Dubai: Gaming company Ukledo is taking virtual reality to the next level with its first adventure game — Virtual Universe (VU) — to produce a virtual world with non-player characters reacting and interacting with the player.
Ciaran Foley, Founder and CEO of Ukledo, a blockchain research and development company based in the Cayman Islands, told Gulf News that VU is the world’s first VR game powered by artificial intelligence and blockchain.
“We can read the gamer’s body language and this can be passed through AI and impact the reaction of non-player characters in the game. AI is used a lot in gaming but the sophistication of AI has to be increased for this kind of experience,” he said.
Fundamentally, he said that non-player characters have their own brain. So there are characteristics based upon behaviour models that are created.
For example, he said a bird has a sense of sphere, a sense of humble, motivation built in and an awareness of the environment around it. All the behavioural characteristics are coded into an animal behavioural model.
When you interact with it, he said the bird interacts with the player based on the algorithm.
VU can be played on any VR-ready computer or laptop and is compatible with major headsets such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality.
The company has started its VU token pre-sale and the general sale will be locked until July 1.
He said that 150,000,000 tokens are available for pre-sale, and 600,000,000 will be sold in total during the ICO (Initial Coin Offering). Any unsold tokens will be burnt.
Buyers need to have ERC20, a technical standard used for smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain for implementing tokens by developers, to buy the tokens.
ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comment and 20 is the number that was assigned to this request. One ERC20 can buy 6,000 VU tokens and the total supply is one billion VU tokens.
The company has sold around eight per cent of the current stock of tokens.
“At this point, VU tokens can be used only within the game due to the regulatory norms. MMORPG market is massive and $16 billion was spent on virtual goods in 2016. We are looking at an opportunity for VU tokens to be used outside of the game in future but as per the law,” he said.
The token sale is open to all countries except the US, China, Singapore and Canada.
He said that certain countries have stringent laws on cryptocurrencies and have banned ICOs.
“We identified that blockchain was going to become an element in our research because as a multiplayer game, the first step in that equation was that a lot of games will use virtual goods and virtual sale. For that, some sort of virtual currency is needed.
“We realised that blockchain is much more than representing a type of payment. There are a number of different problems within and around multiplayer games which we can solve. One of them is the payment problem. The token can be used to exchange value within the game. Beyond that is the ownership of smart objects and experiences created within the world by the users themselves can be recorded on the blockchain to provide a level of integrity,” he said.
In addition, he said that smart contracts can be used within this world to power financial structures, a user to user transactions, otherwise are complex to code. Through smart contracts “we can automate that process”.
Also, he said that it provides greatly connected tissue with the outside world such as advertising and marketing opportunities and product placement opportunities.
“We anticipate that there is going to be a wide variety of blockchain apps and that is why we are focused on it,” he said.
Foley sees AR becoming the “workspace tool” while VR will find a long-term place in the entertainment industry.
“AR will replace mobile phones in the near future,” he said.
