Hololoot Ecosystem, Part 1
--
Our Backround, Goals, Meet the Team, Holoverse
At Hololoot, we aim to become a universal tool for gamers, professionals from various fields and anyone with ideas of implementing NFTs or metaverse in their projects. How did we get here?
Before Hololoot, the Core Team was engaged in commercial VR projects. The whole story starts in 2016, when we ( Adam Bialon and Maciej Szafarczyk) decided to bring acquired knowledge and experience together.
The fundamentals to our endeavours were built on something more than what one can learn even on most prestigious university. It is passion for VR and AR. This is where we source our certainty that both these technologies offer unlimited possibilities in fields of entertainment, various industries, business, education and even military.
VR and AR solutions take students into new undiscovered worlds
Diversity in applications of virtual and extended reality was proven through all products we provided to our clients — factories, developers, manufacturers and many more. Our solutions helped improve workers’ safety, cut costs of manufacturing, open new study fields in numerous education facilities. Thanks to VR and AR solutions students get to explore new, undiscovered worlds while tutors get to expand their skillset and experience.
During our work on many projects we have learned that the classical way of building mobile applications is extremely time-consuming.
build version 1.0, gather feedback, apply changes, re-compile the code, deploy, build version 1.1… Lather, rinse, repeat
Build version 1.0, gather feedback, apply changes, re-compile the code, deploy, build version 1.1… Lather, rinse, repeat
Looking for an alternative to this situation, we have stumbled upon the Knowledge-Based Engineering Methodology. PH.D. Filip Górski is one of the best scientists researching and developing this field. As our valued advisor he is making sure we follow the right path.
Faster, cheaper, better, bigger
By applying KBE to our infrastructure we are able to edit the content of the AR application in real-time without touching the source code. All content is stored online, on Hololoot Cloud. This means no heavy use of mobile’s storage and endless scaling possibilities. Instant synchronization and real-time customization features will also be handled by cloud rather than unnecessarily draining your device’s resources. Above mentioned solutions make us ready for fast approaching era of AR glasses.
The Core team has successfully deployed this method in a previous VR project sold to a local private investor from the educational sector. It is used for building virtual classrooms in a no-coding way.
While navigating through Holoverse, ie. looking at the world through your phone’s camera lens, you will occasionally come accross Hololoot Box. The said box will possess popular lootbox mechanics you can find in lots of modern games.
By finding H-Boxes you might get your hands on $HOL token, secure yourself pieces of Legendary Tier NFT or find clues about current in-app missions.
We aim at maintaining user’s involvement in form of regular visits to the Holoverse, but we want to do it ethically. We want to avoid FOMO, which has been proven to have a negative impact on ones mental health. Fair, non-invasive system, in which frequency of visits does not determine the quality of experience is what we want to have.
Our advisors from Cracow University of Economics, Ph.D. Marek Makowiec and Ph.D. Aleksandra Witoszek are making sure we stay on top of our game on this subject.
As mentioned before, we opted for cloud computing. It is fast, flexible, secure and easy to scale.
Our own platform, Hololoot Cloud, serves as the heart of the system, a back-end for smooth immersion in Holoverse and a database for all 3D objects.
Cloud storage, identity, and access management,
organization management, and delegated administration are handled by it.
The Cloud was built with modern technologies:
Azure Cloud, React, WebGL, Java, NoSQL storage, machine learning.
It allows for:
Admin dashboard for companies, including content management; 3D model preview, 3D view embeddable on other websites; role-based authorization system, identity and access management.
Hololoot Cloud supports fully automated deployment, which significantly reduces time to market with new features. Automated backups, audits and monitoring are applied to achieve good service availability. It has proven to handle dozens of thousands of products with 3D models.
All self-service features allow for seamless management of content available for AR application users in no time, while keeping interface simple. All configuration needed for top tier display of 3D models with switchable
materials is automated within the cloud.
Environment light data like temperature or brightness is applied onto 3D models with colour correction
Hololoot App integrates with Hololoot Cloud which allows for instant 3D models synchronization. The connection to Hololoot Match lets the app provide users with quality suggestions in regards to what they are looking for.
Hololoot uses advanced technologies such as ARkit, AR Foundation, and glTF
files to give our users the best experience of the presented content. We take advantage of depth cameras which make very precise scans of rooms and can recognize 3D elements. New generation AR glasses on our platform is just a matter of time.
Hololoot AR is using a technology called Light Estimation to gather data in real-time from physical world. Environment light data like temperature or brightness is applied onto 3D models with colour correction. They mimic the real world.
This is nothing else but our own Machine Learning algorhitms implemented into Hololoot Ecosystem.
Production:
Hololoot Match improves productivity, by reusing and specializing generic or pretrained models while designing new models. It also updates models with the new data as it appears in the system.
Search:
Hololoot Match is implemented in our NFT Search Engine. As you search through available NFTs, each swipe increases the likelihood of finding what you are looking for. The app allows our users to adjust their preferences for a onetime search or set them as default. Users can discover new NFTs with help of machine learning. This is a complete novelty on the market of NFT marketplaces.
Whenever creating something, there are two methods of doing so, depending on user’s advancement level. Either you can manually handcraft each piece or use algorithms to produce them automatically.
Manual creation gives you quality and is time consuming. Perfection needs time. The latter method saves you heaps of time at the cost of quality.
At Hololoot we mix the best of two worlds.
We’ve built from our own scanning device from a scratch. This allows us to create digital twins of real world materials — fabric, metal, wood, ceramic, etc. Manual asset generation is a tedious process. Hence our aim to automate everything that we can. Our automation process has one condition — no compromise on the quality.
3D Assets Creation Guideline
We want Hololoot to be a self-service product. We have written a detailed guideline allowing anyone with basic 3D modelling skills to prepare assets quickly and easily so they can be placed on the Hololoot Cloud and sent into the Hololoot AR app.
There is a lot of algorithms, services, nerdy talk and code contributing to the creation of Hololoot Ecosystem as a whole. What was covered here is only scratching the surface of what is being created.
We will keep to ourselves the amount of hard work, sleepless nights and litres of caffeine used, but make sure you stay tuned for Part Two, where we will talk about Tokenomics and more juicy info.
It would be very difficult to get to where we are now without our talented developers.
Kamil Gawelek is responsible for our AR software development, while Rafal Pronko takes care of all our data. And all these jaw dropping, beautiful 3D assets and proper functioning of them and all the future ones are the effects of two of our 3D specialists, Artur Przylucki and Pawel Szulik, respectively.
Stay tuned for next articles. You can visit our Twitter and Telegram Chat if you crave more knowledge.
TBC…
Originally published at https://medium.com on November 17, 2021.
