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Blockchain Fields of Innovation
In the early days of crypto, many thought that Blockchain was just a flash in the pan, similar to how the Internet was viewed more than four decades ago.
Then too, a lot of mud has been thrown at blockchain and its revolutionary perspectives, but nevertheless, it keeps on giving new horizons despite the everyday challenges.
While there are a lot of roadblocks ahead, it’s indisputable that blockchain technology has officially signed on the dotted line with the emergence of Metaverse, NFTs, and Crypto Gaming.
Sure, it’s hard to see the light through the recent market crash and extreme fud. Still, looking at the big picture, crypto-related projects have been off to a roaring start, with many cross-related ideas emerging, opening up new fields of innovation.
3D VR Fashion Avatars
With its history of being at the forefront of invention, the fashion industry recognizes the opportunity and cultivates the seeds for VR Fashion anchored in blockchain technology.
Science fiction may have inspired the Metaverse and 3D Avatar VR Fashion concept, but the opportunities that this hybridization of digital and physical worlds provides are real.
The latest partnership between Bloktopia Metaverse and cross-game 3D avatar platform Ready Player Me shows that VR Fashion isn’t just a futuristic concept that would never catch on.
Bloktopia Fashion Ready With RPM
What could be the best way to express and identify yourself in a virtual world? How about creating a virtual 3D avatar that truly reflects your personality? Well, with the service offered by Ready Player Me (RPM) users can now create a 3D avatar and have one consistent identity while exploring virtual worlds.
By creating custom 3D avatars from selfies, Ready Player Me avatars will offer Bloktopia visitors a wide range of styles and looks and make Bloktopia Fashion Ready.
A user’s customized avatars can then be used in the Bloktopia metaverse across multiple types of activities, such as visiting virtual stores, attending events, and playing games. It will also run across a variety of diverse games and metaverses, enabling true interoperability.
A number of well-known brands have partnered with Ready Player Me, including Somnium Space, Spacial, VRChat, PIXELYNX, TCL, Hiberworld and over 1,500 partners have incorporated Ready Player Me 3D avatars into their games and apps.
Also, Ready Player Me has formed partnerships with well-known names like Dune, Dior, New Balance, Adidas, and many other famous brands.
RPM NFT Wearables in Bloktopia
Having the ability to integrate NFTs has also been a key reason for Bloktopia choosing the Ready Player Me (RPM) 3D avatar solution.
👋Welcome to Bloktopia @readyplayerme 🤝https://t.co/GStdnobOoD pic.twitter.com/lRknYvpVg8
— Bloktopia (@bloktopia) May 18, 2022
Through virtual stores, avatars in the Bloktopia Metaverse will be able to purchase digital NFT wearables to put on in Bloktopia Virtual Skyscraper and on other metaverses and gaming platforms.
More About Ready Player Me
Estonian Metaverse startup 3DWolf with its cross-app avatar platform Ready Player Me is grabbing the attention of investors. With a long list of partners, including NordicNinja and Konvoy Ventures, it raised a $13 million Series A round led by Taavet+Sten (the VC firm of Hinrikus and Tamkivi) in December 2021.
More about 3DWolf Startup
Ready Player Me, a cross-app 3D avatar platform, is the brainchild of Wolf3D. Founded in 2014, the company created a professional, hardware-based 3D scanner as its first product. These scanners were installed in public spaces such as airports, museums, and conference halls around the world.
The scanning process by Wolf3D resulted in the collection of high-quality face scans of more than 20,000 people.
They were able to create perfect virtual 3D avatars from a single selfie created using this proprietary database of face scans. By combining one continuous identity with virtual world exploration, avatar design startup allows users to explore virtual NFT wearables worlds more easily.
Currently, the Ready Player Me avatar platform is compatible with more than 1,500 immersive experiences such as VRChat and MeetingVR.
Exceptional List Of Partners
RT3D (Real-Time 3D) development platforms from Unity Technologies and Epic Games for web, mobile, and desktop platforms are supported by the Ready Player Me. Many other companies work with Wolf3D, including Tencent, Huawei, HTC, Vodafone, and H&M.
Moreover, RPM has partnered not only with gaming and VR companies but also with fashion trailblazer brands such as Adidas.
Currently, 42 employees work for the startup, but that number is expected to reach 70 by the end of 2022.
Founded: 2013 (Ready Player Me 2020)
HQ: Tallinn
Total funding: $21m
RPM Adidas Ozworld
Adidas Originals and Ready Player Me have partnered to launch the world’s first personality-based avatar creation platform, which celebrates Adidas’ newest collection, Ozworld.
To empower and open up self-expression opportunities for all, the Adidas Ozworld experience enables users to create their very own digital self, which can be used across the web exclusively using Ready Player Me, a cross-platform for the Metaverse Avatars and NFT wearables, that allows everyone to navigate virtual worlds with one identity.
Following the creation of their characters, users are able to animate them and digitally try on and buy the Adidas Originals NFT wearables Ozworld sneakers.
Ozworld is bringing some new heat to the web with the first generative avatar based on your personality, built from the latest adidas Ozworld collection. 🪐
— adidas Originals (@adidasoriginals) April 15, 2022
Create yours at https://t.co/DvWgn4ZU52 pic.twitter.com/qGoMiyrI1B
With this feature, users will be able to download their alter egos and upload them to their social media accounts as stickers or animated GIFs.
Rather than physical appearances, Adidas Ozworld 3D avatars are based on individual personalities.
These avatars work in much the same way as Ready Player Me avatars, but are completely independent. Adidas Ozworld avatars can be imported into apps and games from 2,000+ developers, such as:
- VRChat – explore hundreds of community-created VR experiences
- Somnium Space – open, social, virtual reality world
- Mona – beautiful social worlds for you to collect, show your art, and gather with others
- The Nemesis – explore virtual worlds, take part in live events and competitions
You can create your Adidas Ozworld avatar at ozworld.adidas.com by selecting your personality. If you are interested, you can also opt-in to get your avatar when it is ready on Ready Player Me. A unique link will be emailed to you by Adidas for adding your Ozworld avatar to Ready Player Me.
Adidas NFT Wearables
As part of their partnership with the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Punks Comics, Adidas released 30,000 ‘Into the Metaverse’ NFTs in 2021 and sold $22 million in NFTs.
Adidas is one of the world’s top 500 companies, with a market capitalization of $43 billion. Once more, Adidas is leading the way as one of the first companies to embrace NFT wearables and blockchain technology.
VRChat & Ready Player Me
Avatars created by Ready Player Me (RTM) can now be exported to VRChat. Users can upload their photos to VRChat, create a personal avatar, and chat with other users on PC or Oculus Quest. Using a machine learning algorithm, a 3D model will be created from the photo. Alternatively, users can skip this step and go directly to the avatar maker if they don’t wish to upload a photo.
What is VRChat?
VR Chat is the world’s most popular social VR platform. The VRChat SDK provides creators with the ability to publish their own custom content to the platform whether they are using a PC or Oculus VR headset or not. The creators will be able to share their avatars or worlds with the community after they have uploaded them.
Impressive Numbers
Many VRChat users spend hours interacting with each other and their creations during a single session. It is estimated that VRChat users have created more than 300,000 worlds. There are plenty of incredible places to see, as well as games, events, and performances.
For example, in honor of the latest New Year’s Eve event, nearly 40,000 people logged in to VRChat simultaneously. This tells us a great deal about how large and powerful the community is on VRChat.
How to Create Your VRChat Avatar
- Make an avatar at readyplayer.me/vrchat by clicking “Create your avatar.”
- Take a picture or upload one. If you prefer not to take a picture, you may skip this step.
- Your virtual 3D avatar will be ready in about ten seconds. Using an AI model trained using 20,000 face scans, an avatar can be created from a picture.
- Easily change your avatar’s eyes, hair, tattoos, clothes, etc. Your 3D avatar can resemble you or can be totally different.
- After that, click “Next”. After clicking “Import to VRChat,” login to your VRChat account, and grant Ready Player Me app access.
- VRChat avatars will sync within 10-15 minutes. The new avatar will appear under the “Other” section of the “Avatars” tab.
RPM CEO Timmu Tõke
The Metaverse arrives in a big way, and it won’t be a single app – there will be thousands of them. Your 3D avatar will serve as your identity as you explore myriads of virtual worlds. As a virtual passport, your 3D avatar acts as your ticket into the Metaverse.
Here is another interview with the CEO of Ready Player Me Timmu Tõke and his views on the Metaverse, Decentralization, Virtual Avatars, and more.
Q: What is the Metaverse?
Timmu The Metaverse for us is a network of virtual worlds that people visit for different purposes. It’s mostly virtual worlds that people visit to play games and collaborate, but it can also extend to virtual interactions that are 2D. But in general, we see it as a network of many different apps, worlds, and so forth.
Q: And they’re all interconnected in some respect?
Timmu Well, they should be! Most worlds are closed systems with no common layer across them. And that’s what we’re trying to do — connect these virtual worlds. The Metaverse should be a network of digital worlds, definitely not one world.
Q: Do you see blockchain fitting into the Metaverse ecosystem at all? Because right now Ready Player Me doesn’t use NFTs or any decentralized technology, but whenever I hear about the Metaverse, it usually has to do with blockchain.
Timmu Yes, I do think blockchain has a place, but what is more important is the mindset behind the Metaverse — it’s the mindset of building open platforms that are interconnected and that communicate with each other. And that’s a big mindset shift for the gaming industry because so far the gaming industry has been very closed. So, I think the blockchain world is helping push the Metaverse from both a technological perspective — obviously it’s a great way to manage assets and economies — and also from a philosophical perspective.
For us, NFTs are on the roadmap, and the promise of NFTs is interoperability. But most NFTs are not very interoperable, and to actually make these assets work in many different experiences, you need to integrate them in each respective experience.
Q: Well, that’s why I found Ready Player Me to be so interesting, because your platform is essentially fulfilling the promise of interoperable NFTs without blockchain. So you got me thinking — is blockchain even necessary to build the Metaverse at all?
Timmu Blockchain is definitely the way we want it to go, that’s for sure. It is a very unique way to create scarcity which is important. I mean, there are other ways to do that within a centralized system like the Steam store and CS:GO skins, but they are still controlled by one central entity, and assets are not transferable. So we want to see blockchain succeed — we want to see it as a part of the Metaverse. But we will do this regardless, and if blockchain does not become widely adopted, that’s fine.
Custom avatar creation is now available in the AlphaBatem #metaverse! 💫
— AlphaBatem -💫The Open Metaverse (@alpha_batem) May 17, 2022
We have integrated the @readyplayerme avatar creation service into our platform! Who has an avatar already? 👀
Start creating at 👇https://t.co/49507wA8nZ#ReadyPlayerMe #SolanaCommunity #NFTCommunity pic.twitter.com/fZ2Y2Cc86T
Q: How do you see avatars fitting into the Metaverse ecosystem?
Timmu Your avatar is a representation of you in the virtual world, so they’re a very important part of the Metaverse experience. They allow you to feel like you can express your identity in the digital realm. However, the key aspect in regards to avatars is interoperability. We believe that avatars are the most logical interoperable element of the Metaverse because they represent who you are. You buy stuff for your avatar and can wear and attach them to yourself. These assets travel with you, and that creates a more unified experience when traveling between different virtual worlds. Your avatar can become your wallet.
Q: When I made an avatar with Ready Player Me, it really looked like my face. I was surprisingly pleased with the technology. How do you build the avatars from photos?
Timmu So, my co-founders and I have been working on this for seven years. We started building hardware scanners, and we scanned tens of thousands of people. We actually have the biggest proprietary database of face scans on the planet, and we spent around four years only doing data science and building a deep learning solution that predicts how to shape faces from a selfie. And that was our previous product.
Q: That makes sense. So there are two kinds of avatars that you can create with Ready Player Me: VR avatars and full-body avatars. Why is there a need for two types of avatars?
Timmu There is a very practical reason that. A lot of VR experiences don’t want to use a full-body because they need to develop a kinematics system. So, when you move around with the headset, developers need to create a system that will predict what the legs will do, and usually, it just looks terrible. So, most avatars in VR just have a head, torso, and hands. But, in the future, we will definitely have more body types and styles of avatars.
Q: What are you doing for developers to allow them to integrate your interoperable avatars?
Timmu What we’ve done to make it easy is to create SDKs for Unreal Engine, Unity3d, and mobile native platforms and so forth. Integration usually only takes a couple of days. It’s extremely straightforward compared to spending six months to a year to build a decent avatar system yourself.
Q: Why did you choose the name Ready Player Me? Because it sounds like an homage to Ready Player One.
Timmu So like the joke is that in the future we want people to think that the movie was named after Ready Player Me and not vice versa. Through our name, we want to express that our company is about the Metaverse and building this virtual world. We chose the name before the “Metaverse” became such a buzzword and wanted to make sure that people understood the vision. However, in Ready Player One, there is one gigantic company controlling the virtual world, and we’re very much against that. We’re trying to build an Open Metaverse that is built by millions of developers, not one big company.
Q: Do you think that an Open Metaverse is possible without the use of decentralized technology like blockchain since Ready Player Me isn’t based on decentralized technology now?
Timmu That’s a great question. For me, the challenges to building the Metaverse are more rooted in philosophy and less about overcoming a technological problem. We already have great virtual worlds that people spend crazy amounts of time in like Roblox and Fortnite, and I think they can be considered “Metaverses” more than some of the crypto Metaverses out there now. Most of the crypto Metaverses don’t have many users and haven’t built engaged user bases like the worlds I mentioned earlier. Anyways, the point is that it’s about the philosophy of building open platforms. “Open” doesn’t need to mean blockchain, but it can. A connected world can be achieved in multiple ways.
Q: I guess if you look at something like Minecraft, which is a non-blockchain-based world, it’s still very open and has a great environment for developers.
Timmu Same thing with Roblox. Now, if you could go from Minecraft to Roblox, that would be cool.
Q: So that’s the crux of my question. Let’s say we want to go from Minecraft to Roblox. How would interoperability work in an “Open Metaverse” that is not controlled by one company that also does not use decentralized technology?
Timmu Right, another thing that needs to happen is allowing players to be able to go from one app to another without having to exit the world.
Q: Like a Metaverse hyperlink?
Timmu Exactly. Like portals.
Q: Do you have any ethical concerns surrounding the Metaverse?
Timmu Yes, if one entity controls too much of it, then that will be a dangerous thing. And like with all the new technologies, governments don’t understand it and won’t know what laws to pass. But, it will be very powerful, which means it can do a lot of good but also be very harmful.
Q: Thank you so much for your time! Is there anything else you would like to add?
Timmu For the Metaverse to happen, the main thing that needs to change is mindset. The technology will follow, and that’s just another problem to solve. I think the biggest roadblock currently is that everybody is trying to build their own “Metaverse,” and we’ll continue living in a closed system. Some of these worlds are great, but we won’t have the big interconnected virtual multiverse we dream of. We believe, more communication and connection between virtual worlds is better for everyone. And that’s what ultimately enables the Metaverse — cross-game services and connections.
About Bloktopia
Bloktopia is a decentralized Web3 Crypto Gaming Metaverse powered by Polygon, designed to deliver an unforgettable VR experience to the crypto community and connect users in one immersive and engaging virtual world.
The Bloktopia Web3 Skyscraper is essentially a building with 21 floors dedicated to honoring 21 million Bitcoins.
The Bloktopia Skyscraper will represent the central hub and be the gathering place for all cryptocurrency-related levels of expertise.
With Bloktopia, VR is utilized to interact, play crypto-based games, enjoy, and engage in many ways, enabling the first-person perspective unavailable anywhere else.
Bloktopia will bring crypto-related information and interactive content under the same roof for the very first time.
Token owners will be known as Bloktopians, and Bloktopia will serve as a central hub for crypto enthusiasts at all levels.
In the Bloktopia Metaverse, players will earn revenue through a variety of opportunities, including real estate ownership, advertising revenue, Play-To-Earn NFT games and activities.
Bloktopia’s four guiding principles
Learn
This is the first segment that takes into account how difficult it can be to navigate the crypto world.
The Internet is flooded with resources and information on Crypto and Web3, including YouTube, Telegram, and Crypto Twitter, and they are very fragmented at the moment.
Bloktopia is geared towards addressing this challenge by positioning itself as a central hub where users can gather and learn in a safe and open environment.
Earn
With the many income streams offered by Bloktopia, there are many ways to earn revenue. Bloktopians have many options for building wealth, including Bloktopia real estate, passive earning, advertising, and staking.
Play
Play is another essential component of any metaverse ecosystem, and competition, fun, and relaxation cannot exist without it. Through Bloktopia, users are able to interact with friends, play interactive games, and network while exploring a virtual reality world from a first-person viewpoint.
Create
Finally, developers will give their users the chance to push the limits of their creativity by designing scenes, challenges, artworks, and more, creating them with a simple tool, and then participating in events to win prizes.
The native token of Bloktopia is BLOK, which can be traded on exchanges such as KuCoin, Gate.io, OKX, QuickSwap, and others.
Conclusion
Bloktopia Metaverse is forging partnerships left and right almost on a daily basis, positioning itself as one of the most promising Metaverse spaces around. Thanks to its latest co-operation with Ready Player Me, Bloktopia continues its ongoing growth this time with Bloktopia Fashion Ready upgrade.
Disclaimer: The information provided on this page does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, trading advice, or any other sort of advice and it should not be treated as such. This content is the opinion of a third party, and this site does not recommend that any specific cryptocurrency should be bought, sold, or held, or that any crypto investment should be made. The Crypto market is high-risk, with high-risk and unproven projects. Readers should do their own research and consult a professional financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
