible as the web itself—because with our approach, it literally is. Perfect for creators, brands, and communities who need maximum reach with zero barriers.

Persistent Collaborative Spaces

Every world lives and breathes 24/7 with up to 100 concurrent users per shard—with new shards spawning as needed so the party never stops. Build together in real-time. Changes persist. Communities form around spaces that evolve organically. Your creations exist in a continuous reality where every visitor can leave their mark—temporarily as a guest, permanently as an owner.

User-Generated Objects (UGO)

This is what we're most excited about: functional items that travel between worlds, creating spontaneous experiences nobody could predict or plan. When anyone can bring anything anywhere, every moment becomes unique. A creator's laser gun meets another's shield system. A musician's instrument jams with a DJ's turntables. Chaos and creativity collide, and that's when the real magic happens—emergent gameplay that writes itself through community actions. We call these User-Generated Objects, or UGO's.

The Living Economy

The Marketplace

Our official marketplace showcases reviewed, verified collectables. Discover new character species to become, wearables that fit your form, emotes that express your personality, interactive objects that transform spaces, vehicles that defy physics, and tools that unlock new possibilities. Every item has been reviewed, scored and categorized, ensuring quality and transparency. This is where collectors find treasures and creators build sustainable businesses.

Underground Markets

Not everything needs approval, and we think that's healthy for experimentation. Underground markets let experimental, unreviewed objects find their audience. Trade at your own risk, discover cutting-edge creations before they hit mainstream. Find experimental characters, boundary-pushing wearables, glitched emotes, and objects that explore new possibilities. Of course, we still respect intellectual property—DMCA takedowns are handled swiftly. Some of today's underground experiments become tomorrow's marketplace bestsellers. A laboratory of free-form digital creativity.

Sustainable Creator Economy

We're building this to last. Our fee structure is simple, competitive and transparent. A portion of fees flows directly into a treasury for grants, contests, and ecosystem growth. Royalties allow creators to earn from secondary sales perpetually. Every transaction strengthens the network, creating a self-sustaining economy where success breeds more success.

The Journey

Ready Phase Two

Our story began with Phase One—the release of our open source, self-hostable engine that put the power of world-building into the hands of developers everywhere. We watched with excitement as the community embraced this foundation, creating experiences we never imagined and pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

Now we're thrilled to announce Phase Two: transforming our battle-tested engine into a unified platform and ecosystem accessible to the entire planet. This isn't just an upgrade—it's a complete evolution. Where Phase One empowered developers to host their own worlds, Phase Two connects everyone into a living, breathing spatial web where creations flow seamlessly between worlds and communities thrive together.

HYPER Token

With the launch of HYPER on Solana in January 2025, this token serves as both a governance and utility token for our platform, putting power directly in the hands of the community. HYPER holders will shape the future of the platform through exclusive experiences and playtests, voting and participating in key decisions, as an ecosystem currency for the upcoming marketplace, player-to-player trading and in-world transactions, and helping guide our collective vision forward.

Platform Evolution

Your voice matters. Major decisions go to community vote—new features, economic changes, partnership opportunities. Stake-weighted voting ensures those most invested have proportional influence while preventing capture by any single entity. Everything we build is open and usable by you, by us and by the entire ecosystem.

Creator Grants & Spotlights

We're committed to supporting amazing work. Regular grants fund ambitious projects, experimental content, and community events. Outstanding worlds and experiences earn spotlight placement on the main portal and featured positions in hub worlds. When you succeed, we want everyone to know about it.

Living City Hubs

Curated portal worlds showcase the best of what we're building together. Featured creators, trending experiences, seasonal events—all accessible through beautifully designed hub worlds that serve as both directory and destination. The community's best work rises to the top, and we celebrate it.

Brands & IP Unlocked

Instant Global Experiences

We're opening incredible doors for major brands and IP holders. Launch immersive experiences in seconds, accessible to millions with just a link. No app downloads means your favorite franchises can create pop-up events, product launches, and interactive storytelling that reaches fans instantly—whether they're on their phone, computer, or VR headset.

Living Brand Items

Here's what gets us excited: officially licensed items that aren't just cosmetic. A superhero's gadget that actually works, a musician's instrument that plays their hits, a sports brand's gear that enhances your abilities. Brands can create functional items that fans collect and use across the entire metaverse, turning passive consumers into active brand ambassadors.

Zero-Friction Events

When a global brand wants to host a premiere, launch a product, or create a fan experience, they need maximum reach with minimum barriers. One link in a social post transports millions directly into the experience. No installations. No signups. Just instant immersion in worlds crafted around beloved IPs, with exclusive items and experiences that travel with fans wherever they go.

The Technical Edge

Simplicity is Key

Behind all this magic lies an elegantly simple truth. Every world starts as a blank canvas. Everything you see, touch, or interact with? Just objects. That's it. An object is nothing more than a 3D model with some metadata and maybe a script to make it come alive. We've wrapped these portable digital objects in a binary format that travels anywhere—because we believe in "file over app." This deceptively simple architecture powers everything: the sword in your backpack, the portal you just walked through, even the world itself. Complex possibilities from simple foundations.

Built for Performance

Under the hood, we've crafted something new and innovative. Utilizing existing open-source technology such as Three.js for our rendering engine and PhysX for industry standard physics simulation as a solid foundation, we combined these with a purpose-built engine for realtime collaborative virtual worlds. Our custom scene graph, automatic instancing and batching systems, blazing fast spatial hierarchy, lightweight HyperScript language and object synchronization supports a large number of unique and dynamic objects and ensures everything runs smoother than ever, and all within your web browser!

HyperScript: Code Without the Complexity

HyperScript makes programming interactive objects exponentially easier than traditional 3D coding. HyperScript is a subset of JavaScript that runs inside secure compartments attached to 3D objects, it allows you to focus on behavior, not boilerplate. Whether you're creating a spinning cube or a complex puzzle, HyperScript lets you focus on the fun parts while we handle the technical heavy lifting.

Why This Changes Everything

We're standing at the edge of a fundamental shift in how virtual worlds work. Until now, immersive spaces have been walled gardens—beautiful, but ultimately limited by top-down design and static content that is locked inside each experience. We're obliterating those walls.

Creators Build Stages, Visitors Write the Story

Every world becomes a canvas for visitor expression. An alien planet transforms into a drone racing circuit when explorers arrive with their vehicles. A floating island becomes a premiere screening venue when someone brings their cinema equipment. A mystical forest turns into a spell-testing arena when wizards gather with their spellbooks. Creators aren't just building environments—they're crafting stages where visitors perform with the tools they carry.

The Magic is Real

When someone casts a spell they learned in a fantasy realm and it actually works in a sci-fi world, when a shield forged by one creator blocks attacks from another's weapon, when items from different universes collide and create emergent gameplay nobody predicted—that's when the magic becomes real. Every combination unlocks new possibilities.

The Pivotal Moment

We'll know we've succeeded when every world visit generates stories worth sharing, when creators are as excited to see what visitors bring as visitors are to explore new worlds, when the line between creator and player dissolves completely. The real immersive, living web begins when worlds stop being destinations and start being possibilities.

We're incredibly excited because for the first time, we're enabling:

• Non-technical users to build meaningful, interactive worlds using sophisticated objects created by others
• True cross-world functionality where items aren't just cosmetic—they actually work everywhere
• Spontaneous, emergent experiences that no single creator could plan or predict
• A creative economy where success comes from empowering others to express themselves
• Instant global experiences accessible to billions with just a web link
• Real magic in digital form—where spells, vehicles, and tools transcend their original worlds

Join Us on This Journey

We're not just building another platform, we're redefining what it means to work and play online, the worlds first truly immersive cross-world ecosystem where:

• Every link is a portal
• Every item is an adventure
• Every user is a creator
• Every moment is unpredictable

We can't do this alone. Every explorer who collects their first item, every creator who forges their first object, every moment of spontaneous joy when someone discovers what an item can do—you're all part of writing this story with us.

The static, silo'd worlds of the past are fading. The internet cinematic universe is emerging. The universe in your backpack begins now, and we're thrilled you're here for it.