A new open-source web browser engine, called Sneeze, is coming to mobile, desktop, and mixed reality devices, the project’s backers announced today at AWE, a mixed reality and AI conference.
Sneeze is a collaborative effort from the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative. It is a product of the nonprofit Metaverse Standards Forum and RP1, Sneeze’s main maintainer.
Sneeze is not meant to be a typical VR application designed for one specific system.
“Sneeze is focused on the core browser engine layer — rendering, standards, interoperability — rather than user-facing features like avatars, profiles, inventories, or messaging,” Neil Trevett, president of the Metaverse Standards Forum and a VP at NVIDIA, told Hypergrid Business. “Those are typically built on top by platform providers or app developers.”
Trevett is also the president of the Khronos Group, where he created and chaired the OpenGL ES working group that defined the industry standard for 3D graphics on mobile devices.
Instead, the goal of Sneeze is to streamline how users interact with digital content in the physical world.
“As you walk through a city, a museum, a hospital, or a store, Sneeze discovers spatial services relevant to where you are—information, navigation, agents, experiences, all anchored to the real world,” Trevett said.
Unlike proprietary software on mixed reality devices, Sneeze aims to be a standardized web engine across multiple devices, said Trevett. It will pull data from different AI sources and spatial fabrics — sites designed for the metaverse — and simultaneously superimpose them over the user’s location in the real world.
“Those services,” said Trevett, “can be almost anything: an AI navigation agent that reads your environment and guides you turn by turn through an airport, an AI retail assistant that recognises what you’re looking at and surfaces relevant information in real time, a shared workspace where AI helps remote colleagues collaborate as if they’re in the same room, or a museum experience where an AI brings each exhibit to life as you approach it.”
Currently, according to Trevett, mixed reality applications that interact with the web are proprietary, essentially locked to their ecosystems. Also, only one application at a time takes over what the viewer sees.
“That model can’t support multiple independent services composing into a single shared spatial view,” said Trevett, “because there’s no standard for how multiple services would share a scene without interfering with or exposing each other’s data.”
The Sneeze engine, said Trevett, aims to address that by walling off each remote application into its own sandbox, so that the web browser built on Sneeze will be able to display the data from each remote application simultaneously without them reading each other’s data.
“Sneeze achieves this through WebAssembly,” said Trevett. “Each service runs as a sandboxed module with per-service memory isolation, and through the Scene Object Model, a shared scene graph where each service owns its own branch, with access-controlled read-write APIs. Services compose into one scene without ever touching each other’s data.”
With the internet age, there is always the risk of unwanted surveillance by third parties. Sneeze is designed to address this, said Trevett, by using security measures similar to standard 2D web browsers, including verifying certificates and ensuring users can grant and deny permissions on a case-by-case basis.
“The browser is the user’s gatekeeper,” said Trevett. “No service ever touches raw camera, location, or sensor data directly—all hardware access is mediated by the browser, which acts as a permission boundary between services and the physical world. The user explicitly grants access, can scope it to a session or a specific context, and can revoke it at any time.”
The open source nature of the project also ensures people can inspect the code of the browser engine in real time, said Trevett. “The rules of the system are public, [modified versions] can be tested for compliance, and the security model isn’t dependent on trusting a single vendor’s deployment.”
Any institution that wants to host its own AI app for use on the system can do so, according to Trevett, without having to trust a third party with all its data, unlike current models.
“For an aerospace manufacturer, a hospital, or a factory operator,” said Trevett, “that means their physical spaces, operational data, and user activity would all need to be hosted by a third party just to run AR at all. That’s unacceptable from a data sovereignty standpoint, and it’s a hard blocker for enterprise adoption.”
The project’s code can be viewed on its GitHub page. More information can be found at the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative web page.
The name Sneeze, said Crabb, is a nod to the Blink engine, the foundation for the Chrome web browser.
“Browser engines tend to have informal names,” said Sean Mann, co-founder and CEO of RP1, the company that created the Open Metaverse Browser Initiative along with the Metaverse Standards Forum.
“Chrome uses the Blink engine, Safari uses WebKit,” he told Hypergrid Business. “Since we are building the next engine in that lineage, we wanted a name that nodded to Blink, and Sneeze stuck. The name is light on purpose, but the engine and the standards behind it are serious work.”
Terrence J. Smith has contributed his writing to nonprofits and both print and digital publications. He enjoys all things technology, but remembers to meditate and appreciate the outside world.
