AMA Highlights: Realm
By Daniel Dal Bello, Director.
June 28, 2021–8 min read.
On Friday 25 June, we welcomed Matthew Larby and Joban Thomas, co-founders of Realm into the Hillrise Group Telegram chat for an AMA.
Realm is blending augmented reality (AR) and blockchain into their very own metaverse.
By bringing together AR and gamification, REALM empowers users to not only create their very own “microverses”, but also customize and monetize them with NFTs.
As these microverses are connected you can also visit other people’s microverses, exhibits, games, and more, while bringing along your pets for good measure.
Realm’s elaborate toolset is being built on the open-source decentralized game engine Godot, giving strategic advantages regarding decentralization and censorship resistance.
We were eager to learn more about the unique ambitions of Realm to give shape to the metaverse of the future.
In this post, we have compiled key questions and answers from the event.
Raymond Reijnders
Thank you for joining us today! Excited to learn more about how you’re bringing together AR, a metaverse consisting of linked portals, solid tools built around royalties, pets, and much more.
Can you please tell us a bit more about yourself and why you have decided to start working on Realm?
Joban Thomas
Hey, I’m Joban and I have been involved in tech start-ups and crypto for many years. I love building great products with a super clean user experience (UX) and elegant solutions. I take the role of CPO and Creative Director and have also been a CTO and technical consultant for large brands and start-ups.
I’ve always been really into the digital economy, digital art, music, and gaming, so Realm feels like a culmination of all of these.
Matthew Larby
Hey everyone nice to be speaking with you. My name is Matthew Larby, I am the founder and CEO of Realm. I have had previous successful exits in the Web2 space, where we built an internal GPS system to connect people with the buildings around them, we eventually sold this to a tech billionaire with a large property portfolio.
I’ve been invested in blockchain since 2013 and spend a lot of time wondering how to build decentralized systems that improve upon their centralized competitors. We built Realm to create a metaverse that has a better economy than existing metaverses.
So, for instance, you have to buy land in Decentraland, etc. and we think this fundamentally inhibits the growth of a metaverse so we are taking a different approach. We are also heavily focused on mobile.
Rowan Zwiers
We clearly see you have a very interesting background together. Since you’ve together co-founded and sold Unified Technologies Ltd. (2014–2019). We are very curious about your past experience, what it’s like to work together, what lessons you’ve learned that might benefiting your chance of success with Realm.
Would you like to share with us your past experience and the origin story of Realm?
Matthew Larby
It’s good to work together, Milan our CTO has also worked with us at Unified and on other projects. Joban went to Cambridge University so he has an excellent network of generalists who we tend to lean on. You want generalists at the beginning of the project as you can solve problems much faster. It’s also great working with people you know as the relationship won’t ever break, we’ve already had all the stressful times in the past.
And yes, Realm is sort of something we thought about in the past when we were using AR and positioning people inside physical spaces.
The main aim of Realm is to free digital art from an e-bay style website and allow people to actually experience the art in a unique way. The natural progression is the metaverse and advanced tech like AR.
Rowan Zwiers
Joban, in being the CPO and with a strong affinity for UX and elegance, it must be very exciting to build a suite of VR creation tools with tactile 3D objects, space manipulation, and more.
The concept of Realm is both exciting and difficult to grasp, from an experience point of view it might be reminiscent of Dreams, from the traditional gaming industry on the PlayStation VR.
Are you familiar with Dreams? What are the similarities and differences between the toolset you envision creating and what we often see nowadays?
Joban Thomas
It’s funny you mention Dreams — a friend of ours Bogdan built some algorithms at Unified and has been a key part of the Dreams team ever since! I think it’s an amazing product, and we are definitely drawing inspiration from their work.
In terms of the experience for builders, we want to cater to experts and also will use a template approach so that pretty much anyone can create a unique space with very little technical knowledge.
We’re also working on asset pipelines, so for instance we are working with some high profile artists in order to allow them to bring their 3D work to life inside Realm — and this actually largely involves making sure that we can import all sorts of format and make them explorable worlds within the engine.
Matthew Larby
Yes, this is actually really interesting as so many NFT artists have these 3D scenes that they render as an image or video. So focusing on this allows their fans to experience their art in a whole new way.
Raymond Reijnders
You have decided to build Realm on the open-source decentralized game engine Godot, which differs from conventional engines such as Unity or Unreal.
This gives some strategic advantage as it makes Realm more censorship-resistant.
However, developing on such a novel engine might also bring its own challenges, can you share your reasoning for choosing Godot and how has development been so far?
Joban Thomas
Yes, it’s a unique choice and many people have made the same comparisons to Unity and Unreal. Of course, these are great engines, however, Godot is actually a really powerful and versatile engine, and development has been really smooth so far. There is definitely a lot less in terms of templates and blueprints out there, but we have a team of amazing Godot engineers and some who have transitioned from Unreal and Unity without difficulty.
There’s also the advantage that it's very lightweight, so file sizes are dramatically smaller than those from Unreal and Unity, and we are also able to build for mobile, web, Windows, Mac, and eventually VR. So it’s given us a lot of flexibility, and of course, it’s open-source so there’s a really engaged and talented community around it.
Matthew Larby
I’ll talk more philosophically about this. Censorship resistance is extremely important and given the current trend to cancel everything we felt it was necessary to choose open source.
We are handing 25% of the tokens out to the community in return for building, see it as being paid to build inside Realm, if we used Unity they could just destroy all those people's efforts, in effect dropping a digital nuke on an entire metaverse.
Raymond Reijnders
Do you feel like there’s still too little attention for open-source development within the blockchain and gaming spaces?
Matthew Larby
There is definitely more focus and money on centralized gaming. We think this will change though as you combine ownership via tokens and NFTs. The idea of Realm really is very decentralized, ultimately if you think about most metaverses they are one large space with a bunch of set rules you must all abide by.
Realm is a collection of microverses where the creator gets to set the rules, the style, and all functions. I know of realms being developed that have no visuals and are entirely sound-based, it’s pretty trippy, to be honest.
Creators want to own and create how they want to create, give them a sandbox and they will create. Kudos to Sandbox, great project.
Rowan Zwiers
Your NFT features will also interact within the game engine which enables new forms of functionality to the NFTs, we’re curious about that.
Could you walk us through how this process works and what special use cases this enables?
Joban Thomas
Sure, so we have a few ways that NFTs will interact — one of the key ones is in the DNA of ‘Realmies’ — the creatures that have their genetics encoded into the realms. We generate these using Chainlink VRF for key properties, and then as they grow and interact with the environments and other players their genetics begin to evolve. Then when two creatures are placed into a breeding contract, we assimilate the DNA of the parents with more randomness from Chainlink, and the end results in a few generations down the line nobody can predict exactly!
Rowan Zwiers
One of your challenges in that was finding the fitting token standard to implement with all of this.
As you’ve chosen ERC-1155, how does creation in the ERC-1155 token standard (developed by Enjin — crypto-gaming platform) benefit Realm as opposed to other token standards for its specific product?
And do you believe that ERC-1155 is sufficiently fitting and robust to stand the test of time within your models or will you continue to look onward for a novel, possibly more fitting tech?
Joban Thomas
We feel that ERC-1155 is a more forward-thinking standard and indeed was created to enhance the shortcomings of 721 that the Enjin team encountered.
One big problem has been user experience, however thankfully Metamask now supports ERC-1155, as well as Trust Wallet so we are making progress.
We will always keep looking ahead for the latest standards however and are very curious about what the Substrate / Polkadot ecosystem will bring to the table eventually.
Matthew Larby
We are focused on creating utility for creators and unlocking new revenue opportunities for them in the metaverse rather than redefining the NFT standard. That being said there is a need for all NFT platforms to adopt a Unified royalty standard, Realm is aligning our royalties with OpenSea for this reason.
Rowan Zwiers
We’re seeing a lot of community outreach activity over the past few months, amongst which a heavy AMA schedule, quizzes, polls, meme contests, sharing contests, partnering with NFT communities, and more.
Can you tell us more about your community strategy and the importance of it for your success?
Matthew Larby
Up until now, we have been focused on speaking to a broad community through AMAs, things have gone well and we have grown the community fast. We are now entering a phase where we will announce partnerships with other large NFT projects and famous NFT artists.
Community is everything as you need the metaverse to feel vibrant and full of life. It’s the reason we have gone with a microverse approach, as artists now can invite their audience into their realm to make deep and meaningful connections with those fans for drops etc.
Joban Thomas
25% of the entire supply of $REALM will be distributed among the community over the next five years. Combined with the dispersal of platform fees, the Realm Foundation has the financial power to provide real benefits to the NFT gaming and art community.
Realm is committed to open source and will be offering grants to content creators to build art, games, and experiences using the Realm engine.
Raymond Reijnders
As technology allows for more and more expressive freedom, undesirable forms of expression, something many artists encounter on a daily basis, could become a point of concern.
Have you considered this as a concern for the metaverse reality being created?
Matthew Larby
Yes, for sure. We are making a community moderation panel and a way that players can report certain pieces of content. Content that seems to be offensive may end up in the “badlands” where fewer people will see it.
It’s a fine line though as we can’t censor information.
We are doing extensive tagging to then allow the user to filter what they want to see, autonomy seems fundamental to blockchain.
Rowan Zwiers
What makes you personally most excited about the concept of a metaverse and what are the major opportunities and challenges you see it will bring?
Matthew Larby
We are working on a concept that will make you feel like you have torn the fabric of space-time and actually there is this digital universe just there all you need is a computing device to merge with it. In a year or maybe two the hardware will change to glasses and suddenly this connection will feel a lot more fluid.
Apart from that some of the artist concepts are out of this world and so fun, characters that they are going to bring to life for the first time ever in the metaverse, it’s honestly limitless.
Joban Thomas
I am just really excited by the creativity of the space — I see Realm developing far beyond what any of us has imagined, simply by providing people with the tools to build and monetize on their own terms.
I strongly believe in the future culmination of digital art, games, music, and identity. There will be many challenges along the way, in terms of copyright, security, the crypto-market in general, but in the long run, the creativity and freedom it promises will outweigh them and digital worlds will become a large part of people’s lives.
Hillrise Group supports ambitious Web3 startups with early-stage venture capital and fundamental research.
Realm is a cross-chain, community-driven open-source project that encourages collectors and creators to express their artistic vision.
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