Sunrise, Sunset, Sunrise, Sunset of Worlds

Today we wrapped a marathon day of shooting to complete a full season of interviews with worldbuilders in Engage with the Virtual Worlds Museum™ Spotlight Series, our third season of interviews with the people who create immersive worlds across social and VR platforms far and wide. We interviewed 8 artists in a quick press junket series shoot across worlds, racing the sunset before platform close to get as many of their stories as possible and hear more about these artworks.

In a few hours we interviewed film, music and art professionals from around the world who create unique and beautiful works, from the handpainted magic of Juliana Loh to the vast world of Kurt Jackson with Ambrose Cavalier at Infinity Island, an art park world with rides and attractions, portals and boat rides, a haunted house this week and, coming soon, new islands opening in new worlds.

Juliana's fantastic digital paintings in VR are closing for now until her artworks can be migrated to a new home. A few artists like Helen Lundstrom Erwin and Mada de Leeuw are already migrating to new or old platforms to reach web or VR audiences. For every platform like Engage that closes, new ones appear, or are rebirthed by the community after the companies and capital that tried to run them move on. AltspaceVR is being opened this week by and for the community with the build support of Shane Harris at Sidequest, with worldbuilders like Austin Caine (Cause) creating systems that support portability, interoperability and creator-owned autonomy.

Many community leaders, facing sunset, find themselves returning to a platform that closed on them 3 years ago. Right now XRGuide and the Virtual Worlds Museum form the easiest way to leave a forwarding address. Artists are welcome to list their new homes at XRGuide.

Portal to new worlds: the Teleportal emerges

Mapping these vast networks has been the work of the Virtual Worlds Museum™ led by Julian Reyes for a number of years, with support from many creators including Steve Van Loon building dynamic graphic architectures, and new apps and portal experiences built with creative developer Robin Moulder.

The first app, Teleportal, is out in the Meta Quest store. It takes the ideas we've prototyped for years with our portal crawls and makes it easy to see the connected map of the open metaverse, with hubs for the Virtual Worlds Museum across worlds and portals working in immersive platforms like Burnersphere.

Over the last few months we've captured the stories of worldbuilders inside their own worlds, sharing why they loved the places and communities they created, and where they plan to go next now that platforms like Engage, along with Rec Room, Spatial and others, have sunset or closed. Read more at Road to VR.

With every sunset, there's a sunrise: a new opening, a new world rising.

Building the gateway to a connected immersive web

As spatial computing moves into the mainstream, the immersive web faces a fundamental challenge: fragmentation. Most virtual destinations remain isolated inside publishing platforms or walled gardens where portability and portals are hard to engineer across devices. When these platforms shut down, their collective creative works and shared memories disappear. The web has become the one refuge and archive of worlds, and it's a stormy sea for worldbuilders today.

To solve for this lack of memory, persistence and mapping, Julian Reyes and the team at the Virtual Worlds Museum are pioneering open spatial cartography and social navigation tools through Teleportal and its upcoming evolution, The Metaportal. You can support this work as it grows.

“IMO the Metaverse is the amalgamation of all virtual world platforms. Our work focuses on helping people see virtual world platforms as an ecosystem, rather than fragmented spaces.” (Julian Reyes)

Teleportal: a multi-version 3D cartography system

Rather than relying on flat lists, Teleportal visualizes 3D platforms as constellation-style maps, with categories such as games, WebXR and blockchain platforms radiating from the Virtual Worlds Museum as a central hub:

• Version 1, 3D Force Graph: an interactive map of virtual platforms as one interconnected ecosystem.
• Version 2, Virtual Worlds Museum Index: a searchable map with category rings and clickable nodes.
• Version 3, Education and Youth Viewer: a simplified 2D grid for classrooms and workshops.
• Version 4, Meta Quest VR app: browse worlds in VR and launch installed apps such as VRChat, Roblox and Horizon Worlds.
• Version 5, WebSpatial XR (Apple Vision Pro and Pico): built with WebSpatial and engineered by Steven Van Loon on open, browser-native standards.

The Metaportal: the social front door

The Metaportal, built in partnership with 3lb Games, adds a shared multiplayer layer over the spatial web. Friends meet in a shared lobby, explore curated destinations together and organize group "world hops" across platforms through portals. It opens in December 2026, with previews at Immersive X.

Why open cartography matters

• Cultural preservation: when platforms sunset, years of community history are erased. Capture is essential to preservation.
• True interoperability: open architectures and WebXR let people move between spaces without lock-in. A SteamVR version of Teleportal is in progress.
• Structured discovery: educators, creators and investors need to know where the best immersive work lives, across devices. That is what XRGuide is for.

Join us on December 30 for the next portal crawl with Julian and the Virtual Worlds Museum, and at Immersive X on November 10 to 12, including "Building the XR Commons" on November 12.