4500 BAYC owners had a party in the metaverse

[Nonobstant]

Summary

After a failed venture in the dating world, the Bored Ape Yacht Club partnered with British tech company Improbable to deliver a view into the "Otherside", Improbable's new Metaverse.

Nearly 4500 BAYC members joined the Metaverse experience, in the same virtual space. The "game" seemed to be pretty well built to sustain that many users in the same instance without lag.

 

Image Credits: Yuga Labs

 

Quotes

Quote

This past Saturday [July 16th], this reporter joined a large private demo of Otherside called “First Trip,” where 4,500 Yuga community members logged on simultaneously to experience an hour-long tightly scripted demo.
[...]
From a technical standpoint, the demo managed to go off without any clear hitches on my end. The more fascinating experience was existing in such a large crowd of avatars with full knowledge that there was a real person behind every one of them. Moving from space to space with throngs of avatars on every side while hearing light mumbles of nearby conversations gave the demo the social vibes of a small festival.
[...]
Though the Bored Apes NFT audience is still fairly niche at the moment, the Otherside launch is a big win for U.K.-based Improbable, which is developing the title. The startup banked $500 million on its multiplayer vision five years ago and recently raised $150 million at a $1 billion value for its new “metaverse network” M2.

 

My thoughts

Apart from the fact that the audience was pretty exclusive - a BAYC NFT costs about $137k - Improbable and BAYC made quite the impression.

The Metaverse is a pretty undefined buzzword that every company out there is throwing themselves on. Aside from that buzz, it looks like Improbable is interested enough to apply pretty cutting edge technology to the metaverse. Taking the metaverse/NFT discussion aside, 4000+ players in the same game interacting with each others live, that's a pretty big technical feat.

Maybe this could be the start of something that will give us a bit more than likening the metaverse to a 3D VR experience like so many companies (like Meta and Nvidia) do, likening the Metaverse to something new, rather than a pay-to-earn Second life.

 

Personally I would have loved to see these technologies applied in a more traditional game, I feel that the layer of "metaverse" is mostly useful for the communication, riding on the buzz.

 

Sources

BAYC ft. Improbable in the Otherside Event: https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/19/bored-apes-founders-on-their-plans-for-otherside-metaverse/
SpatialOS: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/improbable-spatialos-simulated-cities

[Motifator]

This lame garbage is pretty much being mained to compensate for the crypto crash of big companies who were too dumb to predict it earlier. Nothing more really.

[Salv8 (sam)]

How to have the worlds saddest party: a three step guide!

[ComradeIT]

Fyre Festival was a music festival held in 2017 and marketed as the most luxurious, expensive experience you could buy. Influencers and celebrities signed up to attend the event in the Bahamas, and when they did, the tragedy was everyone else's gain. Pictures of disaster relief tents set up for accommodations, "gourmet" plain cheese sandwiches for lunch. A group of the richest, most famous people would be forced to live like an underfunded boy scout troop. People loved it. The suffering of people who flaunted their exclusive access to an expensive venue was absolutely rich.

 

This is similar to the reason why people hate Bored Ape Yacht Club and want it to fail. It represents exclusivity, wealth, fame, and nothing else. Class for the classless. A literal virtual Yacht club.

 

That said, I think the basic idea behind it is kind of cool. It would be interesting to see something similar - offered for free or close to free however. There could be an LTT virtual event for Verified Actual Gamers. Other businesses could set up a virtual booth. The benefits could be reserved for actual people who are actual fans and actual enthusiasts instead of simply barred to people who have money. The kind of network they built could be used to build an anti-yacht club. 

 

I don't like the Yacht Club even a little bit, because of what it represents. 

[Nonobstant]

Quote

Although I do not see how it could not be a thing without the involvement of NFTs and 'metaverse'. For example Runescape and World of Warcraft are both pretty damn old

I guess, although technically none of Runescale or WoW got to that point techncally. Improbable's Spatial OS was meant to enable this (thousands of players in the same area, scaling virtually infinitely), but by digging a bit, it looks like no major game studio adopted it in the past 2/3 years. My assumption is that, Improbable found an application to their technology in this kind of experience.

 

 

I totally agree with you @ComradeIT, I think the application to the BAYC isn't of the best taste, but the technology, and sort of experience it enables could be amazing. Looking a bit more into tweets of the founders they seem pretty focused into making something technically sensible. For example one of the Founders of Improbable is talking about dynamically importing 3D models in the "metaverse". It looks like the first event of the sort was actually with Alexa (a Kpop artist) a few months back, with 1500 people in the same space

 

By any means, I'm not an advocate to whatever metaverse means, but it a hell of a lot more concrete than what Meta offered so far.

[Blue4130]

19 hours ago, Nonobstant said:

, with 1500 people in the same space

 

 

Their parents basement? 

[NF-A12x25]

On 7/23/2022 at 2:52 AM, ComradeIT said:

This is similar to the reason why people hate Bored Ape Yacht Club and want it to fail. It represents exclusivity, wealth, fame, and nothing else. Class for the classless. A literal virtual Yacht club.

People also hate Bored Ape Yacht Club because of its ties to Neo-Nazis and naziism. The most glaring of which is the logo.

[Senzelian]

Man, I wish I was that cool. Instead I had to go to a real concert in Munich and listen to some noname band. The gitarrist was wearing a top hat for some stupid reason.

 

[Isuck Assimov]

3 hours ago, NF-A12x25 said:

People also hate Bored Ape Yacht Club because of its ties to Neo-Nazis and naziism. The most glaring of which is the logo.

Damn i didnt even know they used a nazi-german Waffen-SS logo for their stupid Apes. Hella disgusting and looking forward to german BAYC owners getting sued for using nazi era symbolism (at least we can hope)

[CephDigital]

Okay from a tech perspective, getting 4500 people on the same server with minimal lag is pretty cool.

 

On the other hand, was NFTs really necessary to make this happen? I bet this could happen without it but I guess NFTs make a nice headline.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

A video of someone who got in the demo.

I would describe it as a MMO walking simulator that uses NFT to authenticate users.

I find it technologically offensive that all avatars look the same, Yuga didn't even bother (or was not able) to have avatars modeled after the BYAC NFT used to log into the demo.

[Nonobstant]

I think my point above was that, yeah, Improbable tried in the Game industry but didn't succeed, and found this metaverse space which has lots of money and hype in which they could use their tech with.

Not trying to justify the links to BAYC or anything like this, but from a business/money/tech perspective it kind of makes sense, I guess.

 

I'm more looking forward to other partnerships they'll have

[spartaman64]

ive had much better "metaverse" parties in vrchat

[Giganthrax]

I don't understand what they were doing at the virtual party, and how the metaverse virtual party is different from something like VR chat. 

 

It's quite impressive that the metaverse was "revealed", like, a year or more ago, and I still haven't the faintest clue what it's actually supposed to be and why anyone should care.

 

That being said, I do hope it paves the way for cheap VR headsets. I'm dying to try out Dirt Rally 2 in VR.

[Avocado Diaboli]

17 hours ago, Giganthrax said:

and I still haven't the faintest clue what it's actually supposed to be and why anyone should care.

The basic gist of the metaverse is that real space is running out and markets are being saturated in the real world. And since colonizing other worlds is still a distant proposition, the metaverse is an attempt to create almost infinite new space for corporations to sell you something. Can't buy a real beach side property? Buy one in the metaverse. It doesn't matter that you're not actually at a beach getting crapped on by real seagulls. That's not the point. Neither is the fact that none of what you can actually buy in the metaverse has any tangible value at all unless you can find a bigger fool who will buy that virtual beach side property (read: NFT).

 

The entire point of the metaverse is to sell you something. Anything. it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it sells and keeps the capitalist economy growing. That's why there are so many old-money assholes among its evangelists. It's the promise of a blank virtual slate where their accumulated wealth gives them a head start to fleece you a second time for all you have but without the need to actually provide a product or service in exchange. That's why those image NFTs are all just variations based on a library of basic elements, it's the cheapest way to just run an algorithm over an array of these elements and combine them in sequential order to quickly generate something to sell. If they could sell you random strings of numbers or letters, they would.

[Kisai]

On 7/25/2022 at 3:31 AM, CephDigital said:

Okay from a tech perspective, getting 4500 people on the same server with minimal lag is pretty cool.

 

On the other hand, was NFTs really necessary to make this happen? I bet this could happen without it but I guess NFTs make a nice headline.

4500 on the same server is probably not the feat you think it is. Many existing games a "server" is not one server, but a cluster of servers, usually 2-3 per map, and when the actual capacity for the map runs out, it spins up another. The more complex the game, and the more customizable the avatars are, the less players a single server can support. For example, FFXIV went through absolute pains to minimize the data transferred to have acceptable trade offs between latency and data losses (synced every 2 seconds, or something like that) and we have never, ever heard of any asset duping or crashing in FFXIV caused by players. There's been instances on new content where the content itself caused a chain of "unable to reach server" because of under-provisioning the instance, thus the 2000 people or so trying to enter X area for a story quest, blocked everyone who needed to get through that area. There is a reason why "Rauhban Extreme" and "Pippen Extreme" were jokes during Stormblood. They were solo instances that people were getting kicked from, and everyone waiting in the "lobby" area blocked everyone else from progressing.

 

A scripted demo, is basically nothing impressive. You can easily fit 10,000 players into a "server" if all you're doing is showing them canned content that requires no interaction and requires saving no avatar state, because their avatars are fixed.

 

On 7/25/2022 at 7:11 AM, Giganthrax said:

I don't understand what they were doing at the virtual party, and how the metaverse virtual party is different from something like VR chat. 

 

It's quite impressive that the metaverse was "revealed", like, a year or more ago, and I still haven't the faintest clue what it's actually supposed to be and why anyone should care.

 

That being said, I do hope it paves the way for cheap VR headsets. I'm dying to try out Dirt Rally 2 in VR.

There is simply no such thing as "the metaverse"

 

There are multiple "VR/AR" environments out there that seek some kind of intermobility with each other, so your "rights" in one, exist in another. Basically think "Ready Player 1", except everything is unique (at least as a serial number.) In theory this doesn't work because there is no standard game engine between any of them. If everything was derived from Unreal Engine 5, that would be less of an issue, but most of these systems are proprietary, and extremely underwhelming and unimpressive compared to what has already been out there for 5 years, let alone 15.

 

It's like introducing AOL chat rooms to someone who was already on the internet and knew IRC. AOL chat rooms introduced nothing that IRC already did. Skype, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Slack, even Twitch.TV are just re-implementations of IRC, again (with Twitch chat, literately being IRC-compatible.) There is nothing unique about Discord. What has changed is the bandwidth people have since then.

 

Yet, every time I see pictures of videos of "VR" spaces that aren't VR Chat, it's like looking at 1997 VRML things. "Next big thing" that fizzled out nearly right away. People don't want 3D "chatrooms" where they can show up virtual assets they "own", people want 3D games that they can show off their trophies in. Just because you bought some NFT, doesn't make you special or interesting. Completing some questline in a MMORPG to get X reward is a story in itself. Having X skin in Fortnite isn't special, you can literately buy all the levels you need to obtain it, if you actually want it. There's no reason to play Fortnite to "earn" anything when you can just buy it while it's "in season", once stuff is out of season, you can usually just buy it anyway. You just need to login when that happens.

 

Honestly. MMORPG's have been experimenting with NFT's before they were called that. Many games had seasonal skins/clothing that were only available if you played the game on those days they were available, and paid for the "premium" subscription or "premium skin" or whatever P2W nonsense the game invoked. If you wanted them after the fact, SOL, sulk about it. But these were never about creating value, hell in most cases, these were just "fixed" color versions of regular items. There was nothing special about them, just the ability to dye the clothing into those colors was difficult.

 

Now imagine that taken to an extreme where you could take your gear from WoW or FFXIV, and play it in a new unreleased game, a game that doesn't know how to load assets from WoW or FFXIV. There is a long road ahead before there is ever a standard avatar system that can be used in more than one game. You have the models themselves, how do you bring a Miqote (cat person) from FFXIV into a game that has no animations for cat ears or cat tails? How do you make them handle a weapon that that they do not have animations for? Does the game engine have a generic biped thrust or parry action, or does that weapon have to come with normalized animations, thus making the player unable to do anything but the weapon's animations with it? (eg generic attack and parry.) A lot of that has not been figured out. What if you give a FFXIV character a weapon from another game (eg any number of guns from a MMOFPS) how would the game engine resolve how to use it?

 

What some games have done, is supported an Avatar system called "VRM" which is a version of GLTF. This format is basically married to Unity, but you can import it into Unreal.  VRM's give you a very basic avatar that can take standard BVH animations, but you usually can't do anything about the textures or shaders of the VRM. It just gives you some expected animation IK's. Most game models are nowhere nearly complicated enough to take BVH animations. Like if your character has a cat tail, wings, or something else a "human biped" would not have, like additional arms, well they just don't animate, or their IK's are just connected in a way that they move as though they were clothing.

 

But this goes back to this question of why the metaverse does not exist. These companies will never agree on a single avatar format that would allow the transferring of assets owned by one company to that of another. We've had a real world version of this happen like 15 years ago with Local Number Portability, where the phone companies no longer "own" the phone numbers, they belong to the user, and thus can be taken from one company and brought to another (and later phones.) Hell the entire way mobile carriers work, is pretty much how a "metaverse" would work. You have a "home register" where your asset lives" and a "guest (roaming) register" where assets created by other games live when they are in your home, and vice versa. Should the company no longer wish to participate (or more likely, no longer wish to operate servers, due to making no money from NFT's themselves), then all those assets instantly vanish, as if they never existed. They no longer have a "home". Which is why finding a way to make assets portable has to happen before any "metaverse" ever exists. You need to be able to "own" those assets outright so that you can move them between games.

 

LNP only worked because the phone system was standardized.

 

Funny enough the anime/manga "Sword Art Online" even had a version of this, where you could import your character from one game to another, and it would save the appearance and some gear that was transferrable. But not everything. You're not bringing magic wands into a gun game that has no logic for how it works. It may let you skin a sniper rifle into a wand, or something, but ultimately it's still a sniper rifle. And you will have people who will whine and complain that their immersion is ruined because of the fantasy assets in their gritty gun game.

 

[BuckGup]

On 7/25/2022 at 5:31 AM, CephDigital said:

Okay from a tech perspective, getting 4500 people on the same server with minimal lag is pretty cool.

 

On the other hand, was NFTs really necessary to make this happen? I bet this could happen without it but I guess NFTs make a nice headline.

I agree hosting this many concurrent users is awesome considering I've never heard of them before. The NFT would work like a ticket into a concert and showing an ID. The ID is serialized and can be traced back to you the same way an NFT is, but virtual. So really if they used it like this then it's a great way of issuing non fraud able ownership. 

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

21 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

really if they used it like this then it's a great way of issuing non fraud able ownership.

NFT aren't a good for anything legitimate.

It takes about six liters of gasoline worth of energy for each Ethereum transaction, and Ethereum is the most popular NFT blockchain, and is the one used by Yuga. Ethereum only works because the network is not used at scale, there just aren't enough transaction slots to process NFT tickets worldwide. Worse, Ethereum throughput is so abysmal that transaction slots are auctioned off to the highest bidder, so during gas wars, transaction cost rutinely raise to thousands of dollars. Yuga mint events singlehandedly caused in the past huge transaction spike on the ethereum network.

Network costs aside, owning an NFT does not prove you should own that nft, theft of BAYC is rampant because they can be sold for a large amount of ETH, which currently can be exchanged for a large amount of real money, and because BAYC holders are surprisingly easy to swindle.
 

Ethereum had planned to move from PoW to PoS nearly a decade ago, and the switch could happen in a few months. The switch didn't happen beacuse it was more profitable for miners to have an expensive PoW network. With the recent crash, miners might be incentivized to sell their hardware and stake ETH instead for a leaner operation. The transition promises to solve at least some of the issues, at the cost of making the network unstable. If Ethereum does switch, it will become cheaper and faster, but there will be frequent outages and rollbacks as the network loses consensus when overwhelmed. Even after the switch, NFT will still be pretty bad at their job of proving ownership. Solana is PoS and Solana can't do it well either.

[dizmo]

On 7/22/2022 at 11:52 PM, ComradeIT said:

Fyre Festival was a music festival held in 2017 and marketed as the most luxurious, expensive experience you could buy. Influencers and celebrities signed up to attend the event in the Bahamas, and when they did, the tragedy was everyone else's gain. Pictures of disaster relief tents set up for accommodations, "gourmet" plain cheese sandwiches for lunch. A group of the richest, most famous people would be forced to live like an underfunded boy scout troop. People loved it. The suffering of people who flaunted their exclusive access to an expensive venue was absolutely rich.

 

This is similar to the reason why people hate Bored Ape Yacht Club and want it to fail. It represents exclusivity, wealth, fame, and nothing else. Class for the classless. A literal virtual Yacht club.

 

That said, I think the basic idea behind it is kind of cool. It would be interesting to see something similar - offered for free or close to free however. There could be an LTT virtual event for Verified Actual Gamers. Other businesses could set up a virtual booth. The benefits could be reserved for actual people who are actual fans and actual enthusiasts instead of simply barred to people who have money. The kind of network they built could be used to build an anti-yacht club. 

 

I don't like the Yacht Club even a little bit, because of what it represents. 

Have you seen the deep dive a person did into BAYC? It's quite brilliant, and shows that it's either very racist, or one of the most elaborate trolls the Internet and ever seen. Leaning more towards the latter than the former. 

On 7/24/2022 at 9:42 PM, NF-A12x25 said:

People also hate Bored Ape Yacht Club because of its ties to Neo-Nazis and naziism. The most glaring of which is the logo.

While true, I think it's part of the massive trolling that it is. It's very much in line with the 4chan "humour." 

[Sauron]

10 minutes ago, dizmo said:

It's very much in line with the 4chan "humour."

Yeah, because 4chan is a haven for neonazis. The two are not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite.

[dizmo]

13 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Yeah, because 4chan is a haven for neonazis. The two are not mutually exclusive, quite the opposite.

I didn't say it was. While there are lots present (documentary points this out), it's also not the only type of people that are on there. 

[Sauron]

11 minutes ago, dizmo said:

I didn't say it was. While there are lots present (documentary points this out), it's also not the only type of people that are on there. 

Right, but the type that would make SS jokes and then lie about it pretending to be outraged are usually the neonazis.

[NF-A12x25]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

While true, I think it's part of the massive trolling that it is. It's very much in line with the 4chan "humour." 

iirc some of the founders were exposed as actual nazis but I’m not sure how accurate that is

[Quackers101]

this is specificly what Improbable have done for years now... with some big events like this.

I guess its news for something NFT like event, but yeah, still the old derps. Emote me in fortnite, when the event drops big chicken nuggets.

[Needfuldoer]

Too bad they had to waste that tech on pointless crypto bro peacocking.

  

On 7/28/2022 at 10:42 AM, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

theft of BAYC is rampant because they can be sold for a large amount of ETH, which currently can be exchanged for a large amount of real money, and because BAYC holders are surprisingly easy to swindle.

 

 

On 7/25/2022 at 10:11 AM, Giganthrax said:

I don't understand what they were doing at the virtual party, and how the metaverse virtual party is different from something like VR chat.

Artificial scarcity and fraud, mostly.