Another World VR developers Ioulia Isserlis and Max Sacker thought it was a prank when German Hip Hop legend Dennis Lisk (aka Denyo) reached out via email to collaborate on developing a social VR and a completely virtualized live DJ performance toolkit. But it wasn’t a prank, and they’ve been building a real-time audio engine compatible with Unreal Engine in order to meet the live performance standards of professional DJs to mix, sync, and modulate music in real-time. Most DJ sets in social VR either rely upon external hardware where the audio is streamed in, or they just play back a recording of a set. But for Lisk, he wanted to be able to perform live in order to more dynamically respond to the audience without having to split his attention between the physical hardware and any virtual representation of it. The end result is The District VR, which is an ambitious fusion of all of these live DJ mixing tools with aspirational plans to build out social VR clubs and create new monetization opportunities for DJs and musical artists.
I’m personally a bit more skeptical on some of those cryptocurrency-based potentials based upon my previous deep dive into Voxels (aka Cryptovoxels) where I found “22% of Voxels CVPA parcels are owned by the top 1% of holders (excluding unsold plots held by Cryptovoxels), 44% parcels are owned by the top 5%, 56% parcels are owned by the top 10%, 68% parcels are owned by the top 20%. There are similar numbers for Decentraland LAND holders with 20% of virtual land owned by top 1%, 41% owned by top 5%, 52% owned by top 10%, 65% owned by top 20%.” The underlying principle is what’s called “preferential attachment,” which is explored in much more detail in this article titled “The Rich Still Get Richer: Empirical Comparison of Preferential Attachment via Linking Statistics in Bitcoin and Ethereum.” The bottom line is that most cryptocurrency-based projects based upon underlying libertarian principles will demonstrate this type of preferential attachment dynamics. So the challenge for The District VR is to figure out how to bring a different set of what the Peer-to-Peer foundation calls “commons-based values” where the exchange of value creates a broader source of value to the community rather than to a single individual. It’s possible that using cryptocurrency to support DJ artists in live performances could start to create this type of underlying value shift, but it’s not guaranteed as most economies will fall back into a power law dynamic where it works for a handful of folks, but not realistically for most. Other physical-based, entertainment economies fall into this same type of feast or famine type of dynamic, and so I look forward to hearing more from The District VR team in how they plan on cultivating a vibrant economic ecosystem with their future plans. Perhaps a white paper or an experiential proof of concept will open up my mind a bit more than my default crypto skepticism that I laid out back in episode #1117.
I opted to not dive too deep into a crypto debate in this interview as I feel like the experiential component for what they’ve built is so much more compelling than most crypto-based projects that I come across, which tends to put the experiential component at the bottom of the priority list. So I’ll keep an open mind and will be keen to see where they take that part of this project as supporting independent artists and creators is one of the potentials of crypto-based projects. But I’ve also read enough entries in Molly White’s Web3 is Going Just Great blog to have a healthy amount of any crypto-based claims.
Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what types of new nightclub, rave, or party scenes that The District VR is able to cultivate as they were able to generate a lot of buzz from musicians and DJs at SXSW. And again, this is a project with a strong foundation of experiential design and VR development that’s rooted in a technical foundation that allows them to do things in a live mixing and live DJ context that no other platform has been able to so far, and to include it all within a social VR platform. So looking forward to seeing how they build out their community, and continue to innovate on both the experiential side as well as the monetization side.
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Music: Fatality
