The Metaverse Podcast - A Future of Fluf, with Aaron McDonald of Non-Fungible Labs
Primer: The NFT space has been invaded by bunnies lately. Where did these bunnies come from? Check out Jamie Burke's interview with Aaron McDonald on Fluf World, the home of these bunnies. Don't miss it. There's some alpha leak as well.
Background
Been in tech for more than 20 years
Started his career as an engineer
Moved up to the business and product side
Went to corporate venture and eventually moved into the start-up world
Started this venture business called Centrality in 2016 where they build a connected venture portfolio where each venture adds something that's missing from the rest of the portfolio
Each portfolio company would experience a snowball effect and could scale faster
60 portfolio companies in 3 funds
Started Non-Fungible Labs to accelerate ideas into the Metaverse space and bring exciting new content formats
Co-Founders For Non-Fungible Labs
Met Brooke Howard-Smith through investing in his company. Brooke's company, WeAreTENZING, specializes in the management of content creators
Allows them to engage with audiences as they would have access to sports stars, influencers, and content creators
Had a chat with Brooke one day and decided to pool their resources to build something in the NFT space
They were joined by Alex and Jesse. The latter is a creative genius and is behind a lot of the art that comes out of Non-Fungible Labs
Fluf World
10,000 Unique 3D Animated Rabbits
How The Project Started
Jesse had a side project he was working on. Made bunny theme art as he was inspired by the bunny he has at home
Concurrently, they were also working on a real world NFT street art treasure hunt. Connected with street artists around the world to create some unique street art and put QR codes on them
The team would release clues on the location and people would self-organize and go on these treasure hunts
The first person who found it could scan it and claim it as their own
Jesse revealed his work to the rest of the founders and they were blown away by it
Alex was a master of lore and created a whole world behind these characters
Combined them together. Did a lot of strategic thinking about how to do it as an avatar project but give it an infrastructure and creative background that could be sustained over the long term
Added music element to the avatars as well
"We were connecting with really cool street artists around the world, getting them to create some unique street art, put a little QR code on that. And then we'd release clues as to the location of it. And people will then then self-organize and go on these treasure hunts."
- Aaron McDonald
Flufs
Fluf holders can download the media content — music files, images, backgrounds
Fluf holders have the full commercial creative license of the Fluf they own
Their community is creative. Within a few weeks, they had people create over 50 remixes of the tracks into new songs
Their 3D avatar will be fully rigged
Will be launching a new campaign early next week where they put up these fully rigged models. There will be a competition and $100,000 is up for grabs for the community to create a short film featuring these characters
Once the competition is over, they will release everyone's full bodied avatar. Comes in multiple formats:
Cinema quality (like Pixar quality)
Voxels
This allows Flufs to exist in multiple worlds and interact with multiple content formats
There will be a breeding game coming up soon
Role Of Music In Fluf World
Inspired from Bored Ape Yacht Club. The creativity of the community propelled its growth and the branding around it
Took that into account when they were thinking about the architecture of Fluf
Created FLUF as a dynamic NFT. It is more of a storefront for users as a personality/brand rather than a piece of art
Has a feature for people to change the music/audio file and background behind the Fluf. Turns Fluf into a dynamic, responsive content platform
"What that does is allows your Fluf to become this kind of dynamic, responsive content platform for everything from podcasts through to brand advertisements, through to album releases through to, you know, you name it in terms of what you want to do and show to the community that's relevant at that point in time."
- Aaron McDonald
Breeding System
Game has already begun for breeding
It is not a mashup of profile pictures
Tradability and swappability of Fluf backgrounds is important for breeding as they need to be in the space place for breeding to occur
"If you can imagine Flufs going on a journey to breed, just like we humans do. You kind of have to be in the same place in order for yourself to meet your breeding partner. And the same is true for Flufs."
- Aaron McDonald
Breeding as a play-to-earn game. Fluflets are produced from breeding and they have utility because people will be buying them to play-to-earn with them
Fluflets will also have a game for themselves. It will be an interactive real-time game where people can play and earn from the Fluflets
Their Metaverse
When producing their game assets, the team is future-focused and looking at where the Metaverse is going
Still, they also made their Flufs compatible with existing metaverse spaces
Brought in heavyweight players to help create a metaverse world that can accept high quality assets. Their metaverse is known as the underground burrows
The underground burrows will evolve into a world space that can accommodate Flufs in their full glory as well as other metaverse characters and collections
Existing metaverses are dull and boring. They will be changing the game and making their metaverse more interactive
There will be intelligent NPCs that exist in these spaces that will make it rich and vibrant for users
Burrows
Will be a VR-first experience
They will be launching on mobile first, followed by PC. Mobile was selected due to its large user base
Will be dialing up the quality for the PC version
Resolution will adapt to the device that users have
Flufs will be able to interact with different experiences, games, and content. There will be social connectivity between Flufs
Purchase of burrows will come with some land/public spaces in the metaverse
Burrows are private spaces that can be customized for more private engagements
Land/public spaces will be built by the team so that it will be rich and high quality
"So have these two layers, this kind of above the ground, let's call it public space as a metaphor. And then this kind of below the ground, which is your private space that you can build out and, and give people the rich experience up top and the customized experience underneath."
- Aaron McDonald
There will be installations that people can put things on a piece of land they own
Public spaces can be connected to private spaces/burrows, without needing a link through to another metaverse
Altered State Machine
Altered State Machine: A decentralized protocol for creating ownership of an AI agent via an NFT. It can be used to create agents for games, financial applications, virtual assistants, online worlds, and many more. These AI agents can compete with each other, interact, and support human actors.
Altered State Machine gives them 2 new "Lego Bricks" to build with:
The ability to own artificial intelligence through NFTs
The ability to inject a personality into your NFTs
This creates a rich set of unique intelligences that can exist in these metaverse spaces
Team is working with 3 intelligence projects to kick things off
Some will use their intelligence as an asset to generate wealth for you
The next stage would be to put these characters into the metaverse space to create the richness those spaces are missing
Mycelium Token
The token will be the binding thread that links everything together (e.g. the world, the land, play-to-earn, multimedia social format)
Token will work not just within Fluf world, but across worlds that leverage the altered state machine
Alpha Leak On Art Associated To Burrows
Can be found on their YouTube channel here
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