Description

### Background In December 2021, the community voted to approve a Decentraland DAO [grant](https://governance.decentraland.org/proposal/?id=088fc210-5e26-11ec-8188-4352ce3d30e7) that launched one of the first significant VR efforts to the Decentraland ecosystem. Read the previous grant proposal [here.](https://governance.decentraland.org/proposal/?id=088fc210-5e26-11ec-8188-4352ce3d30e7) That grant proposal covered both the development of Byldr to support creating content for Decentraland as well as a viewer for users to experience Decentraland in VR. That grant proposal specified that the VR viewer was not the primary focus of the grant, and the original intention of the proposed approach was to integrate the viewer with Byldr. However, after starting work on the project, the team quickly realized that Decentraland would better benefit from a separate, open source VR client and that the addition of a VR client would be an enormous benefit for Decentraland. Therefore, the team spent significantly more effort on the VR client portion of that grant than originally planned for and have since received remarkably positive engagement and enthusiasm from the Decentraland community. Under the previous grant, the team was able to successfully port Decentraland to run on PC-based VR devices (SteamVR headsets, Quest via PC link, Windows Mixed Reality, and other PCVR headsets) and began to convert most 2D UI elements and interacts to operate in 3D space within the VR experience. ### Decentraland VR support to run natively on Quest The team spent significant time investigating porting Decentraland VR to run natively on android in order to support devices such as the Quest 2, without the need to connect the headset to a PC. After much investigation and attempts, the team learned that the Decentraland architecture would require significant effort to get the Decentraland kernel (the core component of Decentraland that handles scene state) to run on an Android-based VR headset. The team proposes to tackle this challenge in this grant in order to build a native Quest Decentraland VR client. This will significantly reduce the difficulty and cost of accessing Decentraland VR and make Decentraland a true, portable immersive experience for the masses. ### Continued development of Decentraland VR Decentraland’s in-world interactions are primarily built around PC-based inputs such as keyboard and mouse. While the team has ported many key interactions to work with VR controllers during the previous grant, there are still many in-world elements, UI, and interactions that work only with keyboard/mouse input. The team proposes to continue development on this to bring Decentraland VR up to parity with the desktop/web clients so that VR users can do anything that PC users can do. The team seeks to build upon the previous VR client effort by submitting the current grant proposal, which is fully dedicated to the Decentraland VR client. The team is honored to be considered for a DAO grant for the continued development of Decentraland VR. We are excited to be part of Decentraland’s journey toward making the metaverse a fun, immersive and vibrant economy that increases accessibility and financial opportunities to Decentraland citizens all over the world! We would like to thank everyone in the Decentraland community for your support and the integral part you play in building the XR future for all generations to come.