The Evolution of Web3D at Alipay: From AR Red Packets to In‑House Rendering Engines and Future Outlook

Since 2016, Alipay has explored Web3D, beginning with the AR red packet released during the 2017 Chinese New Year, which introduced 3D models and animations to the mobile app for the first time.

The front‑end team, unable to rely on the client side, built a pure JavaScript WebGL solution and later created a custom rendering engine called R3 (Render for 3D), along with a Unity export plugin, enabling Web3D projects to run in any browser supporting WebGL.

R3 powered early successes such as the “Star Planet” game in Ant Forest, which drove massive user engagement, but later projects like “Hui Planet” faced long development cycles and lower traffic, leading the team to shift focus.

To reduce development cost, Alipay introduced the Lottie animation framework, allowing designers to export After Effects animations as JSON files, which quickly became the standard for many marketing activities.

Facing the high cost of 3D modeling, the team built internal web‑based 3D editors—first an early version of R3, later renamed Oasis , and a separate editor called Mars that combined 3D rendering with 2D animation techniques.

Despite challenges such as WebGL compatibility on older Android devices and the need for particle‑system performance, the ecosystem matured: Web3D projects increased from one every six months to two‑three per month, and the editors began to resemble lightweight versions of Unity and After Effects.

Looking forward, the article predicts that Web3D will evolve toward platformization, with editors enabling collaborative creation, while emerging technologies like WebAssembly, server‑side rendering (e.g., Unreal Pixel Streaming), and 5G may reshape the balance between real‑time 3D and video‑based solutions.