Kokowa

The problem it took on

In 2016 building anything in VR meant a game engine, a toolchain and a build step, which meant the medium belonged to people who already had those skills. Kokowa put world-building in the browser and made publishing a world about as hard as publishing a page.

WIRED covered it in April 2017 under the observation that it made building bizarro virtual worlds far easier, which is a fair description of both the tool and the point: lower the floor, and what gets made stops looking like a tech demo.

Afterward

The company is no longer active. The problem it named is not solved so much as absorbed, and the same instinct, that a medium is only real once ordinary people can publish into it without a build step, runs through Palimpsest and Sigil Studio, both of which run entirely in a browser with nothing uploaded anywhere.