Jadu announces that it will release thousands of avatars created with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as it prepares for the augmented reality metaverse.

By the end of August, the Los Angeles company plans to sell 11,111 avatars, or AVAs, that can be proprietary thanks to authentication via the blockchain, Asad J. Malik, chief executive of Jadu, said in an interview. with GamesBeat.

The sale of NFTs is part of a larger ambition to create a real-world AR gaming experience and ecosystem with a continuous narrative that brings players back to a place that blends animations and physical reality into a kind of reality narrative. mixed.

Jadu has raised a lot of money to date ($45 million to date, including a $36 million round led by Bain Capital Crypto) and has also sold a variety of AR items in the past, such as virtual hoverboards and jetbacks. The new avatars will be able to use those items to maneuver in the game world.

The 3D playable avatars are called Jadu AVA and will be the center of the game. In the story, the avatars are robots that have crash-landed on Earth through a mysterious portal from another world. Each AVA belongs to one of the 5 types Blink, Rukus, Disc, Yve and Aura.

In the minting of the NFTs, the partners will provide collections. Those partners include FLUF, Meebits, VOID, Chibi Apes, CyberKongz, and CryptoWalkers. Such partners have helped the company gain momentum for its AR items in the past.

In the past, the company has partnered with Elton John to auction off a one-of-a-kind Rocket Man Jadu Hoverboard NFT for 75 ETH (Ethereum cryptocurrency), the largest NFT hoverboard sale to date, with all proceeds donated to Elton John. AIDS Foundation (EJAF). He was also associated with seven-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton; Grimes; Snoop Dogg; visual artist Mimi Onuoha and NFT curator Trippy on their NFT hoverboards.

Community focus

Malik said the company will use the proceeds from the NFT sale later this month to create the AVA Community Treasury, which will use the funds on behalf of the community.

The avatars are designed to work with augmented reality, since they were created for AR. The game will have several chapters in a story. Avatars will be able to perform parkour maneuvers. And so little by little the company will launch its ecosystem.

“The community element is really key,” Malik said. “It’s like treating our members and our players like citizens.”

Around $5 million may be made from the sale of NFT avatars, and the company will use it to establish a community treasury, where the community can discuss how to spend the resources. Instead of focusing on a game with millions of people, the company is now focused on getting 10,000 or 20,000 hardcore players from the start.

origins

Malik immigrated to the US at age 18 to attend college and debuted an AR project at the Tribeca Film Festival and founded Jadu about seven years ago. Malik’s mission is to reverse the trend of digital experiences dismantling our connection to the physical world.

The company has a whole team of people in Pakistan (they are paid in US dollars and thus doing well despite the instability in that country) working on blockchain technology. Jadu has also hired some people who have been laid off at other tech companies in the current recession. The company has about 50 people.

“We’re attracting people who want to make a proper AR game,” Malik said. “The main type of AR we’re doing is focused on gameplay. AR has always been a first-person medium where you play with things. What we’re doing is making it a third-person game. So instead of you being the player, you have an avatar and you see that avatar in your room and you control it with an on-screen joystick.”

He added: “And the avatar goes and does all the interactions on your behalf. The avatar can ride a hoverboard, ride a jet pack and go around the wall. A lot of the AR forms we’re building are focused on the avatar going through different interactions. And our first step in this is really releasing a bunch of games ourselves, so we’re currently building the first season of our world.”

Initially, Malik worked on AR experiences for film festivals and some of his work is taught in AR and hologram courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. She released a project for Magic Leap in 2019 and created holograms for musicians.

“We were messing around with AR narration,” Malik said.

And now it’s building an AR gaming platform. Over the past two and a half years, the team founded Jadu with the intention of bringing a richer form of AR technology and narrative storytelling to games on mobile devices.

“Over the last year, we’ve switched to Web 3,” he said. “We released our own collection of jetpacks in AR and then we released these hoverboards that worked in AR. Nothing ever made sense. When we started seeing NFTshappen, we thought this was a new way to capture value.”

When NFTs started to take off last year, the company began to focus on AR games in the Web3 space. Players will be able to play in AR as their own 3D avatars. Jadu raised around $5 million through NFT sales and also saw around $30 million in secondary transactions for its jump bikes and hoverboards.

“We’ve been working on this for the last six months or so,” Malik said. “We have a lot of resources behind this.”

Prepared for tough times

I asked if the company had encountered resistance in its NFT sales. Malik said that he agreed with the criticism of NFT companies that have misbehaved, releasing shoddy items or scamming.
“I completely agree with the gaming community’s criticism of NFTs,” he said. “We are not a traditional game company. We are fundamentally an AR company and our mission is always to bring new forms of AR to people in ways that are highly experiential and immersive. We’re about to build forms of AR that haven’t existed before.”

As for the crypto winter, Malik said that the company has a track for the next three years or so. That gives the company peace of mind knowing that it has time to develop its products properly and wait for gamers to embrace the AR multiplayer market.

For the most part, the company’s target audience is people who are already part of the crypto and NFT ecosystem. They are familiar with crypto wallets and are early adopters of the technology.
“We’ll get to a tipping point where this will feel really good, it will feel ready for a larger mainstream audience. And we will transition to them at that time,” Malik said.

In the next 30 days, the company will implement tools that players can use to make proposals for others to vote on and so on. And once the NFT avatars are released, the company will release new chapters of their stories for players.

Malik said he hopes the movement to create interoperable NFTs and an open metaverse will progress, so that the company’s own avatars can be used on more platforms and apps. But that may be further into the future for now.

“In theory, that’s what we’re looking for as well,” he said. “At the same time, I want to say that it is not a high priority. It is something with which we are ideologically aligned. But if another virtual world has 600 users, we’re not going to spend our time creating assets for that world right now.”