Affyn is Bringing the First Metaverse City to Singapore

What is a Metaverse?

As per Tanuja Bahirat et al, a metaverse is an interactive, 3D environment where individuals may engage in collaborative activities with one another and with artificially intelligent entities such as avatars. In my opinion, the adoption of the metaverse and how the big tech such as Meta imagines Metaverse is still away from reality. Further, building a metaverse which is only controlled by a big tech company or a centralised party is only a gateway to being made into a product and a user who is heavily advertised products based on their actions and preferences in the metaverse.

This is not a metaverse that anyone would want in the first place. Humans don’t want to be a product!

The online role-playing game Second Life is another example that comes near the metaverse.

The metaverse, it is alleged, takes this to a whole new level by letting people purchase land and even get married using digital avatars. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has suggested that

“When we talk about the metaverse, we’re describing both the new platform and a new application type; similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early 90s. The metaverse enables us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing, bringing real presence to any digital space”.

Singapore's Corporate Community is Prepared to Enter the Metaverse

Ciena commissioned a new survey that reveals how prepared business professionals are for virtual collaboration. According to the data, 98% of Singaporean business professionals acknowledge the advantages of virtual meetings, and four in five (80%) would engage in work meetings in virtual environments vs current video conferencing platforms. In my opinion, more users are comfortable using a virtual environment for work meetings as it connects the participants better than a Zoom or google call. In my opinion, virtual metaverse meetings may provide that close in-person experience that current technology applications lack.

Over half (56%) of Singaporean business professionals believe their workplace will transition away from static professional situations to a more immersive/virtual reality-based environment within the next three years, and 71% believe that the metaverse will become part of present work practises. A similar percentage, 88%, of Singaporean business professionals are ok with doing more official, HR-type work sessions online.

Even though the interest in augmented reality technologies is rising, people do face difficulties reading in-person expressions and emotions. This is a huge gap which needs to be solved by technology companies. Human connections and interactions play a crucial role in developing close affinities through in-person experiences. In my view, for the metaverse to become indistinguishable from reality, it is critical to create a virtual experience which is focused on high-resolution graphics and locations.

How Affyn is Bringing the First Metaverse City to Singapore

Affyn has announced Singapore as its first city with  2,000 Freehold Land NFT plots in the debut metaverse city, with numerous additional cities to come in the following months. All 2,000 of Affyn's NEXUS World's Land NFTs match a physical site in Singapore thanks to the incorporation of mobile geolocation technologies inside metaverse cities that are directly linked to the real world.

Affyn's NEXUS World has hexagonal tiles, each representing a piece of land with an average area of 15,047.5 square metres and an average side length of around 65.9 metres. Common, Rare, Epic, and Mythical are some of the "rarity" levels used to classify these plots. Land NFTs are the virtual equivalent of physical land in the NEXUS World MMORPG. There are many different types of weather and landscapes on each individual piece of Land. Features in a given Land are proportional to the Land's rarity. More uncommon "Buddies" are more likely to spawn for users with higher Land grades.

What is Affyn?

Affyn is a Singapore-based firm, that leverages ledger technology to build mobile games with integrated geolocation and augmented reality functionality. Affyn is pioneering the gaming paradigm with a sustainable play-and-earn economy where prizes won in the virtual world can also be employed in the real world.

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Image credits: Daniel Welsh, Mike Enerio and Affyn.