Transmira Inc is developing OMNISCAPE™, the first XR Metaverse platform that seamlessly blends Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), linking experiences and 3D spaces to real-world locations.
And what’s more, they are building on the BSV blockchain.
We spoke to Robert Rice, founder and CEO of Transmira and CMO Warren White, about the potential of their platform, where the BSV blockchain fits in and the Metaverse use cases they envision.
Potential use cases for AR, VR & the Metaverse on the BSV Blockchain
Most people have heard of VR – virtual reality – and AR – augmented reality. VR is about going somewhere else, a virtually created world, for example, Second Life or World of Warcraft. AR is like the film, Minority Report, Iron Man‘s heads up display or Pokemon Go – which is like adding graphics and 3D objects to the world around you.
XR is all of it together: AR, VR, ML (Machine Learning) plus IoT (Internet of Things). Omniscape is building the foundation for the XR Metaverse.
Definition of the XR Metaverse – Everything, Everywhere, Connected.
People explain the Metaverse concept in various ways, but OMNISCAPE defines it as follows:
The Metaverse is everything around you. Invisible data, information and knowledge made real and tangible through technology.
It is much more than games and virtual worlds. They are just individual stars in the void. They are a multiverse.
The true Metaverse blends Augmented and Virtual Reality together, linked to the real world, connected to everything. Data brought to life. It is the whole and the sum of its parts.
Although all of these things are part of the Metaverse too, nobody’s quite tapped into it yet, and so Transmira is planning on doing some of these things.
In the case of Omniscape, the platform they’re building, they’ll be blending AR, VR and the real world together with other things.
One of the things that makes Transmira a bit different from other companies in the space is how they treat the underlying elements. For most people AR and VR are far removed on a spectrum of XR. Transmira sees XR more like a vertical stack that starts with location in the real world, then stacked with data, AR, 3D, VR until it’s all related.
Rice points out that a lot of amazing things become possible once you think about it in this stacking approach. ‘For example, if you have a 3D copy of the room you’re in right now, you’d call that a digital twin. And if you have the Omniscape app on your phone, it will know your GPS coordinates to know where in the room you’re sitting. With this information at hand, you could create a 3D VR space so that somebody in another city can remotely log into the room, just like a game.’
You would have an avatar that accurately mimics your position and movement within the virtual room. And because the virtual world is linked to the real world, the visitor could have an AR hologram of them in the real world room so you can interact with them.
The concept can be applied to any use case that can benefit from blending the real world, augmented reality and virtual reality. Rice imagines that it could potentially change every industry and application we know, ‘particularly when you start blending in monetisation and blockchain to keep track of everything’.
Why XR requires the BSV blockchain
Rice sees the potential for a great number of fascinating applications. ‘But, to make it feasible and do it really well, we need blockchain.’ Rice has considered numerous blockchain platforms, and found most of them highly unsuitable for XR applications.
To do XR properly, Omniscape has to ingest a tremendous amount of data from IoT devices, users and 3D content. Add the volume of transactions, interactions and monetisation that happens within the platform, and you’re looking at an extraordinary amount of data that needs to be processed really fast.
Rice concludes: ‘There’s only one blockchain that can handle this: it’s the BSV blockchain. BSV is fast, it’s scalable, it’s very inexpensive, and it gives us the security, trust and verification we need.’
Using the BSV blockchain for NFTs
Why are these things important? Well, one of the things Transmira is doing (and have patented) is to link 3D objects in the virtual world to things in the real physical world. It would be similar to Pokemon Go, but instead of hunting for Pokemon, you find a 3D Starbucks coffee cup floating in space in augmented reality. That is going to be an NFT – a unique object that can be tracked, collected to go over to Starbucks in the real-world and redeem it for a coffee.
‘That linking between 3D objects and virtual digital space to something that’s physical in the real world space is a bridge that will change the game,’ Rice declares. Instead of having an NFT that just points to a JPEG file, you could treat an NFT like a bearer bond. ‘Owning an NFT, this 3D object, is equal to owning it in the real world.’
The BSV blockchain as a security system
Having this data on the blockchain would help avoid things like fraud and security vulnerabilities. ‘Can you imagine someone hacked one of these XR games and now we have to pay someone a thousand Starbucks coffee cups or ten hundred thousand Teslas. But if it’s on the blockchain, and it’s an NFT so we’ve been tracking everything, we can prove and validate that it’s real.’
Utilising the BSV blockchain for data feedback
Having it on blockchain also gives a platform the ability to feed the huge amounts of data being generated back to the brain of the system, as the BSV blockchain is a Turing complete system.
BSV blockchain for identity
Another element that makes blockchain critical is identity. ‘Who you are is very important as well as where you are and what’s around you. The current Internet model allows so much anonymity that people behave in a way they would never have in real life.’ With the BSV blockchain, you’ll be able to track and confirm somebody’s identity according to a platform’s rules, while granting them pseudonymity in public. ‘Even if they’re using an alias you can add a level of responsibility to the things you do in the Metaverse.’
Monetisation of the Metaverse with the BSV blockchain
Without the ability to monetise the Metaverse, all you’ve got is something that’s of entertainment value. But because Transmira is building on the BSV blockchain, they are able to integrate monetisation into their Metaverse so it can be used for commerce, businesses, content creators and brands.
Rice concludes: ‘Because our Metaverse projects are powered by BSV, we gain trust, identity, monetisation, data as well as the cool experience. And so we end up with something that can grow and scale to attract a lot of different use cases and audiences.’
Transmira’s future
‘The COVID pandemic has accelerated people’s understanding of the value of blended reality,’ reflects Transmira CMO Warren White.
White believes that the ultimate value consumers and enterprises will gain from a Metaverse is to be able to seamlessly blend their lives and business ventures in the physical world with that in the digital world.
‘Transmira wants to build out unique experiences and ways to be anywhere, anytime with any device you’re using,’ he declares. Although White admits it will be a much richer experience with VR goggles and haptic gloves, the company aims to make their platform accessible through desktop and mobile phone. ‘And it will all be built on the BSV blockchain.’