Yuga Labs’ Otherside ‘First Trip’
White Star Capital Digital Asset Fund - newsletter #91
Yuga Labs invited 4,300 players—Otherside landowners known as ‘Voyagers’—to take the first trip into the Otherside, their immersive, online platform navigated by users’ ape avatars.
Otherside Land Deed
Yuga Labs - the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club - held the initial NFT sale for the Otherside in late April 2022. The NFT collection is called ‘Otherdeed’. The Otherdeeds are tokenised land plots that contain game elements, each one coming with a set of resources and some including a ‘Koda’ (beings for which a lore has yet to be shared, presumably rare in-game characters). Players will be able to harvest resources and use them in the Otherside game. Yuga Labs designed Otherdeeds to evolve over time based on users’ in-game decisions.
The Otherdeed has exceeded $1B in sales volume, making Otherdeed the NFT project with the 7th highest all-time sales volume (three of the six collections with higher lifetime sales volume are also Yuga Labs collections - CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Mutant Ape Yacht Club).
The ‘First Trip’
Yuga Labs invited 4,300 players — dubbed ‘Voyagers’ — for a first-look demo and tour of the immersive online platform called the ‘First Trip’. The First Trip marked the opening of ‘Phase 1’. Voyagers are all owners of the Otherdeeds NFT. Yuga Labs will be conducting further demos allowing third-party developers and Voyagers (providing an opportunity for Otherdeeds holders that did not participate in this demo) to experience the platform and essential aspects such as the software development kits and in-game building tools.
The platform is currently only open to voyagers, all prospective Otherside players must first embark on, or view, a First Trip to be able to participate in the game. Yuga Labs will invite Voyagers to take part in an 11-part storyline in an extension of phase 1.
The demo exceeded expectations with Voyagers being able to explore the immersive play area in their Chrome browser with full spatial audio, real-time voice chat, and seamless motion. The Voyagers joined a virtual lobby and then were directed through a portal to a stadium where they could test the avatar dynamics (running, jumping, dancing, and emojis - comparable to Fortnite). Following this the Voyagers were able to explore a few other in-game areas, allowing them to interact with other players as well as the in-game environment which featured creatures that would attack Voyagers if they got too close.
What’s next?
Following the Otherside tech demo, Yuga Labs published a litepaper for the Otherside, detailing the “foundational principles of the platform, capabilities of its developers, and possibilities for community co-creation”. Gordon Goner, the co-founder of Yuga Labs, tweeted that Otherside is in direct competition with Web2 giants, but that “the future will bend towards the open, interoperable metaverse, with assets that are user-owned (not rented) and able to move off the platform”. The litepaper expresses Yuga Labs’ commitment to interoperability, designing The Otherside to allow for integration with any metaverse that adopts their models through creating a set of open object standards.
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