Moon Rider is a free VR rhythm game built on the WebVR standard which means it runs directly from a web browser rather than being downloaded and installed on a specific VR storefront. Its creators say the game has garnered thousands of daily players.
Launched in May 2019, Moon Rider is a relatively simple VR rhythm game, but its web-based foundation makes it as easy to play as visiting a website, and just as easy to share with others.
Want to see for yourself?
- On Oculus Quest: just launch the browser and enter moonrider.xyz, click the ‘Enter VR button’ at the bottom right.
- On PC VR headsets: Launch a WebVR compatible browser (Firefox currently has the most frictionless support) then ready your VR headset by launching its base software (Oculus desktop software or SteamVR for most), then visit moonrider.xyz and click the ‘Enter VR’ button at the bottom right.
And… viola! You’re playing.
It’s this web-like ease of access that’s the crux of WebVR (and its forthcoming successor, WebXR), and what’s allowed Moon Rider to organically reach a surprisingly large audience, says one of the game’s creators, Diego Marcos, who is also the founder of Supermedium which built a browser specifically for leveraging WebVR content on VR headsets.
Marcos tells Road to VR that Moon Rider is seeing somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 daily active users with an average session duration of 45 to 60 minutes with 50% player retention. That makes Moon Rider likely the leading WebVR game to date by those metrics.
“It’s head and shoulders above anything else in the [WebVR/WebXR] space,” Macros says.
Moon Rider is built on A-Frame (of which Marcos is a maintainer) a framework which makes it easier for web developers to build WebVR content (and WebXR, which brings AR into the mix).
“The message we wanted to send with Moon Rider is that A-Frame and the Web are now ready to deliver compelling VR content with user reach,” he added.
Like Moon Rider, some other seriously impressive VR web content has also been built atop A-Frame, like Supercraft, a Google Blocks-like VR environment builder with seamless web sharing, and Mozilla Hubs, a web-based social VR chatroom that works across almost any headset, smartphone, or computer.
Moon Rider itself is open source, giving developers an opportunity to see how it was built and to use it as a foundation for their own web-based VR experiments.