The Tournament Of Champions!

Battle of the innovators!

“I doubt I need an introduction, but just in case, I am the mighty Frieza and yes, all the horrible stories you’ve heard are true." - Lord Frieza

Dragon Ball Super’s last season was the Tournament Of Power. Dragon Ball does a tournament arc between every major storyline. The best fighters throughout the universe gathered together to compete for supremacy. I thought it would be fun to write an article in an anime tournament arc style. “Welcome to the beautiful Medallion XLN stadium on this bright, sunny day.” This Tournament Of Champions will see the best innovators over the past year compete against each other. The best minds across the tech world will be involved and a variety of topics will be covered such as Meta Quest VR Showcase, OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 & I finally found an NFT project that I actually like.

I want to acknowledge how much I love how ruthless Mark Zuckerberg is about owning the metaverse. Traditionally, VR Goggles are very expensive. They usually come with complicated wires and the headsets are uncomfortable. The Meta Quest 2 solves all of those issues. Mark then went the extra step to drastically undercut his competitors by selling the Meta Quest 2 wireless headset for only $300 when traditionally it sells for $600 to $1000+. This move allowed Meta to claim 60% of the VR market share in a span of 3 months. Meta & Ray-Ban recently released their AR Smart Glasses collaboration. Meta recently updated the Meta Quest 2 to use hand tracking that doesn’t need the controller to interact with apps. Meta is also pioneering a Brain Interface wristband, which tracks all the muscle movements in your wrist then use that as the controller.

With all of this leverage, Meta announced that they will take 47% of revenue from each app that gets sold on their app marketplace. Bravo! What a dominant performance and execution of technique. Mark Zuckerberg wants to go down in history as the pioneer of the Metaverse. How long can Mark keep up this pace? Will he blow his load before the competition heats up? Recently, Meta announced that they will be opening Meta stores to compete with Apple stores, how timely? Apple is rumored to be entering the Metaverse with its headset later this year. If Apple’s VR headsets are anything like my 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro, it’s going to be an incredible device. Of course, Meta has the premium Cambria headset on the way as well. I can’t wait for this slug fest of titans to take place. One of them is going to lose.

Keeping up this amazing momentum, Meta Quest Gaming Showcase unveiled the next generation of VR gaming. Fans of Among Us will be glad to know that they have a VR title on the way. In Among Us, you must complete all tasks before the imposter kills the crew. Crews can range from 4 to 10 players. Among Us is a viral game that became popular in recent years. Mark’s strategy must involve tapping into the viral phenomenon of the game to expand Meta’s market dominance.

BoneLab developed by Stress Level Zero caught my eye for being a truly next-generation VR game. Dare I say, this game could be Meta’s version of Half-Life: Alyx. Based on the trailer, every object in the game seems to be interactive. The way weapons are handled seem hyper-realistic and the environment (goes without saying) is immersive. I can’t wait to play this game.

Follow me on the Meta Quest 2 @medallionxln. How do the judges score? 9.5 - 10 - 9! With a score of 28.5 Meta takes the lead for the Gold Medal in the Metaverse!

(This is a parody account of Mark Zuckerberg)

Up next is a fan favorite and inspiration to many… oh what’s that? The floors are shaking. The crowd is chanting his name. The stadium is exploding with energy! Elon Musk! Elon Musk! Elon Musk! Fresh off his aquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk has showed up to defend his title. With such a strong performance from Meta, what can Elon Musk do to top their score? OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 was trained with 650 million images from the internet. DALL-E 2 allows anyone to generate any kind of image in any style, just by typing its description in natural language. “DALL-E 2 can create original, realistic images and art from a text description. It can combine concepts, attributes, and styles.” Examples that are on the website include, an astronaut riding a horse on the moon.

“A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension that looks like a monster as a planet in the universe.” Each example generated 10 completely different interpretations of the text.

OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, also provides the ability to seamlessly edit existing images. The example image provided was an empty indoor pool. The 3 variations added a flamingo close to the camera in the front of the pool, midway away from the camera floating inside the pool, and far away from the camera behind the pool. Each variation generated 10 images that changed the art style of the flamingos, but kept the original background.

Once again, a fan favorite, Elon Musk does not disappoint! This technology can be used to generate NFTs on the fly. It might even be possible to render 3D models. Let’s see how the judges score Elon Musk. 10 - 10 - 8! Only 28, a half-point away from the victory. The crowd is livid! This is the first time in the history of this sport that Elon Musk did not receive a perfect score! The referees threw a flag on the play. They are heading over to review footage with the judge that gave Elon that 8. “The idea is amazing, but DALL-E 2 is not officially available to the public yet. So I didn’t think it was fair to give Elon a perfect score based on just a research paper.” BOOOOO !!!! BOOOO !!! The crowd is now throwing their beer bottles and hot dogs at the judges. Can someone get security over there?

Our 3rd competitor is a newcomer. This newcomer does not have the notoriety of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, but what they bring to this competition is very impressive. This is an NFT project that isn’t another 10k variation of cats & dogs. In February, I wrote an article about how Anime Isekai should be used as a model for world-building in the Metaverse. That’s exactly what this project does. The NFT project is called Blitmaps / Blitnaut heroes on the Lootverse library.

They started as 100 pixelated images that the community merged into 1600 unique NFT siblings called Blitmaps. Blitnauts hero is an extension of that project, where humanoids with TVs for heads exist in the Lootverse; different NFTs can be inserted in any game that is built on the Lootverse library. The Blitmaps are the power-ups, the Blitnauts are the heroes, and then there is a villain collection. The project has a CC0 public domain license which allows its community to use them in any way they want. Owners of the Blitnauts get exclusive perks such as expansion packs and the ability to guide the future of the project. I’m loving the direction of this project. Super decentralized and community-driven.

Cool project and all, but compared to Meta’s iron gauntlet grip over the metaverse and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, I’m not sure if it can compete. That is, until we dig deeper into the library that Blitnauts is built on. The Lootverse library could be the dissident's way of reclaiming Metaverse market share from Supreme Leader Zuckerberg. Lootverses provide an opportunity to build community-centric world-building decentralized Metaverse projects using our NFTs. If that sentence was too complicated, then think about it as the Internet Cinematic Universe. Build avatars once, then import them and their attributes into games built by the decentralized community. The fight for the future of the Metaverse will be won by scalability. I don't care how much money Meta has, they cannot compete with a decentralized community of builders who have all the time in the world.

A centralized Metaverse requires a staggering amount of resources and manpower to build and maintain its infrastructure. The incentive structure for a centralized metaverse only goes as far as the centralized entity is willing to pay for its workforce. That is their biggest weakness. This is also why centralized entities seek to completely control those platforms. A decentralized community of builders work on a different incentive model. The decentralized community of volunteers build incentive models and fills in the missing gaps, all for free. They are driven by passion and imagination. The decentralized community’s reward is seeing their vision be fully realized. A decentralized community of builders isn’t loyal to a corporation, but to its vision. What they build is only limited by their imagination. How do the judges score the Lootverse? 9.5 - 9.5 -10! 29 points! This is the greatest upset of all time. The Lootverse has defeated both OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Meta’s entire metaverse rollout by a margin of half a point. The possibility to import your favorite NFT and use it in any participating metaverse game is truly mind-blowing.

• Brick crashes through the window of the announcer box

Well everyone, that’s our sign to wrap up this session of The Tournament Of Champions.

• Puts on helmet

• Gets hit with a tomato

  

Here comes our security to escort us to safety. Gotta go!

* sirens in the background

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