DEXART Metaverse

Inspiration

We wanted to create a VR world where people can interact not only with each other but also with living, responsive AI-NPCs. The idea is to make AI communication feel natural, especially in a multiplayer setting.

How we built it

The application is built in Unity 6 with a focus on Meta Quest. We use OpenAI technologies so that AI-NPCs can understand multiple players speaking at the same time and correctly distinguish who is saying what.

Challenges

The main challenges were optimizing AI requests, reducing response delays, and maintaining stable network synchronization. We needed one AI-NPC to reliably communicate with several users at once without losing context or mixing participants.

Future plans

We plan to expand AI-NPC personalization, introduce new character types and social roles, develop interactions between NPCs themselves, add small events and activities to the world, and implement persistent world states that react to and remember user actions over time.

Built With

agora
c#
cloud-hosting
coherence
meta-quest-sdk
openai-api
unity-6

Submitted to

Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition

Created by

I served as the primary developer for a cross-platform metaverse application built in Unity. My responsibilities covered the full technical stack, including platform support, networking, systems architecture, content pipelines, and runtime features.

I implemented comprehensive cross-platform support across iOS, macOS, Windows, Android, WebGL, and OpenXR (Meta Quest). This included platform-specific optimizations, input systems and device-level integration.

I designed and developed the multiplayer layer using coherence framework, creating networked gameplay systems, custom synchronization logic, and scalable server–client communication. I also built an extensible animation and character-control pipeline suitable for networked avatars for vr/non-vr players.

I integrated AI-driven NPCs with real-time voice interaction, combining speech recognition, text-to-speech, behavioral logic, and multiplayer voice routing. The system included attention management so NPCs could dynamically respond to multiple players in shared spaces.

I implemented real-time video streaming within the virtual environment and developed a modular runtime-loadable world architecture with user-generated content support, enabling dynamic scene composition and extensibility.

Overall, I delivered the core technical foundation of the project - from networking to AI systems.

Boris Novikov
Kirill Tomilov

Updates

Kirill Tomilov started this project — Dec 09, 2025 01:59 PM EST

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