Hi everybody! I'm brand new to this forum and fairly new to crypto in general.
I write a blog about social VR, virtual worlds and the metaverse, and since February I have been investigating blockchain-based virtual worlds. I wanted to talk a little bit about one of the blockchain-based virtual reality projects that I found particularly interesting.
I've looked at a lot of blockchain-based VR projects over the past 6 months, and many of them are still pretty much vapourware (e.g. Decentraland, which you won't even be able to visit until the end of this year at the earliest). But I was able to get a half-hour guided tour of Virtual Universe, led by Jeroen Van den Bosch, VU’s Chief Creative Officer and co-founder. If you're interested you can watch the whole video here:
https://ryanschultz.com/2018/04/28/exclusive-video-a-guided-tour-of-virtual-universe-with-jeroen-van-den-bosch/After my tour, and seeing what you will be able to do in Virtual Universe, I started following the project more closely.
In their whitepaper, VU is described as “part game, part social network, and part social creation platform, blending elements of Minecraft, Second Life and Simcity with innovative artificial-intelligence technologies that drive engagement”, and that is an excellent description of what it tries to be. It’s an intriguing mix of virtual world and MMO/MMORPG where you can collect wood, chop it up, and start a fire, feed worms to the AI-controlled bluebirds, or just explore your surroundings and interact with other users. As I understand from their recent Letter to the Community, explorers will be able to gather resources in the countryside in order to sell them:
Outside the city is our highly immersive LivingVR world, created from the ground up to feel as immersive as possible. Teeming with virtual life, beautiful sceneries and waiting to be explored by you. Let’s say you are exploring further than you have before and suddenly you discover a cave behind a waterfall. Inside it, you find rich copper deposits. You know copper is a desired resource in the city since its an ingredient in many crafting recipes for a wide variety of building blocks. You mine the copper and haul it back to the city. Once there you list your copper on the auction house and collect the cryptocurrency once someone wins the bid on it.
And it is not just resource gathering that can be done in VU, there will be plenty of quests available for you and your friends to experience exciting adventures with plenty of loot to be had!
Last week, Virtual Universe unveiled their brand-new game portal website, where you can register for an account, and read up on the game's backstory. The website is at
https://vutoken.io/ and you can also register for an airdrop of their VU token. VU also offered free apartments for the first 1,000 people who registered, and they were all snapped up within 48 hours! There are still some penthouse apartments available, for those people who choose to purchase VU tokens. (People from Canada, the U.S., and China are legally forbidden from buying VU tokens due to current cyrptocurrency regulations in those countries.)
Here's the backstory to the game:
You’re awake! Good. We have some catching up to do.
Earth as you know it is gone. Global warming and endless warfare left the planet in ruins. But humanity survived! Sort of… spaceships could make the journey to new planets, but human bodies couldn’t. They can’t survive any exposure to space radiation. The solution? House human consciousness in identity crystals, or IDCs for short, After all, isn’t consciousness that what makes a human, human?
So welcome to Uruk, the first city on the planet Raetis. For the past two years, your robot counterparts have been building Uruk. The ship you arrived on now serves as the city’s power source, which sits at the city center. We call this The Core. You’re joined by the thousands of other humans who continue to live through consciousness alone. It’s alright to not feel like yourself. Your chip has been activated inside an avatar, the way all humans now exist. So what’s next for you on this new planet? That’s for you to decide.
Explore Uruk with your friends. Sell your goods and services for real cryptocurrency. Even try on a new avatar for size - your IDC is compatible with any avatar here in Uruk. You aren’t confined in the borders of Uruk, either. The city relies on rare resources for power, which need to be uncovered and mined. You can help out, or simply explore the rest of your new home planet. But remember, most of Raetis is still a mystery. We can’t be sure what creatures or dangers lie amidst the planet’s rocky and cavernous landscape. The farther you venture from Uruk, the riskier your adventure becomes, so be careful!
It’s your life, do what you’d like. Welcome to your world.
Well, I hope this is enough info to interest you in the platform. I'm really looking forward to their beta launch sometime later this summer!
