In Polygonal Mind we've been heavily involved in Decentraland development and community for the past 2 years, and thanks to it we've been in many meetings answering questions about this Metaverse.
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This article is a recap of all the most common questions we've been getting about the platform explained for a non technical person.

Decentraland is a virtual world divided into squares of land of the same size. You can buy and trade this land and also build on top of it. All the content in the world is generated by the owners of the land, making it a huge collaborative space.

The project has been under development for longer than most would like to admit, and it is evolving on a very slow pace to my taste. This slow motion is probably because 2 years ago, most of the progress of the platform was not poured directly into developing it, but more into the financial aspect of it.

• MANA released very early, and was listed on most well known exchanges as a tradeable coin.
• LAND sale was also done way before we could see anything in the world.

This was very criticized and tagged by many as a "money grabbing project" the progress the team was showing to the public was very focused on financial, while at the same time, various promises were broken on the technical side.
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• The project changed the engine a couple of times, meaning that anything built needed to be re-done most of the times.
• VR was removed from the priority list.

Many in the community felt very disappointed at the time, especially for the VR aspect. Decentraland as a concept drove many different people in investing for a very long term project without a clear route.

But what many of us wasn't able to see at the time, was that having a very strong coin and assets before the actual platform would enable the growth of a development ecosystem from the ground up.
Seen with perspective, it was a risky move, but the right one. I don't really know if this was made on purpose or accidentally.

During this time, there has been many initiatives to attract talent to the project.
​Game Jams, Funds, and contests, providing MANA and LAND.

In the future, these initiatives, especially the game funds, will be managed by the Decentraland DAO. That will unlock funds to bootstrap projects pitched directly to the community.

These type of events has motivated professional teams to invest their time into developing for the platform. This has been a great advantage against other platforms that haven't invested that much into attracting developers. It is highly important to allow monetization of your work as soon as possible if you want to retain creatives for the long run.
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Most of the times these payments were done in MANA, which has been increasing its price during last year, helping even more those teams who hold it as a financial asset to fund their ideas.
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Taking all of this into consideration, we can expect his internal ecosystem to grow slowly into a B2B market for the short term, that will evolve eventually on a play to earn economy.

You'll need a computer and a browser.

Although this statement might hold some truth, there are various things to consider on the graphical style of Decentraland.

The most important one is resource optimization, it is a web project that loads your 3D interactive land and everyone around you on real time, from your browser, and on top of that, is USER generated content, that can or cannot be prepared to run smoothly.

Think about browsing a website, I'm sure you have experienced a bad website that takes forever to load because it has high resolution images. This is the same thing, but multiplied. So when you open a site, you open at the same time all the sites around it, some of them will work just fine, but others will work badly.

Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about this, for now.
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And if we think even more into the future, probably everything will be rendered on a cloud computer and streamed to your device, like Google Stadia does. I'm not very optimistic about this technology since it will need that most of the world uses a very high speed internet connection. But only time will tell.
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The second thing to consider on the graphic aspect is the style, and this is purely a personal taste opinion. This debate has been going for years on the videogame industry, hyper-realistic graphics against stylized content. There is no real answer to this. Stop.
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There are many things that Decentraland is lacking visually, we can all agree on that, but I expect the team to deliver them in the future.

Unfortunately you can't, yet.

A very frequent question, right now, you need a license to mint wearables, and it is given by the DCL team. There is a reason behind, making wearables requires 3D modelling, texturing and rigging skills. Not everyone has them.

We're in the early stages of the platform, and I guess the team is doing closed experiments with experienced teams and individuals to learn the best way to open the market later on.
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In the future we can expect:

• To have in-game tools to create basic wearables, like t-shirts.
• More licenses issued by the community through the DAO.

This is one of the points that have brought many different debates and heated arguments to the community. It was promised in the Whitepaper, but discarded a few years back.

Developing a platform is not an easy task, and a VR platform is even harder, so removing it from their roadmap was not a crazy idea at all, it has helped focus on bringing DCL to more devices than a VR focused project could potentially do at the moment.
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It has been stated by the Decentraland team that VR is not a forgotten thing, just postponed. So eventually we'll be able to experience Decentraland with our favorite headset. When? Not anytime soon pal, probably in 2022.

There are various reasons behind this, the most obvious is scarcity. There is a limited amount of them and in order to make more, the community has to vote for it.

Building on it isn't easy either, you need some expertise to create something worth visiting.

We can't deny that the market has gone wild and has been pumping prices for a while, leading to what we have today.
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But at the same time it has shaped the vision of the project into a more B2B approach rather than the B2C we all had in mind. For a business, buying and investing into Decentraland is way more reasonable than a regular person.

Many old fashioned businesses are starting to consider their own Metaverse presence and this question pops very often on their head.

The Metaverse is and will be infinite, endless layers and worlds that we can access anywhere from many different devices. You'll be lost and very easily as we get deeper on the internet.

Decentraland will act as an attention beacon for users, pretty much like any social media platform does these days. So you might want to build your own personal space outside these Metaverse platforms, but you'll need to invest a lot of efforts to attract users there and retain them.

And I'm not just talking about advertising, you'll need to develop interaction on your own, servers to hold visitors, avatar systems, interactivity, etc. Not saying that is impossible, but it will take way more time and funding than having your parcel in Decentraland.
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I would say that having a small presence on Decentraland (or any other platform) and linking it to your personal space will be the most logical option in the future, just like you have your Facebook page and your own website.

This is just a highlight of the many different questions we get everyday, my goal this time has been to explain how Decentraland has been evolving in the last few years from an insider look.

​But there are lots of different questions that I haven't included here, so stay tuned for more Decentraland insider looks.
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As a final reminder, Decentraland is a collaborative layer of the Metaverse, just like Facebook is part of the internet. If everything keeps evolving steadily it might become the business cluster of the future.


See you around the Metaverse!

VRChat is a well known social platform for all those who have VR equipment, and even if you don't have any specific hardware, you can join the party from your standard PC screen too! When you create a scenario, you have to be cautious with texture sizing and data management to make sure you can run your scene, but also the target audience can too! If you fail to democratize hardware requirements then you fail to create a popular VRChat World.

Every frame, a camera perform culling operations that examine the Renderers in the Scene and exclude (cull) those that do not need to be drawn. By default, Cameras perform frustum culling, which excludes all Renderers that do not fall within the Camera’s view frustum. However, frustum culling does not check whether a Renderer is occluded by other GameObjects, and so Unity can still waste CPU and GPU time on rendering operations for Renderers that are not visible in the final frame. Occlusion culling stops Unity from performing these wasted operations.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html
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This is basically the core knowledge of the whole system. This technique is used to avoid doing the real time calculations of gameObjects that are not in the Camera frustrum. This improves framerate and events performance during runtime.

To begin creating an "occlusion area" you need to check the box "static" or just click on the drop down and toggle "OccluderStatic" and "OccludeeStatic". Another approach is to select the desired gameobjects and toggle option in the Occlusion Window on the Object Panel.

This tells the engine to consider the gameObject when calculating the Occlusion Data within its Occlusion Area (Unity considers the whole scene as a single area if you don't configure one prior bake).

The main difference between these two Occlusion concepts is pretty simple but its important to keep it in mind when building your scene occlusion areas and data.
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• An Occluder is an object that can hide another objects
• An Occludee is an object that can be hidden from view by another object (Occluder). If you uncheck this, the object will be considered differently like if it was on another layer, not being hidden by other meshrenderers.

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An example of Occludee toggle would be for larger objects like grounds that should be considered separately to ensure its always rendered.

Culling Areas are "cube" shaped volumes that "group" all the gameObjects inside of it, being only rendered if the camera is placed inside the same area. This works well if you have multiple enclosed areas, for our case, Occlusion areas didnt make sense as the whole scene is enclosed without visual walls among it.
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Occlusion Portals are for connecting two Occlusion Areas and so the Camera can render both areas by the Portal region area. The toggle Open option is for allowing or disallowing this conneciton.

The Occlusion system uses a built-in version of Umbra. As any other system, it has its failures and improvements compared to other occlusion system engines. For other projects I personally have worked with Sector, an Asset Package found in the Asset Store that is very helpful and by the time I worked with it it was way better than the Unity's Umbra (more flexible settings as its main selling point).
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Another thing to keep in mind is the use of shaders with an excess of passes. Each pass is a whole mesh calculation for the material to be rendered and so Materials with more than two passes can be problematic for lower platforms like mobile. I state two as a minimum because transparent materials require two passes, furthermore they require the renderer to render whats behind the mesh rendered with transparency so they are quite the hard limit for low platforms.

The whole scene is marked as "Static" as there are no dynamic objects to keep in mind (the water is animated through material [not shader]). This made the Occlusion set up "easy" and not very hard to set the first steps. Keep in mind the size of the Occluder box you want to set, the bigger, the less "accurate" it will be, but at the same time the data will be much smaller. Each project needs its own balance.


In this case for Gauguin we set the size to 1.5, meaning that the smallest "box" packing objects was of 1.5 units (meters) in x/y/z value.


The Smallest Hole float is the setting to tell the camera how big it has to be the "hole" in the mesh to start casting what is behind it. This is specially tricky on elements with small holes or meshes with complicated shapes.
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The backface value is the value of directionality of a mesh to be rendered. The higher, the more "aggresive" the occluder will be, making the camera not compute meshes that are not facing towards the camera.

The best workaround is to always do it manually and never let the program do the math for you.
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For the scene, the ground meshes were kept without the Occludee option as smaller avatars made it through the ground floor due to camera frustrum and its near clip (this cannot be changed as it how it goes in VRChat).

You may find Occlusion Culling easy to set up or even unnecessary!
​But the truth is that is a vital piece during the final stages of environment development as is the manager, loader and unloader, of all the visual aspects of the camera, ensuring an smooth experience while mantaining the quality levels desired and keeping hidden from view but not unloaded from scene to ensure fast-charging-fast-hidding.


Also each time you modify a gameObject property like transform or add/remove gameObjects from scene you should rebuild your Occlusion data as those gameObjects are still "baked" in the data.
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Keep it in mind specially when working with large environments or low-specs platforms.

You are more than welcome to drop any question or your try-out and results!

Join us: https://discord.gg/UDf9cPy

So you are new to all this Metaverse economy and you are having trouble understanding what's going on. You want to start investing some time and maybe even money on it, but you are not sure where to start... Well, you are in luck, this post is for you!

In the last two years, we've been involved in many Metaverse projects,
​building and generating value across different platforms.

In this article we'll dig into Blockchain Metaverse projects, the ones we know and what you should consider before starting your journey. There are many different Metaverse projects out there, but today we'll compare the best known in the space on different points, so you can have enough information before digging further on them.

Before starting you must understand the Metaverse as a concept.
NONE of these projects alone are the Metaverse, even if they say so on their marketing efforts.
​They are LAYERS of the Metaverse, and all of them combined are the Metaverse.
In easy terms to understand, Facebook is not the internet, but a part of it. Same applies here.

The oldest one in the space.
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It is a single Metaverse layer divided evenly into a grid. Every single coordinate is called LAND.
All the LAND is the same size and has the same limitations. Users can combine their colliding LAND into Estates. Users can create districts to coordinate themselves and this one function as separated entities/companies. There is a limited supply of LAND and there is no way to create more unless the community proposes it through the Decentraland DAO.
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The world was open on 20/02/2020

Minecraft-like inspired project.
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It is a single Metaverse layer divided unevenly in different plots and islands.
There is a main island called Origin City that has a limited supply of parcels.
Their team is always generating new islands and parcels as a way to fund the project.
Every plot has a different size and limitations.
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The world was open on July/2018

High end devices focused project.

It is a single Metaverse layer divided unevenly in different plots along an already generated map with some islands too. Every plot has different size and limitations. The team is releasing new land once in a while.

The world was open on 20/02/2020

The project also has a new proposal for owning whole Metaverse layers, called Somnium Worlds.
​But there is little information about this yet.

Evolution of a previously very successful non-blockchain project into a new paradigm.
Also with Voxel art.
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It is a single Metaverse layer divided evenly into a grid. All the land is the same size and is pretty big, users can combine their plots into estates to generate bigger places. There is a limited supply of land there is still a big part of it not released to the market.
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The world is still in private beta, aiming to launch in Q1 2021

When we talk about Metaverse layers we're talking about content being deployed on the same "world" meaning that in theory you could be able to "walk" from one point to another without any loading screen, so when you join the place, you can see your parcel and everything built around it even if this content is built by another person.
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This is the case of Decentraland, CryptoVoxels and Somnium Space,
they all got a seamlessly walking experience.
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As opposed to the other projects, Sandbox encapsulates their land experiences into separated scenes and when you walk from one parcel to another, there will be a loading screen.

Desktop Website: ​https://decentraland.org/

Desktop, Mobile Website and VR: https://www.cryptovoxels.com/
Same experience in any device.

Full version: Desktop Client and High end device VR headset.
Reduced version: Desktop Web and Quest.
​https://somniumspace.com/
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The reduced version is encapsulated in different instances, meaning that you can only visit 1 plot at a time. Web based visitors cannot see client visitors and vice versa. Avatars are also limited to the web version.

Desktop Client.
Not released yet.
https://www.sandbox.game/en/

The project started with Esteban Ordano and Ari Merlich, both very experienced folks on blockchain and high end technology and did a very successful job creating and pushing the idea. Now the project is managed by the Decentraland Foundation, a new entity that is focused on listening to the community needs. Most of the team is in Argentina.

By the one and only Ben Nolan. This solo entrepreneur from New Zealand started off the project from scratch and now has a team helping him to generate his vision. They are very active listeners on their Discord and Twitter.

Funded by the serial entrepreneur Artur Sychov, the project started with a very successful indiegogo campaign back in the day. Based in the beautiful city of Prague, right in the heart of Europe.

From afar all these projects look very, very similar, but they are actually not, they all have different communities with various mindsets.

This project has made a huge effort into building collaborations and partnerships with top blockchain and crypto projects around the world, there are many virtual headquarters built in there already and more to come in the following months.
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Events and networking is what is driving Decentraland adoption.
​You can keep up to date with their events on the website.
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The platform has also a lot of cryptoart galleries and a few games to enjoy.
​But be aware that most of the place is still empty.

If you want to get inspired quickly, you MUST visit CryptoVoxels.
​In 2020, CryptoArtists from all around the world have taken over this platform generating mind blowing content. The world is filled with art galleries and the community is super active. This project has the best boarding experience on Crypto-Metaverse so far.
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There are many art and business related events in the world, but there isn't a centralized way to find them, you must follow each micro community individually.

The main selling point of the project is its beautiful image rendering.
If you own a high end VR device, Somnium is for you.
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The community is small but cozy, very active and welcoming on their Discord.
​They also got an event page to keep track of all the events.
Art galleries and private land is the content you'll find there.

The project is unreleased yet. But I can give you a glimpse of what you'll find.
​Games, games and more games.
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Their team is making a great effort to build a game platform along with many creators. With their background on the industry and how they communicate, I expect SandBox will become a great gaming platform. They are using Arkane Network, which makes on boarding for blockchain newbies very easy.

Alright. So you want to have something built in your new virtual domains, these are the things you need to take into account.

This platform has 2 ways of building.

The Builder: This online tool allows users to place and allocate 3D models in the parcel and then deploy. What you can do with it is very limited.

The SDK: Tool developed for professional teams to generate interactive content in the game. Probably very complex for starters, but very good if you want to have something very unique on your parcel. We've made different games and experiences with it. Developing with DCL SDK is still a very niche thing and takes A LOT of time, so be prepared to hire a professional team.

The easiest and most friendliest of them all, just join CV and start placing things in your land while playing. You can find many artists willing to take building commissions and they'll create amazing stuff by pushing limitations to the next level. The great downside right now is that you can't create any complex behavior on CV, so no games.

There is a Somnium Builder that works very well, it is very similar to the Sims building creator tool and it allows you to make your own place out of already generated assets. There is a Unity SDK in the works for Somnium, but no release date yet.

This project has developed 2 different tools for content creators:

VoxEdit: that allows to create game items and characters.
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Game Maker: This tool will take the assets generated on VoxEdit and place them in world, also adding interaction and complex behavior for them. No code required.
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Since the platform is not released, it is still hard to find people to develop in your SandBox Land.

All the platforms, released or not, got some economy going on, based on different stuff.

They have their erc20 token called Decentraland MANA ($MANA)
​Probably the strongest coin of all the platforms and listed on the most well known exchanges.

1 MANA ≃ $0.116

Their LAND economy is also pretty hot, the lowest prized LAND on OpenSea right now costs
​8,000 MANA ≃ $924.3
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This project also has wearables made by their team and community,
​you can also buy and sell names on Decentraland.

They don't have any coin anymore.
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It has a very small wearable economy, but unfortunately generating new tokens it's been closed down due Ethereum gas fees many times, making it very difficult to generate a stable revenue for creators.
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Cheapest parcel on Opensea: 1 ETH ≃ $1,236.61

They have an erc20 token called Somnium Space CUBEs ($CUBE)

1 CUBE ≃ $0.3

But their team has made claims that they want it to become a stable coin.
Cheapest parcel on Opensea: 0.68 ETH ≃ $839.5

The project has also created their own virtual reality avatar market, only usable on Somnium client version. They also have released a world token. But they haven't released much info on this yet.

They have an erc20 token called SAND ($SAND)

1 SAND ≃ $ 0.05

Cheapest parcel on OpenSea: 0.1 ETH ≃ $122.7
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Any item created and uploaded to SandBox will be automatically an NFT, so expect a huge boom of NFT trading from this project once is released.

The following statements are made in Jan of 2021 and are based on how all these platforms have evolved along 2019-2020. This might shift as their communities become bigger and evolve.

Networking platform. Hopefully a decentralized virtual Silicon Valley of the future. Many big blockchain companies and influencers are setting their virtual business Head Quarters in there using districts as a catalyst. Unless LAND prices go down, the investment needed to buy a plot and then to develop content for it, is really high. This kind of budget makes sense for a B2B environment.

Micro house-blogging platform. Pretty much like your 3D house blog. The team sets the prices based on FIAT in order to attract more BUILDERS. Many companies and influencers have a plot in CV too, but most of the plots are built by artist showcasing their art. It is amazing to see all the islands getting built these days.

Virtual Beverly Hills neighbour for early blockchain enthusiasts and celebrities. Somnium parcel prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The community is small BUT very active and very well connected. The world looks like a green field, that can remind you of The Sims.

Blockchain based Minecraft competitor. Is very difficult to imagine how this project will evolve without seen it released yet. But based on the previous SandBox game and the team background, we can already see this project being the only one fully focused on game development.

All these projects got Discord communities and Twitter accounts to follow their progress.
You can learn more about them by following us too!

I just wanted to give some insight thoughts on these projects, since these are the most
​"HOT Blockchain Metaverse" projects in early 2021.
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All these platforms compete and work together at the same time.
If one of them fails hard, it will affect negatively to the others,
since they are all tied together with Ethereum.
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As I stated in the beggining, NONE of them are the Metaverse,
they are just layers, collaborative worlds filled with used generated content.
Ultimately the users owning and building the platforms will be the ones
in charge of its success or failure, same goes for their tied coins.

I haven't included any NON-blockchain projects on the list, but to give you some real facts with perspective about how EARLY we are in the space.... VRChat has today more daily active users than all of the platforms mentioned COMBINED.

True ownership will be granted by blockchain, but only if the majority of users
understand the value of NFTs and prefer it to centralized systems.

We could keep comparing all the projects in the space in the future on different subjects,
​feel free to leave us ideas on our interoperable Discord community!