This book arose from the “Building The Metaverse” course offered at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, which has been taught since 2021.

While there have been several books about the metaverse and its implications, there seemed to be a missing link: if you wanted to build a metaverse, how exactly would you go about doing that? This is the gap that our book hopes to fill. We also aimed to present the idea at a high level so that it could be applied to the software of your choice, with more specific examples offered and updated on this website.

We have written our book to serve interactive world builders, designers, developers, product managers, brand teams, and most importantly, self-taught creators of User-Generated Content (UGC). No prior knowledge of 3D worlds, multiplayer games, XR, or the metaverse is required. Professors can use it to anchor learning within a classroom, while hobbyists and UGC creators can take a solo journey with the book as their guide, combining it with the online learning resources provided. Professionals who are already active in game and metaverse development can jump between the self-organized chapters to acquire or refresh conceptual underpinnings or fill in gaps, using this book as a handy reference.

The metaverse remains a fluid concept, and how it will be branded and ultimately adopted on a broad scale is still in flux. Further, the core concepts that drive the building of immersive worlds, authentic avatars, and engaging scenarios are common to all immersive virtual worlds, including multiplayer games, 3D web, VR/ AR/MR, social platforms, and of course, the metaverse. With this in mind, we have chosen the wider lens of "Interactive Experiential Worlds" (IXWs for short) as the foundational construct. Currently, the metaverse remains the most complete manifestation of the ideas explored, and we are excited to see how IXWs ultimately enter the social consciousness.

With “Building Interactive Worlds,” we aim to share the knowledge and skills necessary to design, build, and implement the immersive worlds of the future internet. We hope you enjoy this journey with us.