Portal Crawls

It is one thing to talk about interoperability. It is another to demonstrate it and experience it firsthand.

For practitioners working in immersive media, understanding the friction involved in moving between platforms is essential. MetaTr@versal was founded to advocate for greater interoperability and to explore what it would take for people to travel seamlessly between immersive destinations.

With WebXR experiences, that journey is often relatively simple. A user can click a link and arrive directly at a destination with minimal friction. During our first four Portal Crawls, we traveled through web-based worlds with varying degrees of ease. Once we began incorporating native applications, however, the process became significantly more complicated.

The Portal Crawl series began at the end of 2022 as a New Year’s Eve Eve event. We took the familiar concept of a “world hop” within a single platform and expanded it into a “Portal Crawl” across multiple platforms. We also hosted several off-season events. After six Portal Crawls, we convened a Portal Crawl Town Hall to discuss what we had learned.

One of the central limitations is that movement between platforms is usually tied to a specific operating system. Meta Quest, for example, provides a destination API that can open another application, but it cannot necessarily take a user directly to a particular world within that application. The same process may not work at all for someone joining from another device ecosystem.

We believe there should be no barriers preventing people from traveling together between immersive destinations. Regardless of the device they use or the platform they are currently in, people should be able to move to any accessible destination on any platform as a group.

MetaTr@versal Portal Crawl VIII will take place on December 30, 2026. Join us as we continue testing the boundaries of immersive interoperability.