How Atlas Obscura plans to embrace the 3D Web

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The mysterious atlas It has been crowdsourcing weird and wonderful places from around the world since its founding in 2009. To date, the site’s users and editorial staff have collected and curated articles and photos for more than 32,000 of these places, from abandoned theme parks to hidden beaches to Japan. Cat Island. The Atlas Obscura community has created more than 93 million listings over the years, and the company releases books and podcasts to further highlight what’s obscure and worthy.

Of course, many of the places mentioned are simply out of reach for most people. “The company’s premise was to make exploration accessible to everyone,” says Doug Baldinger, chief content officer at Atlas Obscura. This includes people who cannot afford expensive international travel. When consumer virtual reality first appeared a decade ago, its ability to transport people to far-flung places seemed like an ideal solution for adventure seekers unable to visit them in person. “We wanted to show people that you can access these things wherever you are,” he says.

Unfortunately, the technology was not as cracked. Aiming for maximum exposure, Atlas Obscura bet on affordable headsets like Samsung’s Gear VR and Meta’s Oculus Go, only to quickly realize that these devices come with massive limitations. Without six degrees of freedom, visiting a place in VR doesn’t really feel like being there. Additionally, most of these early headphones ended up collecting dust, with consumers disappointed Give them up after a few weeks.

“The delivery platform wasn’t up to what we wanted to do with it,” recalls Nathan Anderson, who used to work at the company. New fabric The studio assists Atlas Obscura with its immersive media efforts.

Atlas Obscura gave VR another shot last year by re-releasing its app with reworked content On a dead missionand in recent weeks also brought it to Android and steam. Now, the company is gearing up to deliver immersive experiences to anyone, regardless of the device they use. In early 2026, Atlas Obscura plans to launch a WebXR-based 3D social experience called Obscura Society.

The Obscura Society will be a virtual lounge that members of the Atlas Obscura community can visit to hang out with the help of 3D avatars, have audio conversations, and explore places from the site’s massive catalog together. There will also be a bartender serving up virtual drinks and facts about real-world destinations, and people with headsets will be able to use portals that take them directly into the Atlas Obscura VR apps.

The Obscura community will be powered by HTC’s Viverse platform, and Baldinger freely admits he wasn’t familiar with it when New Canvas first proposed the collaboration. However, Viverse ultimately beat out competing Metaverse platforms like Meta’s Horizon Worlds or VRChat because it has a lower barrier to entry. “It’s about accessibility,” Anderson says. “Even in Horizon Worlds, you still need to have an account to log in.”

Not only does Viverse work without an account, it can be embedded directly into the Atlas Obscura website, allowing community members to go from an article or podcast to the virtual lounge with or without a VR headset. “The vast majority of people will come via desktop and mobile, as we expect,” Anderson says.

HTC’s platform is already seeing equal usage from desktop, mobile and VR users, according to Viverse chief growth officer Andranik Aslanyan, whose company helped fund Obscura Society with its creators’ money. “We’re not all about hardware,” he says, adding that this extends to immersive devices. “There are more Meta headset users using our platform than HTC (Vive) headset users.”

Viverse already hosts more than 23,000 3D worlds, but Aslanyan prefers not to call it the metaverse. “We generally avoid that word because it has the connotation of being one general world,” he says. Instead, spaces like Obscura Society operate as separate 3D web entities, which Aslanian likens to embedded YouTube players. “We want to get as close to video consumption as possible,” he says.

New Canvas envisions galleries like Obscura Society as a new form of third places in the metaverse. Places that are not explicitly gaming, but gathering places for like-minded people. “A lot of times, you just want to meet people and just hang out with them,” Anderson says. Places that can be low-risk entry points into virtual worlds, while also offering gateways to full VR experiences for people who want to delve deeper.

The Obscura Association is also betting on artificial intelligence, which allows the bartender to pull nuggets from Atlas Obscura’s vast knowledge base. This is not without risks: AI is a point of contention for Atlas Obscura these days.

I recently encountered the company behind the site Staff The reader’s opposition towards the CEO Plans to incorporate artificial intelligence to Atlas Obscura, in addition to significant staff reductions. “There’s a lot of sensitivity about how we handle production,” Baldinger says. “We see it as an example of artificial intelligence that can actually help enhance human communication.”