Diego Di Tommaso on OVER's AR metaverse with NFT based spatial domains

0:00i'm ashton addison from blockwest capital for investmentpitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have diego d tommaso co-founder and ceo of ovr diego welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time hi everybody very nice to be here thank you for hosting me likewise i'm interested in learning more about the metaverse and the ar metaverse

0:22and how it's expanding and how ovr is playing a part in that so let's dive straight into that can we i'd love to start off our conversation with hearing a little bit more about ovr what are the solutions that your team is bringing into the metaverse space and then we'll dive in from there yeah so thank you very much so yeah basically with ovr what we are building

0:42it's an augmented reality metaphors so our vision is really to merge the physical and the virtual world together seamlessly and the way we do that is combining the two technologies that are blockchain for ownership so for the vector layer of the metaverse and geolocalized augmented reality so if we look at our platform it can be seen as made up of three main layers so

1:07we have a base layer that is an ownership layer so we break down the word in hexagons like the one that is so behind me and basically are hexagons of 300 per meters that are met one-to-one to the physical world so these hexagons basically are special domains so just like in the web you have a web domain and once you have it you decide what will be the content on the web page in

1:28our case you have these geographic coordinates so for example you own the hexagon of the colosseum once you own that you can decide what kind of augmented reality experience will be connected to that location and with your mobile phone you will be able to visualize that kind of experience so far we sold more than 800 000 of these virtual lens and all of those are nfts

1:54at the beginning they were on ethereum blockchain now we move everything to polygon so that basically now you don't need to have any worries about the gas anymore so this is the base layer so the ownership layer and the layer that gives control to people on these metaverse the second layer that we have is a mapping layer and maybe i will deep dive on that later on but basically

2:16this allow to actually scan locations and get a very precise localization of assets in space and this for us is a very crucial point of all of all the infrastructure third layer is a builder so that once you own those lands you can actually publish content on those so we have two kind of coders to just drag and drop 3d files or nfts that you own 2d 3d files gifs

2:46you can actually take these assets and publish it in space and also we have a more expressive tool that is a unity plugin so if you can code and i mean unity is like off of the market for 3d developers is for unity basically you can actually code logics and even games on this platform and this is it i mean for the platform at a high level and i think it also is

3:12important to mention that when you are in this metaverse you are never a passive spectator but you're there with your own avatar so from a selfie of your face or a picture we generate a 3d mesh of yourself and basically you can interact with other avatars with voice so you can speak with people you can meet people you can have a kind of telepresence with your avatar and

3:35also if you have an iphone for example not only they will see you your lips moving but also we trace the face fascial movements so also your avatar will have the same expressions that you have stream live and we believe that also this is very powerful and a good way to on board people inside the metaverse i mean maybe you heard about the concert that there was a fortnight

3:59with 28 million people looking at travis and just to give some reference i mean at woodstock there was one million people or at coachella coming back to our days before covet 1.3 million people so the opportunity to bring people together with this kind of events these beautiful events where you participate with avatars is huge and so that's why also

4:21we put a lot of effort in building also this feature on the platform incredible diego thank you for explaining that all and there's so much to unravel as you mentioned in a short amount of time the ar metaverse sounds like the next step from these decentralized metaverses like decentraland and sandbox bringing more functionality and like integration into

4:44the real world i think it's it is part of the next step but i'm curious from your perspective do you see it as the next step or is it something different and how are you going to start onboarding the next 100 million people into this next step of the metaverse well so first of all we have big admirers of the central and actually the idea of building

5:08ovr was born actually also been inspired by what the central line has been doing the real differentiation here is in ar versus vr so we believe that vr will be big and there are many use cases for vr but at the same time we believe that there is a clear technological trend that is bringing us to ar because at the end of the day we will not spend all

5:35of our lives with some headsets that is totally occlusive so that basically take us out of the physical world but we will keep living in the in the physical world also so we believe that augmented reality will be the new way will actually interact with this with information and so we believe that in the next future also as soon as some affordable augmented reality classes

6:02will be out there this technology will be very very pervasive so the reason why i mean we decided to build this company and invest in this specific field is because we see the potential in vr we believe that is a very big niche but we believe that really ar will take it all in terms of information fruition and so i think that right now there is big incumbents in the vr

6:30space in open meta versus but in ar i mean the space still still need to be occupied and i mean that's why we are here actually yes definitely and you know with what i find super cool is the spatial domains that you spoke about where you're purchasing square meters of land inside of ar are and you mentioned that there's already eight hundred thousand sales so

6:55that's incredible to hear that there's so much interest already and i'm guessing that there's is it the whole world and like it's very small percentage that's actually been sold so far and yeah that's that's yeah so yeah basically if you break down the world in hexagons or 300 square meter square meters theoretically you have 1.6 trillion hexagons out there so i mean

7:20the amount that was sold that was is very small but of course not all of the locations in the world are interesting there are the deserts and the oceans and so on so our estimation is that there are at least 100 million locations that are interesting in the world and this comes from open street map or google maps and if you look to how many locations are characterized like point

7:42of interest the number is around 100 million so yeah basically we believe that one percent of the interesting locations have been sold for the moment of course the landmarks are the ones that have been going first but yes to answer to your question also yes all the world is on sale so you can buy your backyard to test it out you can buy something everywhere you think we

8:07just reserved 5 000 lands and that and that was only for marketing reasons for example we reserved the tour fell and we sold it with a big ocean back six months ago that went out for one hundred eight thousand dollars so but the idea is really that this is a platform to link augmented reality assets to space so it's not that we are trying to do the cash grab

8:34with selling very high prices i mean the idea is that we give you a system to connect assets to space and also because of that the price of one of those lands is quite cheap because the base price is ten dollars so it's not that you have to invest i don't know one eight or zero point one hit to basically buy one land is very accessible so they are really the real idea that we

8:56had at the beginning when they start with this company was actually giving away to people to publish content elementary reality very easily so with no big barriers to entry and this also helped us a lot with traction and because also the amount of owners of this lens is quite important because right now we have 28 000 owners and maybe in the normal world this may

9:20sound not so big but just for comparison again if we think about the centrum for example oh sorry or also sandbox that have an even more honest they have a 20 000 owners of course the price of their lens is much more higher and so on but i mean this strategy really on boarded a very big community on this on these metaverse and also this contributed to have also a lot of

9:44creators we have 12 000 of those lands where content have been published from creators so this is really working very well so far incredible and are you are you incorporating a financial ecosystem where you know the land is nfts and is there any other kind of d5 functionality or uses that you can make out of those nfts

10:13to capitalize on them while you own them yeah so basically those lines like i was as i was mentioning are the base layers so this is ownership player but over this you can build many things so of course the final thing you're going to build are experiences that i mean you can sell you can monetize or you can just make it for fun or for art or whatever but in the middle layer of this

10:38there is this mapping layer that i was mentioning to you so basically what this layer is we call it not to earn and why we call it like that because basically this is an activity that you can do in our metaverse so the point is that when you do your localized mental reality like us or like anybody that wants to do something similar you have a big problem so the problem is

11:01that everybody relies on gps and gps is quite okay for some use cases outdoor works with if you really want to merge the physical and the virtual world you need to go beyond this you need to have more precision so the way to achieve that is to scan locations so to make maps of locations so the way you do that is we have a software on our on our app

11:30where you go around the world you take pictures of locations and from that you generate a map and this map again is an nft and this nft is very valuable because basically is a 3d map of a location that allows the system to locate assets in space with 20 centimeters accuracy so not only you have the geographic coordinates but you also have the 3d data of the location and basically

11:55this data is valuable because it can be both by us as we are as a company that maybe want to buy those data from the lands can be bought from the owners of the land they want who have their land maps so for example let's say that i bought a land in new york i will not go there to map it i will send somebody and we say look if you map my land i will buy your nft that you generate

12:19and basically monetize that and also basically we see this data to be very very important not only in ovr because of course they will be used for precise location but also for any company that will ever want to have precise localization because there is no technical way out of that if you want to have precise localization you need to first map the locations

12:44and so basically somebody says that we are trying to do a kind of google maps it's the kind of google maps open google maps so they centralize or google maps owned by the people that do the actual job but instead of collecting just pictures and doing like the 3d bubbles where you look around and that's it we really recreate the 3d structure of the

13:06location so and that's the reason why we call it map to earn because basically it's an activity that you can do in our metabolism to actually earn so not only play to earn that actually we also enable with a treasurant for example but also doing something more probably valuable or something that creates valuable assets that you can own definitely and i know that geolocation

13:29and mapping is valuable data so is that map to earn is that already live on ovr so right now it's in alpha version so we have 400 people that are testing this but in the next month we are gonna release it in beta version so basically everybody will be able to use this system so it's kind of complex because basically from these pictures we do two

13:55things one we generate this 3d map that you will need to be able to visualize and actually interact with our builder and two we train these neural networks to basically allow to for precise geolocation so but this is the on the back and on the front end basically we have a ux that guts you on where to take the picture so right now we are fine tuning

14:18that because basically the raw data that we get is the most important part so we are making sure that this ux really guides you in the in the right way to get this data but i mean one month is out and we are very excited to see how the world community will behave and also we are very looking forward for that because we have a game right now that is called

14:41It's a treasurance and we call it treasurer software as a service because not only us we use it but also we on board many other nft projects to do that and in the last year we sent people to 1.6 million locations to actually collect those assets and earn these methods so we would like to tell to these players look there is another way that you if you want you can

15:04monetize in the middleware so we're really eager to actually give another opportunity to participate in this meta version and getting something valuable out of that and so yeah that's we're really looking forward for that yeah that's super cool diego thanks for explaining that i'm looking forward to seeing how that is gamified it actually does sound really fun to go

15:27mapping and collect rare nfts so with all of that said and you're working on this with the upcoming launch i want to look at further down the road you know it's i feel like this is a project that is going to take many years to mature because it will just continue to grow as more people adopt into the metaverse where do you see ovr you know three to

15:52five years down the road and how the metaverse industry is evolving and how ovr is evolving with it well so two okay of course this is a long period but i can give you what are the main the core values that they are we are going to look for in developing in this in this coming year so one is the fact that ovr need to become a dow at least i mean the most

16:18important decisions once the layers that i mean the base layers are settled need to become i mean governed by the community that actually owns the assets so the lands and the maps and the assets that are published over there so in the next months we're going to publish a dial that will allow more and more control on what is happening on ovr

16:40and second a core idea that we want to develop more and more is the cross metaverse compatibility so i mean i believe that with web3 we have a great opportunity to basically change the way that people interact i mean with digital assets so not anymore captured by big companies but owned by the community and this is the base and so this is enabled by what

17:05three nfts and so on but that's not all basically to win this war against the i mean the incumbents we need to generate a lot of valuable content i mean bill gates wrote it i mean i think was 2007 when he said that content is key and he was right i mean that time i mean he saw it very very far away so the point is that we need to be able to build

17:28a lot of interesting content but we have a secret secret weapon also on that i mean we as interested as web 3 industry the secret weapon is that nfts are open assets so we can port it between meta verses and so if assets generated in different platforms can live in other platforms we will win this battle to actually with incumbents so a big goal for us is to make

17:54our platform as welcoming as is possible for assets from other platforms for example something that will be seen very soon is that basically we allow for example to control with the joypad and so on all the assets that exist on sandbox for example because sandbox is a great example of as open assets all the animations of the 3d assets are available over there so

18:19basically if you comply to their standard you can actually onboard the asset that was built there in your metaverse so also we are coming out we with standards so that if you want to build an asset that by default works on the vr you know how to do that another thing we are working on that direction for example is a standard for clothes so if you want to have a

18:41clothes that works on the center and sandbox and also vr we also give you the standard that you can comply with so you have an nft that can actually cross through materials so these are i mean some directions that we really want to push towards in the development and on in the next years and this is where we see i mean the future of four metaverses actually

19:05both ar and ai sorry well they are and we are sorry yeah very cool diego i completely agree i feel like the metaverse space needs to work together and be able to communicate with each other most importantly to transfer assets and that will just make it grow that much faster so very exciting that your team is working on that yeah thank you thank you

19:29so what is the best way for people to start getting involved with ovr right now in terms of the metaverse and then with the with the map to earn i think that the best way to do that is start downloading downloading the app trying the experiences maybe trying to participate to these treasures play with it see how it works and then of course if you are more like a builder

19:54some some people that is creative and so on try to engage also with actually our sdk try to publish content be to the events because we are also organizing a lot of virtual concerts with djs and live i mean performers that are playing so really i think that the best way is starting from the app and then and then you will understand what we are building and if

20:18it's something that is interesting for you then i mean you can try all of the other things that we do so maybe you can buy the land and so on but i think really the best way to see is to see the products and so understand what that is probably the best way better than words to understand what is our vision and what we are building and of course then you can go on our

20:39website and please be careful because there is a lot of scammers out there so just use the links that are official links both telegram we have a lot of support on telegram also i mean we have discord so all the channels that are official and come from the website you can trust those so please don't go to the wrong ones but yes on the website you will find

21:03everything awesome thank you so much diego i will leave the official links and the social links in the description box below as well all the best on everything ar metaverse and let's follow up in the near future thank you very much it's a big pleasure