The UNAVI Vision

What is UNAVI?

UNAVI is an open-source spatial browser—a gateway to three-dimensional hypermedia. UNAVI serves as a reference implementation of The Wired protocol.

UNAVI is not a walled garden. It provides the foundation for an open, interoperable ecosystem where identities, spaces, and objects operate under shared standards.

The Wired is the spatial hypermedia layer of the Internet—a protocol for representing and linking shared 3D environments. It defines how spaces, objects, and user agents take form and interact with each other.

A useful way to think of The Wired is as the 3D equivalent of the Web. The Web is a network of 2D hypertext documents, while The Wired is a network of 3D hyperspace documents.

The Wired is the expression of a self-evident philosophy: information systems should reflect the natural order of the human experience. Common digital interfaces flatten information into screens and feeds—but humans evolved as spatial beings. The many schools of feng shui (風水) have spent thousands of years studying the extent of this phenomenon.

Viewed in this light, The Wired restores a much needed spatial structure to the digital world.

Spatial Continuity

A defining aspect of The Wired is seamless spatial continuity. Independent spaces can be linked together through portals without interruption of presence or state. Moving between spaces does not require reloading, respawning, or resetting context; the transition is treated as a true bridging of space.

This design allows The Wired to function more like a sprawling virtual environment than a library of separate experiences or applications. Users can navigate across different spaces while carrying the same identity, objects, and interaction model.

Creation and Autopoiesis

At the heart of The Wired is a computation layer powered by WebAssembly.

Inspired by autopoiesis, the scripting system allows documents to define and maintain their own behavior through internal logic. This causes hyperspace objects to operate predictably in any environment. Pick up a tool, carry it through a portal to a new space, and it will still work.

Autopoiesis does not imply isolation. Objects can still react to and communicate with their surroundings through a number of interfaces. Most prominent of all is the interface of 3D space itself, via physics interactions.

Over time this grows into an ecosystem of software that composes in a novel manner not possible outside of hyperspace.

The Vision

UNAVI exists to give form to The Wired—to make spatial hypermedia usable, open, and accessible.

For decades, the Web has been a network of text and images. It is expressive, but fundamentally two-dimensional. People, however, perceive and understand information through spatial relationships. Presence, distance, orientation, and environment all influence how we think and communicate.

UNAVI’s goal is to reintroduce these spatial qualities to digital life. When information lives in space, it becomes clearer, more navigable, and more natural. The Wired gives the Internet the form it was always meant to take.

Principles

The Wired, expressed through UNAVI, should be:

Open—Based on transparent standards.
Interoperable—Objects and identities move freely across environments.
User-sovereign—Users own their data and decide where it is stored.
Generative—Systems should support internal growth and adaptation.
Human-centered—Interfaces should reinforce presence, clarity, and meaningful interaction.

The Wired’s social layer is centered around decentralized identifiers and peer-to-peer interactions.

Identity

In The Wired, your identity is yours—not issued by a platform and not revocable by one. The core unit of this identity is the decentralized identifier (DID). This acts as a globally unique handle that you control.

Some example DIDs are:

did:key:z6MkhaXgBZDvotDkL5257faiztiGiC2QtKLGpbnnEGta2doK.
did:web:example.com

Methods

There are many possible DID methods you can choose to use. Some of the basic ones are:

did:key—generated entirely from a cryptographic key. No server or domain required. Portable and self-contained, but cannot be rotated if the key is lost.

did:web—tied to a domain you control. More recoverable, and can advertise services (like your data store) through standard web infrastructure.

DID Documents

DIDs resolve to DID documents, which store useful information related to the identity, such as public keys to use for authentication.

Contacts

TODO

Data

The Wired’s data layer is centered around a personal data store called the WDS (Wired Data Store).

WDS

This is your personal storage—the place where your spaces, objects, and files live. Rather than being a single location, it is actually a mesh network of data stores. You can run one on your own machine, on a server you control, or let someone else host it for you.

By default a local WDS is run alongside the UNAVI client, with additional syncing to a remote-hosted WDS for data availability.

Local First

Edits can be made offline to your local store, which will then be synced with other instances whenever you reconnect to the wider Internet. The local instance also acts as a cache for any external data you fetch, keeping a copy on disk for some time.

Authentication

Stores use DIDs to handle authentication and data verification.

Blobs

Blobs are the binary assets of The Wired. Unlike records, blobs are immutable: their ID is the hash of their contents, so they never change.

This has useful properties. The same asset referenced from two different spaces is only stored once. You can verify the integrity of any asset by checking its hash. Anyone with the hash can fetch the asset from any data store that has it.

Blobs are often referenced from records—a space record may point to the blob hashes of its geometry, textures, scripts, and more.

Records

A record is the basic unit of structured data in The Wired—a document with a stable identifier, access control, and automatic conflict resolution.

Access

Every record has an access control list. The creator starts as manager and can grant others the ability to read, write, or manage the record. Permissions are part of the record itself.

Collaborative Editing

Records use CRDTs (conflict-free replicated data types) for their contents. Multiple peers can edit the same record simultaneously. Changes merge automatically without conflicts, making real-time and offline collaboration both reliable by default.

History

Changes to records are tracked as signed, incremental updates. Each update is authored by a DID and timestamped. This creates an auditable trail of who changed what and enables sync between data stores.

This also enables roll-back and forking for all data, similar to Git.

Schemas

A schema defines what a record is allowed to contain—its fields, their types, and who can change them. Schemas make records predictable: any client that knows a schema can read and write records conforming to it, regardless of who created them.

Schemas are stored as blobs and referenced by hash. Because blobs are immutable, a schema never changes after it is published. Records reference the exact schema they were built against.

Field Types

Schemas support the usual primitives (strings, numbers, booleans, bytes) as well as structured containers: lists, maps, and trees. Fields can be marked optional, and individual fields can have their own access restrictions.

For example, a schema may define a field that anyone can read but only the owner can write.

Interoperability

Shared schemas are how different clients or objects understand each other’s data. A space schema defines what an environment looks like. An avatar schema defines how a character is to be rendered. Applications that agree on a schema can work with each other’s records without further coordination.

Spatial

The format for 3D hypermedia environments and the objects within them.

Spaces

A space is a shared 3D environment—a place where HSD objects coexist, interact, and are experienced together.

Each object in a space has an owner. A space is not a monolith—it is a collection of independently owned objects that happen to share a coordinate system. The space owner controls that base environment; each object’s owner controls the object itself.

Portals connect spaces together. Walking through a portal takes you into another space, seamlessly. Portals are spatial hyperlinks.

Slots let spaces embed other spaces within them. The embedded space appears as a region inside the parent, with its own objects and behavior, scoped by where the slot is placed.

Scripts

Objects in The Wired can carry behavior with them in the form of WebAssembly scripts. These scripts run when an object is loaded into a space—animating it, responding to interaction, and communicating with its environment.

Scripts are sandboxed. They can only interact with the scene through defined interfaces. They cannot access the network or the filesystem arbitrarily.

Portability

Scripts are compiled to a standard WebAssembly format and stored as blobs. They can then be loaded into a space and run on any device.

Trust

The space owner can decide which documents—and therefore which scripts—are loaded into a space. Scripts run with the permissions of the document they are attached to: they can modify their own scene, but not others unless explicitly granted access.

Hyper-Space Documents

Hyper-space documents (HSDs) are the spatial unit of The Wired. They are stored as a record and can be placed into any space.

Structure

HSD is a simple format describing the hierarchy of nodes and other data. Each node can have a position, mesh, material, physics properties, or scripts that define its behavior.

Binary data like mesh geometry, textures, and scripts are stored as blobs, separate from the record itself. This keeps the document light and allows heavy assets to be cached, re-used by other documents, and lazily fetched.

Collaboration

Because HSDs are built as WDS records, they inherit all the benefits of that same CRDT system. This enables easy collaboration in real-time or offline, as well as workflows involving document forking and merging.

UNAVI Docs