Wolf3D, a Tallinn, Estonia-based 3D scanning and avatar company, has raised $1.3 million in its latest funding round, something it says will help further improve its cross-game avatar platform.

The investment round includes support by Trind Ventures, Presto Ventures, Koha Capital, Spring Capital, Contriber Ventures, and various angel investors. This brings the company’s overall funding to $2.8 million.

Called Ready Player Me, the company’s software is said to allow anyone to create “a personal full-body avatar from a selfie,” which critically aims to be platform and game agnostic. Wolf3D says it can support “many different art styles of avatars for all kinds of game styles and genres.”

The company notes that its latest cash injection will fuel “the next level with full-body personal avatars for games.”

Image courtesy Wolf3D

Wolf3D has been developing 3D scanning tech since its founding in 2014. Six years later, the company is now making its avatar scanning technology available for small and mid-sized developers, as well as providing it to select companies for free.

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The company admits that a monolithic ‘metaverse’ is probably not the way it will all shake out in the future, which is why its building cross-platform services. The long-term goal, the company says, is to make its avatar tech “a link between many different virtual experiences, adding them together into one big virtual world that you can explore seamlessly with your avatar and the same set of friends.”

Food for thought: the company’s apparent ambitions depend upon either platform holders or groups of individual developers to implement their system in the first place. While there’s no telling what the VR landscape will look like in the future, if Wolf3D can provide a ready-made solution that’s flexible and good enough, it’s much more likely that an acquisition is in their future rather than taking on the difficult job of stitching together the still largely fragmented digital world as it stands today.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Ad

    I don’t get the whole metaverse thing honestly, and these don’t really help you move from one game to another but they add consistent presentation which is nice, and could make avatars easier for devs to implement. I think Valve should buy them and make their avatars a universal thing that all games can deploy to throw devs a bone.

    That said, this raises an important ethical questions. Should avatars always be less ugly than we are, or should they share the level level of ugliness, or ugliness on a per user level?

    • silvaring

      Define ugliness…. just kidding.

      What don’t you get about the metaverse?

      • Ad

        I don’t get the appeal or the point. It sounds like one of those “future” visions of the internet by people who didn’t get what the internet was.

        • silvaring

          So you dont think the traditional internet is going to grow into a kind of visual metaverse that a lot of people will take part in while they are online?

          • Ad

            Reading the Wikipedia definition, this actually sounds like a terrible and boring idea. Why would I want all VR, or the whole internet, to be on the same map and follow the same generalized logic? This really seems like one of those things that doesn’t have any chance of becoming real, combined with an inadequate imagination like how in Star Trek cellphones are just used for video calls.

          • silvaring

            I just want a metaverse that is like an evolution of the internet. Sure offline VR will still be my jam, but there’s a lot of things I do online on 2D screens that I would much rather do in VR, and things I cannot imagine ever doing in 2D that would be very good to do in VR hint*hint use your imagination..

          • Ad

            1. You’re describing AR.
            2. It’s not about offline, it’s about these things being on one platform in one universe. There’s not really any reason why that is necessary.

          • silvaring

            I’m not sure if you’re understand me here. I’m referring to a VR space, not an AR overlay ontop of the real world. As for being offline I will do VR stuff offline, just like I do other things offline. Not everything in VR has to revolve around the metaverse… but most likely people will definitely use it mainly for that.

          • Ad

            Most passive use things are AR, things you do online now like banking, discord, etc. Unless we misunderstand each other. But what I mean is that the metaverse concept is actually quite boring. Why would you want everything standardized? If you look at something like ready player one, it’s so forced and stuffed with instant gratification to seem interesting. What is the actual benefit of being a metaverse?

          • silvaring

            Who knows Ad… the concept itself is amazing enough to ignite our imagination I should hope. A 3D internet… beyond 2D text and image interfaces.. simple video, or games… and into something more.

          • Ad

            But it seems less interesting because it’s purely adapting old movies and current use cases.

          • silvaring

            Whats less interesting is what we have now and what we came from, old bulky CRTs and chunky computers. Remember the world without internet access and smartphones? When video games were basically 2D sprites, and 3D games ran at 20fps and could only be played with a ball mouse? Yeah, I remember what it was like… it sucked.

          • Ad

            Yeah, but what you’re describing is just someone imagining computers with wheels on them and CRTs that are spherical. It’s not imaginative, it’s just elaborate.

          • silvaring

            Sounds like your issues have more to do with how some people interpret your ideal metaverse, and not the concept of a metaverse. I didn’t like Ready Player One’s world either, but I don’t let that interfere with my understanding of what a VR metaverse could be & the various benefits / challenges it would bring into society.

          • Ad

            No? It’s pretty much the opposite.

          • silvaring

            So you just disagree with the idea of a metaverse in general… ?

          • Ad

            I disagree that it is a novel or compelling idea that could or would seriously happen.

  • xyzs

    Since Facebook is doing some very advance research for this, and that they have control over the shared apis of QuestOS and Oculus client, since it’s their system, I don’t give this a big chance of success on their platform. Maybe on Steam ?

    • I think these avatars would be more successful as avatars in games rather than in platforms. Like if they were implemented in things like VRChat and Altspace so one avatar could be used across both games, that would be very nice. They also look to be very high quality avatars.

  • Sven Viking

    An unexpected new direction for the Wolfenstein franchise.

  • Yeah, an acquisition seems more probable… also because they are competing with the Oculus Avatar system!