Open Source BELIVVRS: Bringing the Immersive Web to Korea

May 26, 2023 3 min read
Open Source BELIVVRS: Bringing the Immersive Web to Korea

This article is a Spotlight ✨ – part of a series of interviews with innovative Hubs creators highlighting their work.

Steve (고경만) works as a project manager for the BELIVVR team and we had the chance to chat about their recent work building virtual universities, customizing Hubs and contributing.

Could you start by telling us more about BELIVVR?

We are a Korea-based XR tech-company building virtual world experiences on the immersive web. We have several years of experience building and contributing to Mozilla Hubs.

Why focus on developing with Hubs?

BELIVVR chose to base its virtual worlds projects with Mozilla Hubs at its core due to its value to our team members and customers and Hub's inherent openness and accessibility. Our firm belief that the immersive web should not rely on any particular corporation significantly influenced this decision. Furthermore, Hubs' open-source architecture was instrumental in our explorations and understanding of the metaverse's definition and direction.

Chonnam National University Project
Can you tell us about some of the unique features you have built?


We leveraged the open architecture of Hubs to expand and customize our project, creating an environment that facilitated real-time dialogue, collaboration, and sharing. As a result, our clients gained unique educational experiences. Additionally, our partnership with National Chonnam University led to the successful establishment of a virtual world educational environment with BELIVVR.

Mirror contributed by juunini, known as the "Korean Queen of the Metaverse" in some circles.
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Demo of the mirror component. Space by MIkko Huovinen Read more about photogrammetry in Hubs

The BELIVVR team also developed full-body avatars in Hubs. It took a lot of great work from developers like juunini.

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Early progress getting full-body avatars into Mozilla Hubs
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Idle, walking, and flying! 

These avatars were designed to ease into natural movement and interaction in the immersive web.

Besides avatars, we developed moderation features to support students' activities, microphone usage, and screen sharing. Furthermore, we expanded the features of our full-body avatar editor, allowing users to change their avatar's appearance according to their preferences.

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Full Body Avatars in Hubs!

For other Korean-speaking users of Hubs, we have even translated the Hubs docs into Korean and contributed to the Korean UI strings on the Hubs Client.

What improvements would you like to see in Hubs?
  • Loading Speed Improvements: we would love to see faster loading speeds to allow users to interact in the immersive web sooner.

  • Plugin community: It would be great to see a broader range of plugins available in Mozilla Hubs and more use cases for plugins. Mozilla has a well-established community, but having the ability to integrate plugins via git, like Stable Diffusion, would make Hubs more complete. It would make Mozilla Hubs more adaptable, diverse, and scalable.

✨Thanks so much to Steve (고경만) and the team at BELIVVR for all their contributions and for sharing their work for this spotlight. Check out more spotlight posts here.

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