Hey @METADREAMER! Ocean Exile will be at NFTNYC. Would MF like a recap video of this popup? Would love to collab with Lano again and continue to build together!
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YES to an event for wearables
NO to pushing this venue
Why am I downvoting?
I see no solid plan, just ideas for a spectacle that may work, or may fail.
Strong themes that came through in preliminary discussions:
- Need for hard deadlines
- Celebratory vibe
- Blurring the line between digital and physical
- Requires external production help (provided by venue at unknown cost)
None of this requires that we commit to such a physical venue/event, when we have a Metaverse team with a track record for phenomenal digital experiences.
- Deadline remains NFT.NYC. But instead of pooling all human resources into event setup, we could focus on longterm content + assets that won’t just disappear after one night.
- The physical event feels more “push” than “celebration.” Digital event = so many less moving parts to coordinate, which opens up room for actually having a good time.
- MetaFactory has really only been physical thus far. A digital event would clearly show our expanded direction.
- We’re relying on the venue for a lot of production oversight, quality, details, and it will come at a substantial additional cost which has not been outlined in this post. The Metaverse team is experienced and infinitely more flexible when it comes to props, lighting, composable media integration.
Best of both worlds: if the digital event is hosted in a scan of the ideal venue, or something similar, then we could extrapolate for a future physical event with a much clearer sense of how we want to set it up.
Additional thoughts
MetaFactory’s relevance / sustainable growth depends on things that we MUST do–namely, improve physical quality, nail fulfillment, release wearables, think about long term plan (curation game? back-end platform for aligned production coordination?), uplevel our content outreach and maintain a rhythm, hone our design language, figure out stables compensation, among others.
This event will inevitably come at a huge human resource cost, not to mention the non-negligable financial cost. But IMO the financial cost is far second to further pushing out the above mentioned must-do’s.
And for what?
Another party in NYC? Good ones go down well, but are still commonplace especially for our target audience. Bad ones cost reputations.
A metaverse experience is where MetaFactory could really stand out. Decentraland Fashion Week set a very very low bar. Just imagine what the Metaverse team’s magic combined with massive heart will do to set us apart!
In summary:
too many unknowns for hosting a main physical event during NFT.NYC. Huge resource cost and potential downside with little upside. I strongly question the underlying motivation for a physical event when we could do it digitally and play to our strengths.
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In the spirit of honest debate, I want to respond to this… I believe you can’t go back and change a snapshot vote so while I’m responding to you Wes, my response is more for anyone else who’s reading the forum and trying to make a decision…
I apologize if the plan for the event was not explained adequately but I will summarize the highlights in a few bullets.
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It’s a 13 hour event, which allows us enough time to showcase our technology during the day and have a fun party at night. The daytime portion is actually the most important part so the goal for this is the furthest thing from just throwing a cool party for ourselves.
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Unlike previous phsyical pop-ups, this will be focused on showcasing our metaverse team’s work and the wearables standard. A room with floor to ceiling projections on all walls is a perfect canvas for our metaverse team to create an experience that is actually blending reality with the digital world, which is what we’re all about.
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I imagine the event being integrated with a simultaneous digital event in the Metaverse. So while being a dope physical event, it will also be a standalone digital event occurring on the Metaverse platform of our choice.
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We will sell only 1-2 exclusive items, IMO ideally a shirt designed in collaboration with a hyped NFT artist. Physical item will obviously be bundled with the wearable that the buyer could redeem to their wallet… This is a scenario where we can actually create secondary market demand for a Metafactory wearable with people who aren’t currently aware of Metafactory, and that is something very important to consider. We don’t have to deal with a ton of inventory like how it was at ETH Denver…
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The event will feature NFTs by various artists for sale via IRL art, with a portion of revenue being shared with Metafactory.
I hope that summary gave some clarity at least on how the financial cost of the event will likely be offset by sales of both our physical item bundled with wearables & direct NFT sales at the event.
It is true that certain amount of detail needs to be fleshed out still for structuring the day, in terms of programming. I imagine we will have speakers, dedicated timeslots to demonstrate various aspects of the tech… Some amount of time would be dedicated to other partners like Webaverse or Kong…
Deadline remains NFT.NYC. But instead of pooling all human resources into event setup, we could focus on longterm content + assets that won’t just disappear after one night.
It makes a lot of sense to think about this event as a video & photo content production as well. The piece Ryan made about us at ETH Denver was awesome, but a video of this proposed NFT NYC event would be like that on steroids. It would cast us in a good light & add some pop via the high-end production value of the space, and the assembled crowd. Same goes for photography of the event, which would easily replace the photoshoot that is currently on our website. These things are assets with longevity, and honestly so are all of the materials we would prepare in advance of the event to showcase our technology.
Additional positives that haven’t been mentioned:
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Possibility of press coverage. It’s never a guarantee, but digital fashion is getting a ton of buzz right now and we deserve to be in the mix of that mainstream attention. Although we’re not the biggest name YET, it is very easy to spin a narrative for us as the face of an open source Metaverse, the real open internet alternative to the Zuckverse. The event & resulting photos would make that story something that a major NY publication could actually run (not as a paid piece).
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VC’s will be around. If we’re doing a raise, (which I don’t even personally want yet because I need to accumulate more ROBOT xD) a successful event could really increase our perceived valuation at a crucial moment.
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Inclusion of non-crypto people at our event. This is a big intangible and will lend some credence to the ‘fashion’ side of what we’re doing.
Downsides of a digital-only event:
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Inaccessible / Irrelevant to a vast majority of people. If we’re going to be successful in our goals, we need to bring new people into the space. Cannot get stuck in a web3 bubble.
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Release of our wearables will happen anyway but take place in a less exciting context. Only “power-users” will be able to truly use our wearables at first, so we need to visually demonstrate their utility and do outreach to onboard as much as possible.
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Incredibly fast pace of crypto narrative cycle, project lifecycle means that we are dealing with a ticking clock. We have an early mover advantage, strong ties with the Ethereum community… Something to capitalize on sooner rather than later.
Overall, I understand where you’re coming from, but I have a very different opinion. I see the event as a low downside, a good deal resource-wise when you consider that the event generates amazing content and also has a chance at turning a profit, and asymmetric upside with a lot of potentially amazing outcomes from doing this.
My thing is, as far as a solid alternative plan for NFT NYC, apart from this, I haven’t seen anything proposed. The truck was cool but was also expensive and we can’t do the same thing two years in a row, plus it’s all physical. A digital event can happen anytime and shouldn’t be considered a replacement for a presence at a physical NFT conference in New York. I agree that it would have been nice if we had this idea in Denver in February and immediately began making moves to plan and organize it. But with exactly 2 months, we have enough time.
I say we SEND IT and I think we’ll be vey happy we did (insert relevant Wayne Gretzky quote here) 
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Yea it would be awesome to collab with you guys again for the event! We could def use help with the whole interview booth setup (potentially live-streamed) and getting nice footage of the event itself as well.
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Stellar! How about we schedule a call or video chat to discuss the vision and how best we can execute it?
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Hi folks, VR crew has recreated Lume studios in VRchat according to the dimensions from the floor plan. Positions of the projectors should match as well. Planning to do a cool intro sequence into it like this to showcase it:
Going to add a storage room with a bunch of pickupable items so that we can arrange / rearrange the space live in the virtual.
perhaps we can host an event there next week or stream it on the next vprod call (monday 1est) or community call (thurs 4est)
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super fire… When we have the event there, let’s capture some screen recordings & use those in the trailer video for the event. thanks for throwing this together so fast, amazing work
Thanks man, can you get some b-roll from the physical venue in the meantime for a promo teaser?
Yeah, i asked Marcel to send in the telegram group. I know he has a video walkthrough of the spot when it’s empty and i’m hoping he has a good one of it during a live event also but i’m not sure. We shall see.
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Marcel just posted one in the telegram group. Said he’ll record another one at their next event on Thursday. He also said theres some good clips you could recycle from their instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumestudios/
We’re stocking up the storage room and giving colliders + physics to everything so that we can arrange / rearrange the venue space quickly together. We’re adding furniture and objects based on references of what we know is available to rent at the physical studio.
Side effect: the space gets trashed real fast
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MF x M3 Mixer
- Event photography: https://imgur.com/a/iD2iCjv
- Metaverse Makers Mixer lightning talks
- Blog post from emotionull about Friday event
- Awesome thread: https://twitter.com/squarebush91/status/1525660594254266373
Highlights:
- Few AV issues that got quickly resolved after the VRC event
- Having props like cheese is a life saving icebreaker for some
- The world hop afterwards was dank, like going to Denny’s after a rave
Metadreamer with a dank nug lol
Got some 360 content with my avatar
This guy had INCREDIBLE worlds and stories that he shared with us after the event
Mixer event format is checked off list, next event will be a field trip where we document builders talking about their worlds or avatars and test projecting those videos onto the screens.
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TV displays
Opportunities to do some fashion shoots with these + physical model at event with virtual avatars in different worlds displayed on screens behind them.
TV Wall
- cryptovoxels
- vrchat
- craftopia
- ??
- webaverse
- neos vr
- valheim / VRAST / etc
These are just ideas, more ideas here: https://hackmd.io/@XR/avatars
TV Tower
Suggestions welcome
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The tv tower looks cool!
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Studio Updates
TV tower and wall moved to entrance of the world, animated cameras positioned there as well
Storage room before entering main floorplan. Hidden by default, can spawn all items by shift+\
Here’s how the fully UV wrapped video screens look in the world. We can spawn cube pedestals by hitting the b button. Nothing is placed on them at the moment.
If we wanted to import / model more rental equipment the link is here. We didn’t have time this sprint since even pre-modeled assets still require a fair deal of preparation to use in the project.
Digital screens
The screens have been UV mapped so that videos can be wrapped in a continuous way to match the spec of the physical venue.
Youtube videos aren’t great because there’s no way to specify the quality of the video by URL for using the vrchat player. We can point to our own mp4 files though, and 360 equis work nice as well (which we can record in vrc).
Avatar switcher
Avatar switcher where people in the world can change to different MF / virtual production related avatars.
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Eventbrite Link!! 
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Updates 6/4/22
Tshirt merch wearable completed 
Website promo WIP
Going to have all the METAPHYSICAL related posters link to the eventbrite page and wrap up the site for deployment next week.
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Great work everyone, very well done on the 3d / storefront website Sith! You did an incredible job!
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Jin do you want me to send you the eventbrite flyer poster in that format too? What aspect ratio is it?
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Backlog updates
Apologies for the week gap, been in crunch mode preparing for the event and this thread has for awhile served as documentation that’ll come in handy for post production.
UV mapping
Previous notes (expand below)
Just want to mention that this is how the video looks like when exporting into the VRChat version of lume studios. It’s 9600x1080 scrunched up into a 1080p video essentially (whatever youtube plays by default but if you self host it can default to a high resolution like 8k automatically).
Watch on YouTube: Lume Anamatic Rough 1 - YouTube
We’re able to pretty quickly preview the wall screens if all merged into one video. It looks cool when one side is content from the digital world and the other side is video from the physical event. We should lean into this setup for a VR encore event, or perhaps use the floor / ceiling to blur reality between them.
This UV map proposes that in the future instead of 1 render texture target we could have 1 per projector screen. There are certain limitations with the video players that we used that prevented us from doing such in VRchat.
Planning
We all synced up on Figma and Zoom with the venue owner to do some floor planning of how the space might look throughout the main events.
Boomboxhead then modeled out the VR space based on the floor plan to give us a preview of the layout spacing.
We added some props on top of the pedestals to create conversation pieces that help tell the narrative of what MetaFactory does from the physical to interoperable digital goods.
Here’s a preview of how the physical and the digital venue look next to each other on the morning of the event before building the physical event began.
Videos
For much of the past couple weeks we focused heavily on producing video content for the event, down to the last second before the show. We’ve adopted Frame.io to upload and get rapid feedback which was really clutch. Frame was fast to comment and scrub through and integrated directly into adobe software for editing.
Sometimes while editing me and boomboxhead ran into space issues because of how big large resolution projects can get. Only later we found out that Lume uses VJ software like Resolume and supports NDI which gave us lots of power and flexibility on how we can display content onto the screens.
Overall we uploaded over 160gb of digital content to Frame. I recorded tons of 4k 360 video to see how they would look displayed in the physical venue, although I don’t think we got to use any for such purpose.
I recorded a few looped videos for the downstairs VIP blackroom screens:
MF Store
We wanted to pre-record some content as a plan B + a few practice rehearsals for presenting the vision. In one night Boomboxhead basically forked the MF shop project into something almost totally new / revamped.
Before
After
For a presentation we gathered in the lounge area. I was a 360 camera to capture in 360 from various angles (so we can test later how they look in Lume studio setup) while boomboxhead asked Drew (green screen) questions as DAOFREN and a guest cat joined us. Clips of this can go into a post-production documentary.
During production boomboxhead worked on a 3D model photo studio that was inside VR. With a hotkey we can switch between camera views and take pics / video from our desktop screens. More deets will be in a separate thread (fashion shoots related).
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