An Open Source, Cross-platform Communications Layer for the Metaverse - Russell Dsa, LiveKit

An Open Source, Cross-platform Communications Layer for the Metaverse - Russell Dsa, LiveKit
Humans are slowly becoming cyborgs. Computers have gone from desks, to pockets, to wrists, now to eyes and perhaps one day, brains. Where the Internet was the interlinking of desktop computers, the Metaverse will be the interlinking of people themselves. Like a fabric pulled over the real world, Metaverse applications will be synchronous, multiplayer, and real-time. If the Internet’s software ecosystem, the Web, runs on HTTP, which network protocol will power the software ecosystem in the Metaverse? Our bet is WebRTC.
WebRTC is open, robust and battle-tested over the last decade. But it’s not perfect: inconsistent implementations, low-level APIs and nonstandard signaling translates into a lot of bare-metal work for the application developer.
In this talk, we’ll take you through LiveKit’s open source client stack - a custom build of libwebrtc mated to a shared Rust core, called by platform-specific SDKs like Unity or iOS. We dive into our SDK design principles, signaling protocol and interfaces which power real-time features like spatial audio, screen sharing, live chat and stream permissions in Metaverse applications including Gather, Decentraland and Portals.