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BUILDING SUSTAINABLE ECOSYSTEMS
HOW PLATFORMS CAN BECOME SAFE HARBORS FOR XR CREATORS

Tue November 10, 2026 08:00 pm CET

What does it take for a virtual-world platform to become more than a piece of technology and instead provide a sustainable home for the creators and communities building within it?

Yewnyx, Project Leadership at BasisVR, Charlene Nichols, Founder & CEO of The Omniverse City, Jay Pilipovich, Lead Developer at The Omniverse City, and Doug Reeder, Director at Hubs Foundation & WebXR Consultant, join moderator Evo Heyning, CEO & Producer at Realitycraft, to explore what creators and builders need from platforms to build sustainable practices, communities, and businesses.

And how can platforms become true safe harbors in an ecosystem where virtual spaces can change – or disappear – remarkably quickly?

Hosted in the Virtual Worlds Museum™ VRChat Hub, the conversation brings together different perspectives from across the immersive ecosystem to tackle one of the most urgent questions facing Social XR today.

Format

Panel

App

VRChat

Location

Virtual Worlds Museum Hub

Duration

45 min

Access via

Presenter

Jay Pilipovich
Co-Owner and Lead Developer at The Omniverse City

Jay Pilipovich is a multidisciplinary creative technologist, filmmaker, musician, and immersive-experience designer working at the intersection of storytelling, entertainment, gaming, and emerging technology.

As Lead Developer at Omniverse City, Jay creates immersive worlds and experiences using various engines and platforms. His projects explore how entertainment, fashion, commerce, culture, and technology can converge inside playable spaces. Through virtual production and digital experiences that bridge physical and digital worlds, Jay helps artists, brands, and creative partners transform ambitious ideas into memorable experiences that audiences can actively enter, explore, and share.

Yewnyx
Project Leadership at BasisVR

Yewnyx has a long history of foundational work in applications and VR. He built core pieces of the Crunchyroll, Reddit, and Facebook mobile apps, worked on the Quest OS at Oculus, and implemented several core game systems in the hit VR title BONELAB from Stress Level Zero.

Charlene Nichols
Founder/CEO at Omniverse City

Charlene Nichols is the founder of The Omniverse City, a platform shaped by her curiosity about how immersive technology can connect people, communities, and experiences.

Her work focuses on moving XR beyond the demo—exploring what happens when people create, learn, play, build, collaborate, and participate across digital and real-world environments.

As The Omniverse City has grown, Charlene has focused on designing for the whole ecosystem, from users and creators to developers, brands and partners. What began as a toolbox of ideas and experiments has become a foundation for accessible, sustainable, and scalable immersive experiences—and a blueprint designed to evolve with the future of XR.

Doug Reeder
Director at Hubs Foundation & WebXR Consultant
© Copyright ©️ 2014 Doug Reeder

A full-stack web developer, WebXR consultant, VR enthusiast, and sometime viking. He pushes back against gatekeepers and works to give users a “bicycle for the mind”

Moderator

Evo Heyning
CEO/Producer at Realitycraft
© @EvoRealitycraft

Evo Heyning is a creator, producer, technologist and strategist with 21 years of experience in public XR & AI media and technology development. As CEO of Realitycraft Design Lab, she leads work producing for spatial storytelling, showrunning for mixed reality, worldbuilding, WebXR, generative media and interoperability. She is the creator and founder of XRGuide, driving search and directory for the immersive web. Evo serves as VP of the Board at XR Guild to advance community best practices across the immersive industry. Evo’s work sits at the intersection of creative production and systems design, bringing tech and business acumen to the future of immersive experiences in public.

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