On July 16, 2022, 4,500 users participated in the first Otherside demo. LAND Otherdeed owners explored the Bored Ape metaverse for the first time during the “first journey.” The feedback was positive and the Otherside roadmap promises great things, according to the participants the success is overwhelming. The Bored Ape Yacht Club inaugurated Otherside and the Litepaper of the project was also published on this occasion. The challenges of the near future will be mainly technical. How does Otherside intend to evolve the metaverse technology?
A Metaverse on trial
Otherside is a metaverse still under construction, and will be tested in stages by the Voyagers, i.e. the owners of the Otherdeed, before being opened to the public. The release will be progressive and the features will be unlocked one by one. More precisely, Yuga Labs, the laboratory from which Bored Ape and Otherside originated, envisages three phases, divided into several “voyages”. Each of these journeys will allow the user to explore certain areas of the metaverse, interact with the virtual environment and become familiar with the elements and mechanisms of this digital world. Although Otherside is primarily an open world in which it is possible to build and play without constraints, in these test phases, the game experience will follow a pre-established narrative. The first phase is divided into 11 parts linked to the mysterious appearance of an Obelisk in the Otherside universe. For the moment, the second and third phases have not been presented yet.
The demo and the various tests of Otherside are only available to selected developers and the 4,500 owners of the metaverse. For them, on July 16, the adventure began by following an oversized boring monkey into the beating heart of the metaverse, the “Biogenic Swamp”. The first test was performed on the avatars, in actions such as dancing, running, jumping. The Voyagers will be responsible for reporting bugs and giving critical feedback on key aspects of the metaverse development.
What does the Otherside metaverse look like now?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club has finally opened its doors in Otherside, the place where “normal rules don’t apply.” For now, the metaverse appears partly as a galaxy and partly as an archipelago, with islands stretching from the Biogenic Swamp to the Infinite Expanse. These islands are none other than the different LANDs of the Bored Ape metaverse. Otherside is populated by indigenous creatures, the Koda, and relies on four types of elements that shape its world: Anima, Ore, Shard and Root. Otherside is also full of hidden objects and materials to collect.
The Otherside Litepaper: community and interoperability first
The Litepaper, a beta and provisional version of a classic Whitepaper, outlines the basic principles and roadmap of the Otherside metaverse. On Twitter, the team explained, “this document serves as an initial guide for Otherside. It covers the basic principles of the platform, the prerogatives of developers and the possibilities of creating collective communities.”
The first fundamental guideline is precisely the centrality of community: “In order to plant the seeds of a successful community, we begin the development of Otherside with Voyagers, our first supporters and followers. Here, Otherdeed LANDs becomes the key to participating and co-creating the final version of the Metaverse. So Voyagers are actively involved: “this deep connection with our most passionate supporters and creatives will be key to understanding what features, moderation, tools, and support our community needs as we develop this ecosystem together, from the bottom up.” Otherside’s roadmap also calls for the integration of a governance system to manage peaceful coexistence among users. In an atmosphere of trust, communication and shared goals.
The technological challenges of Otherside?
The same as the other metaverses. Otherside’s Litepaper analysis is particularly interesting because it highlights the challenges of technological innovation that affect all metaverses in general, in an effort to bring the sector into the mainstream. The main challenge concerns the processing of data to allow large numbers of people to interact simultaneously in the metaverse: “the metaverse does not work without a crowd.”
To enable thousands of people to participate and interact at the same time, Yuga Labs relied on Improbable, a company that specializes in infrastructure for video games and Web3 interactive events. Otherside’s roadmap also includes offering an interoperable metaverse that can be accessed on all devices. By “interoperability” we mean the ability to create elements such as NFTs or games that can also be used in other metaverses outside of Otherside. This is the function of the Otherside Development Kit (ODK), which is a set of programming tools for creating interoperable characters, objects and places.
Improbable’s experience in virtual worlds
With Otherside, Bored Ape Yacht Club also inaugurates its collaboration with Improbable. Since 2012, this British company has been working on multiplayer video games and collaborating with the most important production companies in the gaming industry. Improbable decided to use its expertise to build architectures capable of supporting the information and data density of the metaverse.
Using Morpheus, the technology developed by Improbable’s team, Otherside will be able to support the rendering of thousands of unique avatars and handle thousands of audio streams. In addition, Improbable has developed a machine learning-based system to access the Bored Ape metaverse with any device, even cell phones with less than perfect connections.
Otherside’s “first journey” ended on a positive note, leaving the Voyagers satisfied! The Bored Ape metaverse also continues to grow economically, LAND in the form of NFT, since its launch in May, has seen sales of over $1 billion, and the ApeCoin token after the July 16 demo increased its volume by 52%.
