The Bored Ape Yacht Club launches the Otherside metaverse. Here’s what happened at the 16th of July demo and the details of the Litepaper!
On the 16th of July 2022, 4,500 users participated in the first Otherside demo. LAND owners in Otherdeed explored the Bored Ape metaverse for the first time on 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 project’s Litepaper was also published on this occasion. The challenges of the near future will be mainly technical. How does Otherside intend to develop the technology of the metaverse?
A Metaverse on trial
Otherside is a metaverse that is still under construction, and will be tested in stages by Voyagers, i.e. the owners of Otherdeed, before being opened to the public. The release will therefore be progressive and 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 “journeys”. 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. The second and third phases have not yet been presented.
The Otherside demo and various tests are only available to selected developers and the 4,500 owners of the metaverse. For them, on the 16th of July, the adventure began by following an oversized boring monkey into the beating heart of the metaverse, the “Biogenic Swamp”. The first test was carried out 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’s 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”. At the moment, the metaverse appears partly as a galaxy and partly as an archipelago, with islands ranging from the Biogenic Swamp to the Infinite Expanse. These islands are none other than the various 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: soul, 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 draft version of a classic Whitepaper, sets out the basic principles and roadmap for 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 the community: “In order to plant the seeds of a successful community, we begin the development of Otherside with the 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 includes the integration of a governance system to manage peaceful coexistence between users. In an atmosphere of trust, communication and shared goals.
The technological challenges of Otherside? The same as the other metaverses
The Otherside Litepaper’s analysis is particularly interesting as it highlights the challenges of technological innovation that affect all metaverses in general, in order to make the sector more 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 specialising in infrastructure for video games and interactive Web3 events. Otherside’s roadmap also includes offering an interoperable metaverse that can be accessed on all devices. Interoperability means the ability to create elements such as NFTs or games that can also be used in other metaverses outside Otherside. This is the function of the Otherside Development Kit (ODK), which is a set of programming tools for creating interoperable characters, objects and locations.
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 game industry. Improbable decided to use its expertise to build architectures capable of supporting the information and data density of the metaverse. Thanks to Morpheus, the technology developed by the Improbable 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 mobile 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 NFTs, since its launch in May, has seen sales of over $1 billion, and the ApeCoin token after the 16th of July demo increased its volume by 52%.
