Motivation and Mission

October 30th, 2022

Motivation

I want our digital wonders to last, and the early founders and pioneers of this space remembered. Without history, society is easily reprogrammed by its incumbents. If we don’t tell our story, someone else will.

We shouldn't rely on centralized platforms to preserve our digital artifacts and stand the test of time. Twitter is powerful, but it's also a rapid stream. It's useful for data in transit, but not for data at rest.

Virtual worlds are ephemeral

Recently I logged into in VRChat and noticed many of the worlds in my favorites list were disappearing, worse yet I forgot what they even were.

YouTube also does this too but at least we have good tools to download our favorite videos with, we can't say the same for most of the virtual world platforms that exist today.

Preserving virtual worlds has unique challenges

Screenshots are fine for preserving books but don't do it justice for preserving websites or games. Projects like Voxels aren't a typical video game, it's a constantly changing / evolving virtual world.

I picked a part of the map which didn't have much building activity to better illustrate the differences between time. Many places have completely changed.

Right now there is no wayback machine for the metaverse

The only way to experience most virtual world content the way the artist envisioned is via the main client, but what if a future update breaks it or changes the whole vibe?

Alotta Money (RIP) is an OG cryptoartist legend and built many incredible virtual landmarks before he passed away.

The Scarlet Factory, located in the Music district of Origin city, Cryptovoxels.

This is how the Scarlet Factory currently looks with 3rd party viewers (Substrata / Unity /threejs / hyperfy), none of which are anywhere near good enough yet.

Who else is working on such? Isn't this a major narrative point of the web3 metaverse thesis: Interoperability, ownership, digital preservation? What's so meta about platform lock-in?

I miss when Cryptovoxels was black and white monochrome

I feel like a metaboomer when I say this but in my day we had to pay for coloring our voxels. During the first year of Cryptovoxels the entire world had this unusual black n white monochromatic aesthetic that I always thought was unique / punk rock / noir. Ben Nolan may of joked it was to save on network bandwidth but there actually was no practical justification other than it simply looked cool.

I really do miss the black n white version of Cryptovoxels - it was iconic. In both the online and offline world saturated with colors it struck out and was recognizable anywhere. Seeing black n white voxels instantly made you think of Cryptovoxels.

WebVR site with Cryptovoxels displayed as a game within a game

Image album with more pics from that era: https://slate.host/jin/cryptovoxels-history

What is Openvoxels?

At a high level, Openvoxels is a:

Data DAO
DeSci art project
Metaverse interop working group

Notes from our interop projects related to Cryptovoxels are in The Book of Voxels.

The notes are very media rich and useful when collaborating with SDOs (standards development organizations). We can use hackmd notes for quickly creating presentations, videos, and immersive thinking spaces like my garage lab in Anarchy Arcade.

Digital gardening in 3D: all of these things you see are launchable shortcuts

Populating virtual spaces with project notes and media files as 3D shortcuts has great benefits for coming up with new ideas serendipitously, like externalizing a part of your brain into a room without having to foot a huge electric bill.

Much of these ideas are years in the making

This garage lab is my digital garden. Within it are notes from multiple different dev logs, densely hyperlinked information represented as objects with screens. It's a rich environment for thinking about metaverse interoperability that will soon be coming to a browser near you.

DAO

Cryptovoxels is somewhat unique amongst other web3 metaverse projects in that it has no official ERC20 token and no DAO. The team has floated some great ideas but ultimately refrained from rushing into decisions.

We've been discussing the ability for people to be able to run bakers and get paid in token for helping us bake the world and increase the visual fidelity.

A governance token would be super dope if we used it in a super high resolution way, like here's 10 bugs we're gonna work on, vote with your tokens in the next hour to prioritise the list. So a dev could start the day, get bugs prioritised, then start work an hour later.

I believe how we work is just as important as what we work on. I see DAOs as a better model for working groups, and that Openvoxels can serve as an example of such. Sometimes the best way to learn is to simply do and lead as an example.

The plan