Virtual Reality Platform Uses Digital Currency For Marketplace Micro Payments

With the virtual reality market predicted to be worth US$30b by 2020, it’s no wonder Venture Capital is pouring into the industry from the likes of Ashton Kutcher and Samsung. With bitcoin and blockchain technology companies also benefiting on the investment front, a collision of the two industries was inevitable as companies reach for a slice of the pie.

Aside from attracting Venture Capital, the digital currency industry has always been inherently drawn towards crowdfunding. The creators of an end-to-end virtual reality (VR) content creation platform, Voxelus, recently announced a 30-day crowdsale of the cryptographically secure in-game token, called “Voxels.”

According to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Martin Repetto, Voxels will be the only method of payment on the platform’s upcoming Content Marketplace for VR assets, which is set to launch in early 2016. Items for sale on the market will include animations, immersive worlds and games, some of which will be made by users of the platform itself.

The public sale will commence on the 2nd November, and is being handled by ShapeShift. The European based exchange is no stranger to token sales, EverdreamSoft partnered with ShapeShift for their Spells of Genesis BitCrystal token sale, in July.

“We understood how important it was for our supporters that we accept multiple cryptocurrencies during the Token Sale. In order to allow this, we have decided to partner with ShapeShift which offers over 40 different altcoins.”
— – Shaban Shaame, EverdreamSoft CEO and Founder

The Voxelus platform was designed to allow anyone to create Virtual Reality content, a current lack of which is a sticking point for upcoming VR platforms. Voxelus Creator, a 3D design app for PC and Mac, will allow users make new VR experiences and virtual spaces, all without writing a single line of code. Voxelus also features a stand-alone VR player app, which works on desktop PCs, and plays the content on the Oculus Rift or Samsung VR.

“The Rift is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Whether you’re stepping into your favorite game, watching an immersive VR movie, jumping to a destination on the other side of the world, or just spending time with friends in VR, you’ll feel like you’re really there.”
— – Oculus

The idea of virtual reality has been around since before the 1950s, traces can be seen in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s short story, “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” which is recognised as the first work of science fiction to mention VR.

The current generation of headsets in development, including the Oculus Rift, are arguably a real-life version of Pygmalion’s Spectacles. The Rift came into being through it’s own crowdfund, a kickstarter campaign which raised just over US$2m, in August 2012. Just two years later, Facebook purchased the project for US$2b. Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder and CEO of Facebook, said at the time that, “Virtual reality was once the dream of science fiction. But the internet was also once a dream, and so were computers and smartphones. The future is coming and we have a chance to build it together”

Leveraging the buzz around Rift, Voxelus seized the opportunity to announce the public crowdsale at the Oculus Connect 2 developer conference, which took place three weeks ago in Los Angeles. The event, which focused on the Oculus Platform and pushing virtual reality forward, attracted over 1000 engineers, designers, and creatives from around the world.

Preceding the public sale, Voxels have been available to strategic partners and cryptocurrency investors in a private sale, where they received 1200 Voxel per bitcoin, with a minimum purchase of 100,000. During the public crowdsale, taking place on the site sale.voxelus.com, buyers can acquire 1000 Voxel per bitcoin in the first 24 hours, followed by three tranches of 900, 800 and 750 Voxel per bitcoin. There is a minimum order of 100 voxels, selling for US$25 – US$30. The sale will last 30 days or until 31.5 million Voxel are sold, representing 15 percent of the total supply, 210 million.

Voxelus is not the first digital currency company announcing a crowdsale to fund a VR project this year. Wendell Davis arranged a private sale in late January, with assistance from crowdfunding platform Koinify, for project Vizor, “the Youtube of virtual reality.”

Vizor released their own token VIZR, for the sale. Davis, who is the co-founder at Vizor, explained that he is a big believer in crypto tokens and thinks they will pair well with VR, in an interview with BraveNewCoin.

The plan for VIZR sounds much the same as the the plan for Voxels. Down the line, the VIZR token will be tradable for anything, from virtual furniture to a film screening in a virtual theatre, “the possibilities are endless and no coding is required,” said Davis. “The VIZR token can also be used to tip content creators, and purchase advertising and other premium features in the Vizor ecosystem.”

The Vizor team have also experimented with Adam B.Levine’s idea of token controlled viewpoints in VR. “If you had a certain token within your wallet, say we called it ‘Vizor Door’, then a door would appear in your world,” said Davis.

Adam B.Levine wrote a blog exploring this topic, called Token Controlled Viewpoint (TCV) Genesis, Characteristics and Early Use Cases. In it he explains that Token Controlled Viewpoints are an application of Token Controlled Access (TCA ), where users gain access to content by holding a specific token.

“Each piece of information, or block of information, is associated with a token(s) and quantity(s). If the quantity is zero, the information is viewable to users with or without accounts. If the quantity required is more than zero, the information is not loaded unless the address(s) associated with the user contain the required token(s).”
— – Adam B. Levine

Vizor appears to still be in Beta mode and have not made any official announcements since their private crowdsale, although their twitter account occasionally posts updates, the last one was May this year.

Voxelus, however, have taken a slightly different approach with their public sale. The team have attracted not only ShapeShift, and the influence that Erik Voorhees brings with him, but also Halsey Minor, chairman and co-founder of Voxelus and chairman and founder of the exchange Uphold.

Uphold, formerly known as Bitreserve, announced that Voxels will be the only digital currency other than bitcoin that is supported by the platform. "Early in my career, I was influenced by the visions of writers such as Neal Stephenson in books like Snow Crash that envisioned worlds with both virtual money and virtual reality,” said Minor. “Making science fiction science fact is the kind of thing every entrepreneur lives for."