Immersive technology companies are increasingly integrating their AR, VR and MR offerings with Blockchain. Why?

Merging our physical and digital physical realities is the ultimate promise of immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) Virtual Reality (VR) Mixed Reality (MR) – and others in this acronym alphabet soup – which is what makes them such a good fit for Blockchain.

Merging our physical and digital physical realities is the ultimate promise of immersive technologies
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The interesting thing about Blockchain is that it, too, is all about blurring the boundaries between virtual and real. Or perhaps it just exposes that a lot of what we consider to be “real” exists largely in the ether in the form of bits and bytes. What Blockchain does is make the ephemeral feel permanent, and therefore more valuable.

Philip Rosedale is the founder of one of the earliest virtual worlds – Second Life. He told Forbes in a recent interview that virtual worlds need a simple system that allows people to reliably assert ownership.

“I think that Blockchain is super important for money, for digital assets, and most importantly for identity. Not just in the virtual world, but in the real world. It stores that information in a way that only the owner who has the private key can be associated with that little chunk of the Blockchain. The owner can update the object, sell it, move it around. No company or central organization is able to do that once it’s printed in the Blockchain.”

If Blockchain had been around 13 years ago when Linden Lab first launched Second Life, Rosedale believes they would have built the platform around it, and indeed he seems keen to now incorporate the technology into his latest Social VR venture High Fidelity, as are many emerging competitors in that space such as Decentraland which just held its highly anticipated first property auction this month.

The interesting thing about Blockchain is that it, too, is all about blurring the boundaries between virtual and real
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Augmented Reality start-up Lucyd, for example, recently created their own cryptocurrency (the LCD token) and is currently raising funds through an ICO (initial coin offering). Having secured a series of AR patents, Lycid are now designing an interactive AR display that uses your smartphone for processing power and data. Essentially the lens will let users look up from their phones and interact with their apps within a large, smooth AR interface.

Being on the Blockchain they claim, will allow them to develop and distribute AR-native content much more easily so that anyone can develop, share and experience content.

With over 60 million concert tickets sold every year in the US, it is clear that the market for experiences is booming, but equally clear that there is a limit to how many tickets can be sold to access them physically. Which is where companies like of CEEK VR come in.

With over 60 million concert tickets sold every year in the US, it is clear that the market for experiences is booming
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CEEK is a platform founded in 2015 that extends the reach of sold-out shows through its Virtual Reality Venues by allowing users to experience them virtually. It has so far signed up over 100 top artists like Elton John, Lady Gaga, Sting, Bon Jovi and Katy Perry, but believe that incorporating Blockchain technology will allow them to massively scale their operations and realize the dream of a “decentralized VR entertainment Metaverse.”

“CEEK VR’s offering will remove the hurdles of creating premium content and virtual goods featuring licensed music and celebrity assets by offering clearing house services through Smart Contracts that automatically pay respective rights holders and publishers. This means more people will be creating quality content in addition to all the concerts,” says CEEK’s CEO Mary Spio.

Clearing rights for songs, for example, takes a very long time and requires employing full-time staff every time new songs are added to a platform, especially if they are owned by multiple stakeholders – as is the norm in the music industry. By enabling transparent, immutable record of ownership and usage rights to be kept in the Blockchain, however, this process can not only be scaled and automated over millions of songs, but becomes much more accountable, meaning artists will get paid for their work in a much more timely fashion, and reach larger audiences in the process. The picture it paints is very much of a win-win for the creative industries, which has often struggled to cope with disruptive technologies in the past.

If Blockchain had been around 13 years ago when Linden Lab first launched Second Life, Rosedale believes they would have built the platform around it
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Virtual tokens can be used as tickets to VR events and virtual items, but they are also enabling celebrities on the platform to create their own worlds, currency and items in less than an hour, with the potential for unlimited earning. Celebrity minted coins and virtual merchandise items take on the traits of cryptocurrency as each are assigned their own Ethereum address. This means exclusive items can be created, and artists can even sign those items with special cryptographic token signatures that cannot be duplicated and are authenticated on the Blockchain in terms of rarity and value.

Gaze Coin is another Blockchain-powered platform that monetizes VR & AR through enabling such celebrity partnerships. By using gaze tracking, it calculates the amount of time a player spends looking at or immersed inside specific content and then creates a micropayment – advertisers are charged for the time, content owners are paid and gamers are rewarded.

Monetizing virtual goods and services in a frictionless way will be the cornerstone of building these new virtual worlds
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The company is now planning on trialling the first of its “Celebrity Coins” next year. The Kim Kardashian West’s KCoin is linked to the KK Goes to Hollywood app which already attracted 42 million downloads and which has generated nearly $200 million in revenue since June 2014. They stand to make even more, however, by adopting a monetized VR platform where instead of purchasing virtual goods, players can purchase Kardashian’s branded and endorsed products both virtually and eventually in real life.

“For the first time the Kardashian’s have been toppled in the Google search rankings, and by Bitcoin. The idea of linking the two might seem far-fetched, but we see it as the next step,” says Jonny Peters Founder of Gaze Coin. “If the app’s KCoin became a cryptocurrency it would enable brands to track and reward players for influence and advertising, as well as the purchase of real-world goods in virtual stores. So we’re doing it,” he says.

Spio also agrees that creating and monetizing virtual goods and services in a frictionless way will be the cornerstone of building these new virtual worlds. “Tokenization does that, and users will enjoy more premium VR content as well as new earning and spending possibilities,” she concludes.

Article originally published on The Huffington Post

Will Blockchain Supercharge Immersive Tech? https://t.co/2zK93HAJrf via @HuffPostBlog

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) December 17, 2017

For help getting your own VR/AR/MR project off the ground, get in touch about our Virtual Reality Consultancy services 

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Powering Virtual Technologies With Blockchain appeared first on Tech Trends.

AltspaceVR wants to enable people to attend live events in virtual reality.

AltspaceVR's strategy is increasingly focusing on live events
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With mounting competition from platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity (both of which are in Beta at the moment but planning public releases for 2017), it seems like AltspaceVR’s strategy is increasingly focusing on live events as their unique selling proposition in the Social VR Space.

AltspaceVR held the first UK live comedy show in virtual reality, which marks a significant strategic move for the company as it tries to prove the case for enabling people to attend live events in virtual reality.

With mounting competition from platforms like Sansar and High Fidelity (both of which are in Beta at the moment but planning public releases for 2017), it seems like AltspaceVR’s strategy is increasingly focusing on live events as their unique selling proposition in the Social VR Space.

The strategy of building on geographical clusters makes sense in the context of trying to grow a social-based product
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But why hold such a milestone event in London if the company is still firmly based in Redwood City, CA? It’s actually part of their broader European expansion plan, explains Head of International Market Development Debby Shepard, who has just relocated from San Francisco to London to spearhead that.

With around 30 percent of their current base made up of European users, AltspaceVR hopes to significantly grow that by providing greater support and expanded programming. That strategy of building on geographical clusters makes sense in the context of trying to grow a social-based product, since we’re much more likely to engage with those sort of experiences if our friends are already on board.

The demand for live events in VR is driven by the same desire that people have to attend festivals, concerts, comedy clubs—the shared live experience of performer and audience
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Although the potential of using VR’s immersiveness to make live experiences available to larger audiences is certainly clear, it’s also quite obvious that it’s still very early days for this technology
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The live show featured two very well-known names in the vibrant comedy circuit, Ian Stone (ranked among the top ten stand-ups in Britain by The Independent and a member of the Comedy Store’s ‘Cutting Edge’ team) and Ben Norris (who apart from being the cousin of actor Martin Freeman, is a regular on popular UK television shows such as Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks). I was told that attendance for such events ranges/has ranged up into the thousands, and an encore presentation should be available on Dec. 26 at 7 pm Pacific here.

AltspaceVR’s live event capture technology launched in November and can capture live events in full VR, so users can either watch a performance live or an encore after the event (or both). Previously they had tested some of this functionality in a partnership with SyFy for their show Halcyon, where they showed the first episode in VR and hosted a virtual reality international press junket on the platform. The benefits of that for a global audience are clear, as it transcends the need (and associated cost) of travel and lets them do so at a convenient time for them while keeping the social and interactive aspects you don’t get with simply watching a recorded show on TV.

“The demand for live events in VR is driven by the same desire that people have to attend festivals, concerts, comedy clubs—the shared live experience of performer and audience,” says Shepard. “VR uniquely brings the performer and audience into the same space, replicating the live performance experience. With AltspaceVR’s FrontRow, it’s now possible to deliver it to an unlimited number of people simultaneously from around the world.”

This FrontRow technology means that only a fraction of the attendees are visible in these images, explains Gerald Gottheil from AltspaceVR’s marketing team. The idea, presumably, is that no matter how many people sign up to participate in an event, you never get your view blocked by that annoying tall, hat-wearing person standing right in front of you.

Although the potential of using VR’s immersiveness to make live experiences available to larger audiences is certainly clear, it’s also quite obvious that it’s still very early days for this technology. For one, the AltspaceVR avatars still have that characteristic cartoon woodiness that have been a staple of such platforms since the ’90s. That, however, might soon be set to change, especially if they manage to plug into some of the bolder advances in personalized-avatar technology we’ve seen emerging in the space recently.

No matter how many people sign up to an event, you'll never get your view blocked by that tall, hat-wearing person standing right in front of you
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Another interesting aspect of this announcement was the way it overlapped the real and virtual worlds by offering audiences based in London the chance to gather in a physical space to watch a virtual reality performance together with their friends at Camden Square’s recently opened Virtually Reality space.

This represents a new concept that not only plugs into London’s  thriving VR start-up community to help bring their products to market, but also provides ordinary consumers with a physical and social space which invites them to experience and learn about VR and discover its possibilities through hands-on play.  Touting themselves as the “UK’s first virtual reality retail and experience space,” they started out as a stall on Portobello Road selling mobile VR headsets, and managed to capture the imagination of enough passers-by to fund their next move into its current trendy Camden base. It will be really interesting to see how many more such spaces start cropping up in major cities in 2017 as VR takes off.

This article originally appeared on UploadVR

Live comedy shows in @AltspaceVR are growing! https://t.co/S5gJiX7YaY via @alicebonasio #VR

— Upload (@UploadVR) December 23, 2016

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to enhance brand strategy with immersive technologies such as Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Are VRlive Events Becoming a Thing? appeared first on Tech Trends.