Meet DavisVerse: UC Davis Reimagined as a 3D Multiplayer Campus!

Ever missed a great campus event because it was buried in someone's Instagram story? DavisVerse is a hackathon project that turns the entire UC Davis campus into a real-time 3D multiplayer sandbox, making it as easy to find your community as it is to explore a game world. The team rebuilt the campus and its social life in the browser: 1️⃣ A Digital Twin of Campus: Using real OpenStreetMap data imported into Blender, the team modeled a scale replica of UC Davis, including the Memorial Union, Shields Library, and the ARC, all optimized to run at 60fps right in your browser. 2️⃣ Live Multiplayer Exploration: Control your own avatar and see other students moving across campus in real time, complete with floating nametags and smooth movement powered by Socket.io and React Three Fiber. 3️⃣ Spontaneous Events: Anyone can drop an event on the map, from pickup basketball at the ARC to a study group in Shields. Walk your avatar close to an event marker to see the details, RSVP, and jump into a dedicated chat room with live announcements from organizers. Under the hood, a Node.js and Express backend stores the app's database models in MongoDB Atlas through Mongoose. To keep the server fast, the team chose to hold rapidly changing data like live player coordinates in memory rather than writing every movement to the database. 🔗 See how they built it on Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/davis-verse