8th Wall, the browser-based AR platform Niantic Spatial open-sourced back in March, has a new backer: Agog: The Immersive Media Institute announced on August 14 that it’s granting funding specifically to sustain the platform’s transition to independent, community-stewarded open source. It’s a small piece of news on its own, but it answers the question that tends to hang over any “we’re open-sourcing this” announcement — who’s actually going to keep paying for the unglamorous maintenance work once the press cycle ends.
What the grant actually funds
Per 8th Wall’s own announcement, the money is earmarked for three specific areas: device and browser compatibility for the XR engine itself, continued development of the 8th Wall Studio visual editor, and documentation and reference implementations — the kind of infrastructure work that rarely gets funded by hype but is exactly what determines whether an open-sourced platform stays usable a year later. The team says the grant will let them “move forward on this goal, including offering paid contracts,” and they’re inviting community members to weigh in through a survey on where effort should go next.
Why this matters more than the March announcement did
When Niantic Spatial open-sourced 8th Wall’s engine under an MIT license in March — shutting down hosted services like the cloud editor and web-based XR Studio in the process — the obvious open question was sustainability. WebAR is a genuinely useful, low-friction way to ship AR experiences that don’t require an app install (a demo link works from any phone browser), and 8th Wall had been one of the more mature toolkits in that space for the better part of a decade. But “open source” and “abandoned” can look identical from a developer’s perspective if nobody’s funding the unglamorous parts.
The core engine is already live on GitHub — 8thwall/8thwall and 8thwall/engine — under MIT, with modules for face effects, image targets, and sky effects available now, while more advanced capabilities like SLAM-based world tracking, VPS, and hand tracking are still being ported over from the closed-source original. Agog’s grant doesn’t finish that porting work by itself, but it puts real money behind the browser-compatibility and documentation gaps that would otherwise be the first things to stall on a volunteer-only timeline.