Alex Herrity is co-founder of Anima, a platform and studio for frontier augmented reality and blockchain technology. He’s previously led teams building Epic Games Store, Fortnite, HBO NOW, and Ultravisual (acquired by Flipboard).
I’m excited to connect given your startup Anima is at the intersection of AR and crypto. Can you share more about what you’re working on?
Anima is based on our belief that augmented reality is going to be the first and defining platform of the metaverse, connected to our real lives, approachable, and shareable. There’s no ownership in AR. It is seen as purely a way to experience things or as a distraction and when it’s added to an existing NFT, it’s typically an add-on versus the core experience. What we’re building at Anima is a way for creators to make experiences, objects, and artworks that bridge the real and digital worlds, and sell them as NFTs.
Prior to starting Anima, you led product engagements with Fortnite and the Epic Games Store. How did these experiences influence your views on AR, NFTs, and the metaverse?
Tim Sweeney at Epic is an iconic figure in gaming and the metaverse and a real tech visionary. His DNA definitely runs through Epic. I think Epic's version of the metaverse is something closer to Ready Player One where you go to another world and people can build things in it and it’s complimentary to real life but specifically something you go to. AR is a more optimistic version of that future. It isn't something you disappear into. It’s a version of the metaverse that makes your life better. While I played around with some AR projects when working with Epic, the biggest things I learned were more around behavior with virtual goods and virtual economies in Fortnite. The changing self identity that’s happening in the world where your digital identities become just as important to you as your digital lives. We just want to do everything we can to merge those two versus keep them separate.
Before that, you were head of Product at Ultravisual, a mobile app and visual network, that was acquired by Flipboard. What led you to revisit the space of mobile curation in Web3?
Ultravisual was started by Neil Voss, who’s my partner at Anima. I joined that company right at launch because I was so amazed by what they were building. I became their Head of Product and Neil’s one of my best friends now. Ultravisual was a mixture of Tumblr and Pinterest. The idea was you could create things and slice them together. Everything ended up looking better than you expected it to. It was a way to express yourself around shared interests with videos and images you own in your phone camera. I still very much believe that. I think what’s special about what we’re doing now is that we’re creating a digital layer on top of that versus just saying you can cut up, edit, crop, and share photos and write text on them. There’s an entire world that exists on top of that you can create. So, it feels very much like an evolution of that even though there’s not an obvious link.
I think the biggest learning from Ultravisual is being creator-centric gets you to places that you wouldn’t have expected to go. Building the platform and the tool for creators to make things in a new medium is how you dictate what will end up being interesting about that medium versus trying to be prescriptive and saying this is how this should be experienced and this is what people want to see. We’d rather build and inspire the toolset for that.
Anima recently collaborated with iconic street artist Demsky on a collection of AR NFTs that evolve interactively through global exploration. What inspired this collaboration?
When we started Anima, we made a list of artists we were interested in working with someday. Both Neil and I are huge fans of Demsky who has this sort of retro futuristic style and looks like a vision of a future from the past. We thought that contrasting views would work in AR, which is an interesting medium that is neither real nor fake.
We reached out to Demsky. We didn’t have an exact idea yet. Together, we worked on the creative. He’d been doing these physical sculptures that look like the AR version we did and had been playing a lot with location. He did an art show underwater that he released the coordinates on and didn’t really tell anyone about. He was a well known graffiti artist and one thing that’s interesting about graffiti is the context of the work is as important as the work itself. The building that it’s on is just as important as what it is. So, that felt really relevant for us and what we’re building. So, we came up with this idea that we proposed to him, which is that his objects would change based on the context and location. That’s what we built with Mirror.
We’ll be rolling out a feature shortly where anyone who’s bought a mirror can place them in certain locations around the world and have them change permanently in unexpected ways. It plays with the immutable nature of NFTs where they are immutable unless you choose to go do this thing with them and then they’re changed permanently. It checked a lot of boxes for our vision of what AR could be.
In the weeks since launch, how have you seen buyers engage with their AR NFTs? Any creative locations that they’ve featured them in?
We’ve seen them on every continent except for Antarctica. It’s funny seeing a mix of comical and inspiring, beautiful pictures. There’s one in the Swiss Alps that’s a pretty incredible picture that we didn’t take but we’ve shared as if we did because we got permission. We just love that shot. We haven’t released the location based feature yet where it will change so we’re really looking forward to that. I think people will be surprised about how it works and what they get out of it.
Usually you don’t create work and see it in different locations than you thought. We usually carefully curate a show and it goes on a wall or you put a sculpture in a specific location and oftentimes a buyer is sourced who’s going to display it a certain way. AR is not that at all. They’re put in areas that make them look not as cool and they’re put in spots that make them look incredibly interesting in ways we would never have planned.
You talked about the location based feature you’re adding. Overall, what are your priorities for Anima in 2022?
We focused most of the last year plus on augmented reality technology and developing features that we think will be interesting for users and creators to play with. We have an augmented reality platform, we have our marketplace, and we have a studio that we work with creators on. We’re accelerating all of those. We have a chance to finally show off all these tech features that we’ve built. Demsky was a really specific example where we are showing off what we can do with location but there will be other projects where we will be showing off lots of other similar bridges between the physical and digital world soon. Objects will change based on what they’re near, what’s around them, the time of the day, or the phase of the moon. There will be shared experiences where you can see the same thing as the person next to you at the same time. We’re thinking about those features and we’re building projects that use them in unexpected ways.
Our studio arm works with creators in-house to make projects that showcase the potential AR features so that people want to use them. It’s not enough to say that you can do things with location and optics will change. It’s okay, what can we do with that where people will get excited about it and really want to use it. This year we’re really accelerating that.
What applications are you most excited about at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds?
There’s a future where there is both the reality that we see and there’s an alternate reality that sits on top of it that could be defined by creators. So, being able to build the tools that allows an entire world that exists on top of this that’s filled with art, collectibles, and games and just unexpected authentic experiences that you can’t see unless you choose to see them is what gets me most excited. I’m most excited about the things that haven’t been thought of yet that will be developed with the tools we’re building.
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