Bored Apes owner Yuga Labs launches 2nd Trip Otherside metaverse experience

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s parent company, Yuga Labs, today launched its Second Trip for its Otherside universe as a new “metaverse” experience.

The company launched the experience with many thousands of concurrent users, all interacting with each other in real time, said Herman Narula, CEO of Improbable, the project’s technical partner. Yuga Labs is one of the contenders trying to create an experience in metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds all connected, as in novels like Snow crash And Done player one.

The Second Trip builds on last summer’s First Trip, where Yuga Labs and Improbable were able to squeeze 4,500 people into the same real-time 3D world with 3D audio using software from Cambridge, England-based Improbable, which has experimented with technology to build huge game worlds for years.

At the time, the technology showed that players enjoyed full physics effects for their characters, and could talk to each other in small groups using 3D audio, or hear all players at once. I joined the second trip today and it was a similar experience but seemingly with a lot more people. Narula didn’t say how many people attended today, but suffice it to say it was a record number. Previously, the companies said the experience would seat 10,000 people.

“We have a lot more capacity than last time and I expect this to break the record,” said Narula.

Yuga Labs invited Otherdeed holders, or people who had bought their non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the sensations of the NFT craze of recent years. Holders of a dozen projects were able to copy their PFP images into the screen-like faces of Voyagers, the name of the spacefaring avatars used to navigate the landscape of the Otherside virtual world.

“In terms of accessibility, they’re definitely opening up to a wider community,” Narula said. “There will be 12 different companies and providers.”

Yuga Labs has the resources to be a “metaverse” contender. It grossed $450 million in March 2022. And Yuga Labs initially sold 55,000 Otherdeed NFTs for virtual land ownership. That generated about $320 million in primary sales. Overall, the Otherdeed NFTs have generated secondary sales in excess of 500.00 ETH, or more than $800 million. Each Otherdeed NFT is worth approximately $2,920.

The second travel experience

This morning I joined thousands of players in a waiting world called Infinity Space where Improbable determined how many people it could support in the experience. As more and more people joined in, it became a frenzied collection of avatars, all bouncing around and running or jumping on platforms that launched avatars into space. I sat on top of a floating orange ring in the center until “Curtis” arrived.

Players could join via a simple web link, with no download required. This time around, Yuga Labs and Improbable showcased a variety of art styles and environments, different characters with custom avatars, more guest passes and accessibility, more scale and density, and new game mechanics.

“This is the first phase in a series of new revelations,” Narula said. “The way we create content is really different than other people do. It’s an improved version. It is a larger number of people in different environments.”

Curtis was an oversized avatar in the form of a bored monkey, and he walked around for a while stirring up the crowd. He then invited everyone into a portal, which sucked the players into a new environment. Curtis announced that the group would be divided into four groups, each led by influencers who were the team captains: Brycent, Jimmy Wong, Champ Medici and Lowbellie.

The previous trip was set in a place called the Biogenic Swamp and players battled giant Kodas from the world of Otheside. This time we were dropped into a green world and slide down a giant slide, always trying to collect some gold items known as “magic blobs.” As I ran past everyone, I could hear them all talking or watch their texts fly by. It was a beautiful place, with many colors.

At the bottom of the slide was a gate with giant toads. Our team’s job was to collect magical blobs and drop them with the toads, which they would use to blast a hole in a new portal. Each team competed against each other. I could carry about 35 gobs at a time before having to empty them into a pad. The teams collected blobs in the millions, reflecting how many people were in the experience.

I was in Team Veldan and we came third with about 1.9 million points, behind Team Crimson and Team Glacia. The latter won with 2.1 million points. I had 1,080 points. Then the gate opened and we passed again as Curtis said, “No Voyager shall be left behind.”

Next we landed in the world of a giant blue pyramid. Again, there were thousands of Voyagers there. This time there were three Giant Toad platforms, with the center platform blasting the pyramid to get to the next portal, while the side platforms aimed at the other opposing teams to try and blow up the opponents so they couldn’t score points .

Meanwhile, we were sliding down a slide and had to collect magical blogs again. I kept missing the aerial work platforms and wasting time trying to get back to the right place. So there was some skill involved. If everyone was as bad as me, we’d lose. I raced around trying to collect as many as possible and maneuver through the landscape without missing any jumps. We lost again, but the teleportal opened and we flew through the air to the pyramid and transported again.

This time we landed in a desert with a giant dinosaur boneyard. We all got together on Curtis and bounced around. He called us ankle biters and a cacophony of nerds.

The experience in the desert ended with Curtis being shocked to see a giant monster appear in the boneyard and let out a deafening roar. It was a dramatic moment.

Complete

We returned to the Infinity Space.

Was it a nice experience? Well, it wasn’t God of War. You can see from the video that it was almost more like a virtual concert, a shared experience where you could be amazed at how many people were there. We did busy tasks and rushed around the area. It was an accessible game that anyone could contribute to, and it resembled a Subway Surfers kind of open-world experience.

But it was a pretty amazing feat of engineering, and it shows what kind of experiences are to come when the metaverse is finally here.

“I think we’re going to be using more GPUs in one go, in a short amount of time, than anyone has ever used from our provider before,” says Narula. “Pretty crazy. This is the huge difference between everything we do and everything everyone else does. All users are in one world at the same time and can all communicate with each other at the same time. They can all be in the same place. They will all be able to communicate with each other communicate and hear each other’s voices, which is why billions of messages are needed.”