Sounds of Things vs. Other Metaverse: Why it’s different?
The world is at another major technological juncture.
We are witnessing the transition of the internet into web3. Web1 was experienced in the early 1990s, and it was mostly read-only text content. Web2, which began in earnest in the early 2000s, brought us dynamic imagery.
The web3 promises us a virtual world that not only mimics the real world but also interoperates with it in real-time through blockchain, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) technologies.
The primary user interfaces for web2 are websites and mobile applications. For Web3, it is metaverses, 3D virtual worlds built on peer-to-peer networks.
Besides building communities and manipulating the virtual environment in the metaverse, people can create, build and own assets that have value even in the real world.
The least exploited sensory power
The earliest metaverses have had a primary focus on the visual. Most of these virtual worlds are being built with high-quality imagery so that the experience in them is primarily appealing and consumable through sight.
All that is great. However, another human sensory ability has proven over time to give access to an equally powerful experience. And that is indulgence through audio.
The earliest way humans could create nirvana to escape their mundane existence was through audio (orally performed narratives). Also, through audio, humans have accumulated nostalgic intimate moments from their environment.
Simple sounds like birds chirping as we walk through an echo-producing forest, raindrops hitting dry leaves, the wind blowing over dunes in the desert, or water falling over a cliff burn into our memory instinctive nostalgia that is triggered whenever we listen to them.
The first sound metaverse
SoundsOfThings goes against the prevailing wisdom about the nature of a metaverse. It is a metaverse designed to give sound priority over the image.
The logic behind this is that whenever sound and image are produced and consumed together, there is a tendency to give the quality of the image priority.
This is despite tests showing that image is second to sound when it comes to importance.
A sound metaverse allows users to focus on sound both when producing and consuming it.
Indeed, this is the best time in history for a metaverse to focus on producing and consuming sound content. That is because of the availability of superior sound production and consumption technologies, particularly third dimension sound reproduction and binaural rendering, otherwise known as immersive audio.
Only big cinema halls could leverage immersive audio just a few years ago. Today one can have the exact same experience through easily available and affordable headphones.
This is thanks to the advancement of surround sound technologies such as Dolby Atmos, Aura 3D, MPEG-H, and Sony 360 Reality. In other words, everyone can now walk around with cinematic sound capacity.
Users in the SoundsOfThings metaverse can record short, interesting audio and mix it with a professionally composed soundtrack to create a Sound Emotion. They can then share the Sound Emotion with a community online.
The Sound Emotion is tagged to a specific location on the map known as a Sound Village. That means one can listen to it when in a specific physical location.
The Sound Emotions can be minted into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital assets that can be consumed, owned, and passed around as art.