Jadu launches NFT avatars as it prepares for the AR metaverse

Jadu announces that it will launch thousands of avatars built on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as it prepares for the augmented reality metaverse.

By the end of August, the Los Angeles company plans to sell 11,111 avatars, or AVAs, that can be uniquely owned thanks to authentication via the blockchain, Jadu CEO Asad J. Malik said in an interview with GamesBeat.

The NFT sale is part of a larger ambition to create a real-world AR gaming experience and ecosystem with a continuous narrative that keeps players coming back to a place that blends animations and physical reality in a kind of mixed-reality storytelling .

Jadu has raised a lot of money to date — $45 million to date, including a $36 million round led by Bain Capital Crypto — and it’s also sold a number of AR items in the past like virtual hoverboards and jetbacks. The new avatars will be able to use these items to maneuver through the game world.

The 3D playable avatars are called Jadu AVAs and they will be the center of the gameplay. In the story, the Avatars are robots that have crash-landed on Earth through a mysterious portal from another world. Each AVA belongs to one of 5 types Blink, Rukus, Disc, Yve & Aura.

In the minting of the NFTs, partners will ensure collections. These partners include FLUFs, Meebits, VOIDs, Chibi Apes, CyberKongz and CryptoWalkers. Such partners have helped the company gather momentum for its AR items in the past.

Previously, the company partnered with Elton John to auction a unique Rocket Man Jadu Hoverboard NFT for 75 ETH (Ethereum’s cryptocurrency), the largest NFT hoverboard sale to date, with all proceeds donated to the Elton John AIDS Foundation (EJAF). It also collaborated with seven-time Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton; grimaces; Snoop Dogg; visual artist, Mimi Onuoha and NFT curator, Trippy on their NFT hoverboards.

Community focus

Malik said the company will use the proceeds from the NFT sale later this month to create the AVA Community Treasury, which will use the funds on behalf of the community.

The avatars are designed to work with augmented reality, as they were built for AR. The game will have different chapters in a story. Avatars will be able to perform parkour maneuvers. And then little by little the company will launch its ecosystem.

“The community element is really key,” Malik said. “It’s like treating our members and our players as citizens.”

About $5 million could come in from the NFT avatar sale, and the company will use it to set up a community fund, where the community will be able to talk about how to use the resources. Instead of focusing on a game with millions of people, the company is now focusing on getting 10,000 or 20,000 hardcore players in the beginning.

Origin

Malik immigrated to the US at the age of 18 for college, and he debuted an AR project at the Tribeca Film Festival and founded Jadu about seven years ago. Malik’s mission is to reverse the trend of digital experiences that dismantle our connection to the physical world.

The company has a full team of people in Pakistan (they are paid in US dollars and are doing well despite instability in that country) working on blockchain technology. Jadu has also hired some people who have been laid off at other tech companies in the current downturn. The company has approximately 50 people.

“We’re attracting people who want to build real AR games,” Malik said. “The core type of AR we do is focused on gameplay. AR has always been a first-person medium where you play with things. What we’re doing is making it a third-person game. So instead of you being the player, you have an avatar and you see it the avatar in your room and you control it with a joystick on the screen.”

He added, “And the avatar walks and does all the interactions on your behalf. The avatar can ride a hoverboard and ride a jet pack and do a wall flip. A lot of the forms of AR we’re building are focused on the avatar going through various interactions. And our The first step on this is really launching a bunch of gameplay ourselves, so we’re currently building season one of our world.”

Early on, Malik worked on AR experiences for film festivals, and some of his work is taught in AR and hologram courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. It released a project for Magic Leap in 2019, building holograms for musicians.

“We were playing around with AR storytelling,” Malik said.

And now it is building an AR gaming platform. Over the past 2.5 years, the team founded Jadu with the intention of bringing a richer form of AR technology and narrative storytelling to games on mobile.

“Over the last year, we’ve transitioned to Web 3,” he said. “We released our own collection of jetpacks in AR, and then we released these hoverboards that worked in AR. Nothing ever made sense. When we started seeing NFTshop, we thought this was a new way to capture value. »

When NFTs started to take off last year, the company started focusing on AR gaming in the Web3 space. Players will be able to play in AR as their own 3D avatars. Jadu raised about $5 million through NFT sales, and it also saw about $30 million in secondary trading for its jump bikes and hoverboards.

“We’ve been working on this for the last six months or so,” Malik said. – We have a lot of resources behind this.

Prepared for tough times

I asked if the company had met resistance to the NFT sale. Malik said he agreed with the criticism of NFT companies that have not behaved well, launched poor quality goods or engaged in fraudulent behaviour.
“I completely agree with the gaming community’s criticism of NFTs,” he said. “We are not a traditional gaming company. We are fundamentally an AR company, and our mission is always to bring new forms of AR to people in ways that are very experiential and immersive. We’re about building forms of AR that haven’t existed before.”

As for the crypto winter, Malik said the company has runway for the next three years or so. It gives the company comfort knowing that it has time to develop its products properly and wait for gamers to embrace the AR multiplayer market.

Mostly, the target audience for the company is people who are already part of the crypto and NFT ecosystem. They are familiar with crypto wallets and are early adopters of technology.
“We’re going to hit a tipping point where this is going to feel really good, it’s going to feel clear to a larger mainstream audience. And we’ll transition to them at that point,” Malik said.

Over the next 30 days, the company will roll out tools that players can use to make suggestions that others can vote on and such. And once the NFT avatars are released, the company will launch new chapters of its stories for players.

Malik said he hopes the movement to create interoperable NFTs and an open metaverse will evolve, allowing the company’s own avatars to be usable across multiple platforms and applications. But that may be more distant in the future for now.

“In theory, that’s also what we’re aiming for,” he said. “At the same time, I would say that it does not have a high priority. It is something we are ideologically aligned with. But if another virtual world has 600 users, we’re not going to spend our time building assets for that world right now.”