Virtual Reality Meets Bitcoin With Vizor.io – Crowdfunding Announced

Vizor, often referred to as ‘YouTube of Virtual Reality’, announced today they will be launching a crowdsale with their own token known as VIZR on Koinify in January 2015. BraveNewCoin speaks with Wendell Davis, co-founder of Vizor for further information regarding their unique idea.

“Vizor is VR for everyone, in your browser — a YouTube-style content portal with a powerful integrated authoring toolset that makes it simple to create and distribute Virtual Reality (VR) experiences without expensive hardware or specialist technicians”.

• Vizor.io

Wendell Davis co-founder at Vizor.io describes the Vizor team’s background as an emergence from the underground culture “demoscene”. Here skilled programmers compete to create the most impressive graphics or audio visual displays with the least amount of code or smallest file size. Davis describes the ecosystem as an arena in which, “It was really like code as art, or code as competitive art”.

Six years ago, Davis worked on a project called Splice, which was a tool for making music online. This was a platform for open source music, which Davis describes as an endless flow of online collaboration and creativity.

The same team that worked on Splice, moved onto a hobby project which was a similar idea, but focused on web based graphics. The aim was for users to not have to write code and be able to put pieces together such as models, textures and themes with simplicity and speed.

Four months ago, Davis decided he wanted to invest his time to fully understanding Virtual Reality. He got his hands on an Oculus Rift, the Virtual Reality Headset and in his words described it to be, “Quite amazing, I didn’t expect the effect to be that good.” Immediately Davis headed to Helsinki to meet with his team to put plans in motion for Vizor, as Davis believed it was inevitable that this platform would happen.

“Coincidentally, the very same week, Antti Jädertpolm, one of the Vizor partners came across that Chrome and Firefox had just released browsers that supported the Oculus Rift sensors. This was a big deal, as it meant that web technology was suddenly available to virtual reality hardware”.

– Davis

The team took this as a sign, and went full speed ahead focusing all their attention on virtual reality, applying the knowledge of their prior projects. Over one weekend the team managed to get the sensors built into the tool which they had designed as a hobby three years prior. They found they were able to create and explore environments right away. “The rapid prototyping nature of it was really awesome”. said Davis

With Vizor anyone can create and host their own virtual reality experiences. Using the You-Tube style approach Davis advises that these environments could be anything the user desires. “It could be a game, it could be an environment that you sit inside of, it could be an interactive experience, it could be an application or it could be a Metaverse [a collective virtual space] like Second Life”.

Second Life took the world by storm in creating exactly what the name intends to relay: A second life. The approach from the Vizor team is quite different. Users can self-create real-time generated 3D content, as opposed to a predesigned Metaverse and the possibilities appear to be endless. “It’s really about the ability to toggle through those experiences in a YouTube like interface paradigm”. – Davis

In addition they dropped in support for Counterwallet (Counterparty’s wallet) addresses and were able to analyze someone’s wallet. They discovered that if a person held a certain token, it would allow them to take a certain action within the VR environment. The Vizor team proceeded to create a small VR test world.“If you had a certain token within your wallet, say we called it ‘Vizor Door’, then a door would appear in your world. This is along the lines of Adam B. Levine’s idea of token controlled viewpoints in context to VR.” – Davis

Adam B. Levine wrote a blog called, Token Controlled Viewpoint (TCV) Genesis, Characteristics and Early Use Cases. In it he explains:

“Token Controlled Viewpoint (TCV) is an application of TCA [Token Controlled Access] to information content (forums, posts, comments, bonus content, bloopers, walkthroughs, tips, tweets, supplemental blogs, RSS feeds or other data) on basic web pages.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,

Davis is a big believer in crypto tokens and thinks that VR and tokens can pair together quite well. Early next year Vizor will be releasing their own token VIZR, which will initially be a fundraising token.

Speaking further, Davis remarks that, “The crowdsale helps us build an active and enthusiastic community that will be viewing, sharing, liking and commenting on these creative, immersive experiences. VIZR token can be traded for anything from virtual furniture in an apartment tour to a film onscreen at a virtual movie theater—the possibilities are endless, and no coding knowledge is required. The VIZR token can also be used to tip content creators, and purchase advertising and other premium features in the Vizor ecosystem.

Funding for VIZR tokens will take place in late January 2015.  From their press release, Vizor are expecting to raise ‘a considerable amount’, and anyone will be able to purchase VIZR tokens on Koinify using bitcoin.

“The Vizor team is looking to drive mainstream adoption for cryptocurrency and virtual reality – two technologies that represent the future of computing, and make perfect sense when combined.” -Koinfy Founder and CEO, Tom Ding.

Adding, “We’re excited to help Wendell and his excellent team, along with early adopters, to power the future of immersive content creation.”

VIZR, the user-created crypto asset will also enable secure, trust-free transactions at high speed and low cost. Vizor will provide the Vizor Create Store, their online market place, in which the tokens can be spent.

“If you want to create a VR experience, you may not want to create it all from scratch. Instead, you can go into the Vizor Create store and use the token to buy already created elements. Like lego bricks, you can buy a table, or a carpet element, or some code, which lets you animate them, much like Second Life.” said Davis

As users will be able to create, edit and publish using the Vizor Create Programming editor, which is directly accessible on their web browser, Davis believes that the niche VR enthusiasts will be interested. However, they are not necessarily the target market. Davis feels that the target market is that of artists in the digital space. “It is about the Global creative community. People that are into digital art, people interested in making games, VR enthusiasts and possibly crypto people.”

Visor further announced that they have plans to bring digital asset exchange Melotic on-board who will be the first to offer the VIZR token for trade.

“We evaluate a number of promising projects, and VIZR stands out as a unique digital asset application with a great team,”

-Melotic Founder and CEO, Jack Wang.

“The potential for an in-browser VR experience combined with an exciting new digital currency is unlimited, and we are thrilled to provide users an opportunity to acquire and trade VIZR tokens through Melotic.” – Vizor