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Wonderland Engine

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Wonderland Engine
Information
Type Game engine
Industry Web 3D, virtual reality, augmented reality
Developer Wonderland GmbH; Create Worlds (after the January 2025 merger with Robot Invader)
Written In C++ (compiled to WebAssembly); JavaScript and TypeScript component API
Operating System Editor: Windows, macOS, Linux (Flatpak); runtime: web browsers
License Proprietary; free up to US$120,000 revenue per year, 10% royalty above that
Supported Devices Web browsers on desktop computers, phones, tablets and VR headsets
Release Date 1.0.0: May 1, 2023; latest version 1.6.1: April 23, 2026
Website https://wonderlandengine.com/


Wonderland Engine is a 3D engine and editor for building WebXR virtual and augmented reality applications, games and other interactive 3D content that run in a web browser. Its developer describes it as "a web-based 3D engine for 3D, VR, and AR": scenes are assembled in the desktop Wonderland Editor and then loaded in the browser by a runtime written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly, while application logic is written as JavaScript or TypeScript components.[1][2]

The engine was created by Jonathan Hale, whose company Wonderland GmbH was based in Cologne, Germany.[3] Version 1.0.0 was released on May 1, 2023.[4] In January 2025 Wonderland GmbH merged with the US game studio Robot Invader to form Create Worlds, which now develops the engine.[5] Projects built with it include Playko's skiing game Ski Fit 365, a browser version of Robot Invader's Meta Quest game Dead Secret Circle and a car configurator for Morgan Motor Company.[6][7]

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Every release date, feature, licensing term, company fact, project and quote checked against the cited Wonderland Engine pages, Create Worlds releases, MIXED, Meta, AWE and VIVERSE posts, the GitHub organization and the AIS 2025 paper record. About review dates.

History

Origins

Hale started programming at age 11 and studied computer science at the University of Konstanz. With Florian Isikci he founded the studio Vhite Rabbit, which made the WebXR game Barista Express. In an interview with MIXED, Hale said Meta had highlighted the game as an example WebXR application. He handed Vhite Rabbit over to Isikci in 2020 and set up Wonderland GmbH in Cologne to work full time on the engine.[3] The MIXED article gives two different founding years for Vhite Rabbit (2018 and 2019).[3] In the 2025 merger announcement Hale said that, coming from WebXR, "where experiences must maintain a stable 72 Hz frame rate or higher to keep players comfortable", getting the most out of WebGL had been the top priority "since the very first line of code for Wonderland Engine".[5]

The oldest release notes on the engine's news page are for version 0.7.0, published on September 29, 2020. That release added import of animations and skinned meshes from glTF and GLB files, an animation component and a loading screen.[8] The company's GitHub organization describes the product as a "Development platform for VR, AR and 3D on the web".[9]

Licensing changes

In a September 2020 pricing announcement, the Professional license cost 67 euros per month. Hale wrote that the planned final price was 268 euros per month, and a cheaper Community license was also announced.[10] On March 1, 2021 the engine became free to download. The monthly fee was replaced by a 10% royalty on revenue from released products, and subscribers were offered refunds for unused months.[11] From May 30, 2023, the first 120,000 US dollars of revenue per year from Wonderland Engine projects became royalty-free. The threshold applies per company, not per project, and is measured after platform fees; revenue above it still carries the 10% royalty.[12]

The current pricing page lists a free Standard license on the same terms. Enterprise and seated licenses have no listed price; the seated license carries no royalties and allows a custom loading screen.[13] Speaking to MIXED in 2024, Hale explained that under the free terms developers cannot replace Wonderland's loading screen, so agencies building for large brands need a paid company license.[3]

Version 1.0 and later releases

Version 1.0.0 (May 1, 2023) rewrote the JavaScript API in TypeScript and turned custom components into classes. It also replaced the global WL object with a WonderlandEngine class, so more than one engine instance can run on a page. Projects moved to Node.js with esbuild bundling, which made it easier to share components as npm packages. The release added plane-detection and anchor components and an experimental option to launch projects directly on connected Android devices, such as standalone VR headsets.[4]

Version Date Notable changes (per the release notes)
0.7.0 September 29, 2020 Animation and skinned mesh import (glTF/GLB), animation component, loading screen[8]
0.9.0 August 29, 2022 Texture streaming, spot lights, physically based shaders, Slug text rendering, support for desktop and iOS Safari 15[14]
1.0.0 May 1, 2023 TypeScript API, class-based components, npm and esbuild bundling, Plane Detection and Anchor components, a choice of UASTC image compression[4]
1.1.0 September 6, 2023 Editor performance and stability work, multiple text pipelines, Object3D.findByName()[15]
1.2.0 May 2, 2024 First post-processing effects (bloom and tone mapping), HDR environments, animation blending, morph targets, a JavaScript/TypeScript editor API for custom tools[16]
1.3.0 January 28, 2025 New templates (including one with a procedural atmospheric sky), first version of multi-project workspaces, automatic crash reporting[17]
1.4.0 May 12, 2025 Sparse global illumination probe volumes baked in the editor, reverse-Z depth buffering, new complex component property types[18]
1.5.0 December 9, 2025 WebGPU support, clear coat in the physical pipeline, particle effect and audio clip resources[19]
1.5.3 February 26, 2026 Zappar-based WebAR templates for world, face and image tracking[20]
1.6.0 March 19, 2026 Meshlet rendering for large polygon counts, mobile-friendly screen space ambient occlusion (GTAO)[21]
1.6.1 April 23, 2026 Latest release listed on the news page as of October 2026[22]

The 1.5.0 release notes describe its WebGPU support as having "full WebGL2 feature parity", and the editor can be set to use WebGPU only.[19] As of October 2026 the roadmap page still lists Gaussian splats, prefabs and USD and USDZ import under "1.6 and beyond".[23]

Create Worlds

On January 29, 2025, Wonderland GmbH and Robot Invader, Inc. announced their merger into Create Worlds, a US-based company. The new company combined Wonderland Engine with Robot Invader's 2D engine Story Machine, and Hale became its chief executive. The announcement framed the merger around web games, including publishing pipelines to platforms such as Discord and Telegram and web ports of Robot Invader's earlier games, among them the puzzle game Rise of the Blobs, which had been revived as a web game in a playable alpha.[5] The engine website's imprint names "Create Worlds (a DBA of Robot Invader, Inc.)", with an address in Cupertino, California, and Hale as chief executive officer.[24] The Create Worlds website lists Sören Syrbe as chief operating officer and Chris Pruett as an advisor.[25]

Features

Editor and workflow

Wonderland Editor is a desktop application for building scenes. It imports most 3D asset formats and includes a live-reloading web server, so code or scene changes show up in the browser immediately.[1] The editor is distributed as a Windows installer, a macOS disk image and, since November 2024, a Flatpak on Flathub for Linux; it was previously available as a Debian package for Ubuntu-based systems. A Docker container is offered for cloud builds and continuous integration.[26][27] Meta's 2022 developer blog post on the engine said it packages deployment-ready builds "in 1 second or less".[6]

Developers write reusable components in JavaScript or TypeScript, set them up in the editor, and can call any JavaScript library or browser API from them.[1] The official component library and the JavaScript API are published on GitHub under the MIT License. Other repositories in the organization add AR tracking through 8th Wall and mind-ar-js, spatial audio components, rendering to Looking Glass Factory holographic displays, and a Construct Arcade SDK integration.[9]

Runtime and optimizations

The runtime is written in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly. The developer says this gives it more control over memory and better performance than JavaScript for heavy tasks such as scene graph transforms and batching. Its documentation lists these optimizations:[2]

  • a scene graph built on dual quaternions, which take half the memory of a 4x4 matrix and also suit skinning
  • runtime batching, where meshes are merged and textures combined into atlases so that thousands of draw calls using the same shader become one
  • compressed GPU textures plus texture streaming, which swaps parts of textures in and out of memory based on what the camera sees
  • WebAssembly SIMD instructions and a data-oriented design for the scene graph and component system
  • a binary scene format produced by the editor, with mesh quantization, Basis Universal image compression and animation compression

The same page gives the size of the WebAssembly runtime as about 580 kB gzipped.[2]

Later releases added more rendering features: physically based shaders (0.9.0), baked global illumination probe volumes and reverse-Z depth buffering (1.4.0), and meshlets, which split large meshes into patches that can be skipped based on frustum culling and the required level of detail (1.6.0).[14][18][21]

XR support

Output runs in web browsers on desktop computers, tablets, phones and VR headsets, iOS Safari included.[28] MIXED pointed out that almost every VR headset has a web browser that can run such apps; PlayStation VR2 was the exception it named.[3] For mobile WebAR, the 1.5.3 templates use Zappar for world (SLAM), face and image tracking.[20] In a February 2024 post, Hale wrote that Safari on Apple Vision Pro has the same performance characteristics as Safari on macOS and iOS, and that developers with the headset had reported "great performance" for Wonderland Engine projects such as The Escape Artist.[29]

Notable projects

Project Developer Notes
Ski Fit 365 Playko WebXR downhill skiing game, the first activity in Playko's planned The Fitness Resort suite, that tracks leg movement with a Quest controller placed in a sock. It was first prototyped in Unity and moved to Wonderland Engine because of rising graphical demands; Playko sponsored an IK solver and spline-based meshes for the engine.[6]
Dead Secret Circle (web version) Wonderland and Robot Invader Browser version of the first levels of the Meta Quest game, released in October 2023.[3][5]
The Escape Artist Paradowski Creative Listed by Wonderland among the biggest WebXR experiences running on the engine.[1]
Archery Evolution Vhite Rabbit XR Listed by Wonderland among the biggest WebXR experiences running on the engine.[1]
Wonderbricks Novelab WebXR brick-building showcase; its source code is on GitHub under the MIT License.[9]
Morgan Motor Company configurator Apache 3D car configurator rendered on the user's device rather than streamed. According to the November 2025 press release, more than 50 percent of its traffic comes from mobile.[7]

Playko's Ski Fit 365 was the subject of a 2022 post on Meta's developer blog. It was listed on the Meta Quest Browser new tab page and used Construct Arcade for leaderboards and monetization.[6]

For Dead Secret Circle, Robot Invader gave Wonderland the Unity projects for the first levels and the team rewrote the code in TypeScript.[3] The 2025 merger announcement calls it "the world's first port of a native Meta Quest VR game to the web".[5] In a talk at the Augmented World Expo EU 2023 conference, Hale and Wonderland's Timmy Kokke described the porting work. According to AWE's summary of the session, optimizing the original project assets (for example, compressing textures) brought a several-gigabyte experience down to about 150 megabytes.[30]

Platform integrations

HTC's Viverse included Wonderland Engine in the list of supported WebXR engines when it launched VIVERSE Studio on June 12, 2025.[31] A VIVERSE blog post of November 21, 2025 described an open-source template on GitHub that connects the VIVERSE Avatar SDK to Wonderland Cloud networking. Users log in with a Viverse account and appear with their avatar in a Wonderland Engine world, with multiplayer sessions of up to 30 players and spatial audio. A VIVERSE CLI plugin lets developers preview and publish projects to the platform.[32]

Reception and research

In a May 2024 article, MIXED's Jörn Schumacher wrote that the browser version of Dead Secret Circle was impossible to tell apart from the native application. The same article quoted Hale saying that developers still had to "find creative solutions" to get the GPU to do the work they needed, and that WebGPU would change this.[3] In the 2025 merger announcement Hale said the company's focus on optimization had "established us as the fastest game engine for WebXR"; that is the developer's own claim, not the result of an independent benchmark.[5]

A paper by István László Jakab, Éva Hajnal and Klaudia Talabérné Kulcsár, published in the proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Applied Informatics and Related Areas (AIS 2025), used a VR game built with Wonderland Engine as a case study of browser-based VR. It covers WebXR, WebGL, WebAssembly and WebGPU, optimization strategies, and trade-offs against native VR development.[33]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "Wonderland Engine". Wonderland Engine documentation. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/about/wonderlandengine/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Wonderland Engine's Optimizations". Wonderland Engine documentation. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/about/optimizations/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Jörn Schumacher (2024-05-12). "High-quality XR browser apps are finally a reality with the Wonderland Engine". MIXED. https://mixed-news.com/en/high-quality-xr-browser-apps-are-finally-a-reality-with-the-wonderland-engine/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Jonathan Hale (2023-05-01). "Release 1.0.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.0.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 "Robot Invader and Wonderland Merge to Unlock the Web as the Next Gaming Platform". Create Worlds News. Create Worlds. 2025-01-29. https://createworlds.com/2025/01/29/robot-invader-and-wonderland-merge-to-unlock-the-web-as-the-next-gaming-platform/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "Developing with WebXR: How Playko Built Ski Fit 365 on the Wonderland Engine". Meta Horizon OS Developers Blog. Meta. 2022-02-03. https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/developing-with-webxr-how-playko-built-ski-fit-365-on-the-wonderland-engine/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Morgan Motor Company Maximizes Mobile Sales with New High-Performance 3D Car Configurator". Create Worlds News. Create Worlds. 2025-11-12. https://createworlds.com/2025/11/12/morgan-motor-company-maximizes-mobile-sales-with-new-high-performance-3d-car-configurator/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Jonathan Hale (2020-09-29). "Release 0.7.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-0.7.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Wonderland Engine". GitHub. https://github.com/WonderlandEngine. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  10. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2020-09-29). "Wonderland Engine Pricing Reveal". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/pricing-reasoning-and-choosing-a-license/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  11. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2021-03-01). "Wonderland Engine is now free". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/wonderland-engine-is-now-free/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  12. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2023-05-30). "Royalty-free up to 120,000 USD per year". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/free-for-small-commercial-use/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  13. ↑ "Pricing". Wonderland Engine. https://wonderlandengine.com/pricing/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Jonathan Hale (2022-08-29). "Release 0.9.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-0.9.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  15. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2023-09-06). "Release 1.1.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.1.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  16. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2024-05-02). "Release 1.2.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.2.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  17. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2025-01-28). "Release 1.3.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.3.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 "Wonderland Engine 1.4.0 Launches with Groundbreaking Sparse GI Probes and Reverse-Z for Next-Level Web Graphics". Create Worlds News. Create Worlds. 2025-05-12. https://createworlds.com/2025/05/12/wonderland-engine-1-4-0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Jonathan Hale (2025-12-09). "Wonderland Engine 1.5.0". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.5.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Jonathan Hale (2026-02-26). "Wonderland Engine 1.5.3 - AR Templates and Bugfixes". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.5.3/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Jonathan Hale (2026-03-19). "Wonderland Engine 1.6.0 - Meshlets and SSAO". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/release-1.6.0/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  22. ↑ "Latest news & insights from Wonderland". Wonderland Engine. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  23. ↑ "Roadmap". Wonderland Engine documentation. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/about/roadmap/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  24. ↑ "Imprint". Wonderland Engine. https://wonderlandengine.com/legal/imprint/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  25. ↑ "Create Worlds". Create Worlds. https://createworlds.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  26. ↑ "Install Wonderland Engine". Wonderland Engine documentation. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/getting-started/installing/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  27. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2024-11-18). "Wonderland Editor Now Available on Flathub". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/wonderland-editor-on-flathub/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  28. ↑ "Wonderland Engine - Next-Gen 3D Engine for the Web". Wonderland Engine. https://wonderlandengine.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  29. ↑ Jonathan Hale (2024-02-09). "WebGL Performance on Safari and Apple Vision Pro". Wonderland Engine News. Wonderland GmbH. https://wonderlandengine.com/news/webgl-performance-safari-apple-vision-pro/. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  30. ↑ Mike Boland (2024-01-05). "AWE Talks: Bringing High-End Immersion to Web XR". AWE. https://awexr.com/blog/860-awe-talks-bringing-high-end-immersion-to-web-xr. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  31. ↑ VIVERSE Team (2025-06-12). "All Major WebXR Engines Now Supported: Explore VIVERSE's New Studio". VIVERSE Blog. HTC. https://news.viverse.com/post/viverse-webxr-creator-studio-engine-support. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  32. ↑ VIVERSE Team (2025-11-21). "Building Worlds Together: Wonderland Engine Meets VIVERSE". VIVERSE Blog. HTC. https://news.viverse.com/post/wonderland-engine-viverse-integration. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
  33. ↑ István László Jakab, Éva Hajnal, Klaudia Talabérné Kulcsár (2025). "Web-Based VR Application Development: Opportunities and Challenges". Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Applied Informatics and Related Areas (AIS 2025). Óbuda University. https://doi.org/10.12700/AIS.2025.015. Retrieved 2026-10-13.
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