First, a huge thank you to the Portals community. Thank you for all the support and passion for the Portals Metaverse. It really means a lot to us.
In this article, we’ll go through what the future looks like for Portals!
As we open up public access in the coming weeks and months, we aim to become the leading global browser-based metaverse platform, period.
We believe there’s a huge potential in an easy-to-visit, easy-to-build, browser-based metaverse with great graphics and tons of utility. Creators, communities, and companies/brands will build, showcase, host, explore, and just have a good time. Portals is already ahead of most other browser-based platforms on many levels.
The team is growing. And we are grinding away, aiming to turn Portals into a platform people truly love. We have 5x’d the size of the team since November (and we’re definitely still hiring).
We are more excited than ever to continue building a metaverse people actually want to use. Every day, we are working with — and listening to — creators, communities, and companies. Including individuals, agencies and developers who build on behalf of clients.
Great products/platforms iterate quickly — so this roadmap shouldn’t be taken as set in stone. Things could change. With that said, let’s take a high-level view of all the new stuff we intend to bring to Portals!
Maximizing awareness
We wanted to maximize the reach of each announcement and piece of content related to Roadmap 2.0. To do this we released the content and teasers as ten announcements and on top of that announced two new major collaborations.
Let’s dive in!
Building a great “Onboarding Experience” for new users
While Ivory, Onyx, and Vision spaces (the three types of Portals Real Estate NFTs) will drive the majority of the traffic and daily active users as spaces are being built and put to use, we want to create the best possible Metaverse onboarding experiences and welcome areas for new people who are curious in what the metaverse is all about.
This area is what Portals NFT holders currently know as “Downtown”. It’s the Train Station, The Promenade with Portals Labs, The Gallery, The Café, The Arcade etc.
This includes making sure that the initial area is vibrant, fun, and has a calendar filled with great events for people who are new.
One such place for events is “The Gallery”:
Another example is the upcoming Portals Arcade:
In addition to starting quests, games, town halls, exploration, pets, and the ability to furnish your own pod, we are designing even more systems that encourage daily activity that we’ll be talking about soon.
In the next section, we go into some of the other key ways many new users are discovering Portals.
Supercharging Ivory, Onyx, and Vision spaces
We’ve been talking to holders and brands running both small and large events in their Portals spaces. Some communities are large enough to have 800+ attendees waiting to get into AMAs and town halls. There are poker tournaments with 200+ attendees. Weekly gatherings for everything from rap concerts, gaming meetups, internal company meetings, and more.
Many new users are discovering Portals by visiting these spaces, and will be curious about the broader Portals world — “There’s also a city center to explore? I can get my own pod?” — We are leaning into this heavily and designing new systems to reward and encourage space owners to onboard more visitors.
We want to empower all of the creators, communities, and brands to do all of the above-mentioned as easily as possible to create the best possible “active” and ”passive” experiences. We’ll continue to elaborate on what we mean by “active” and “passive” over the coming days and weeks.
New amazing features for Spaces
Some are already mentioned in the April/May Roadmap, but included here for the overview:
- Much improved graphics + camera controls + first-person mode + proximity audio (rolling out now)
- Town Hall Mode (rolling out now)
- Sandbox / Demo mode (rolling out now)
- Templates & Easy Customization
There will be a new interface that allows you to choose from starting templates and then be able to customize. Change floor/wall/furniture/lighting colors to match your vibe and create a much more unique space — with just a few clicks. We want to make it super easy for brands/communities to create spaces that match their unique style.
- New item sets
- Livestreaming video + audio
- Lighting Options
- Building Blocks
- Custom NPC Chatbots
- Image Uploader (rolling out now)
- Screen Sharing
- Live Feed (Charts)
- NFT Gating
- Short URLs
On top of this, we’ll continue to expand what is possible with the spaces and are systematically recording suggestions in the Portals Discord “Suggestions” Channel.
Here are a few visual teasers of some of the above!
Bringing Pets to the Metaverse
While Pets isn’t the highest priority “right now”, a concept like Pets (and Bots for that matter) is a great way to make the Portals Metaverse more interactive, fun, and engaging, even when just exploring or hanging out.
There are so many things that can be done with the concept of Pets. Just as with NFTs they can be collectibles with traits (or even NFTs) that could be upgraded or evolve over time. We know from the gaming industry how popular pets are too and it could create a fun incentive to check in to Portals frequently (to check on your pet of course!).
Avatar integrations and collaborations
People familiar with Portals already know about the upcoming Avatar integrations with a lot of NFT Avatar projects, but another area or industry that is evolving very fast is collaborations and partnerships around Avatar Merch and Accessories.
A way for Portals to quickly tap into this is through partnerships with companies and platforms like the avatar platform Ready Player Me.
Ready Player Me currently doing a super exciting partnership with Adidas!
We believe Portals will be one of the best ways and places for people to use their new Avatars, Merch and Accessories right in the browser. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to us to have interoperability when it comes to Avatars and not only our own closed Avatar ecosystem.
Here are a few sneak peeks:
https://twitter.com/_portals_/status/1519349943705743360
You can try out Ready Player Me in Portals already through our demo here: preview.theportal.to/demo
NPC Chatbots
We want to make sure that visiting spaces is rewarding even when a live event isn’t going on. That’s why we’re letting room owners drop a greeter bot into their space!
You’ll be able to set them up with their own dialogue trees so that visitors can click responses.
[[What else can I do in here?]]
[[Tell me more about X…]]
Features coming to these bots over time:
- Customizable dialogue trees
- Give simple quests or information about things that can be found in your space
- Visitor counter
- Guestbook
- Leave messages for the room owner
Districts
Beyond all the new features we’re adding to interior spaces, Portals will continue building out a dense, explorable virtual world.
We’re starting that expansion with Preview District Zero — formed by our collaborators (and Portals holders) like Solana, Audius, Magic Eden, FTX US, OpeanSea & Binance.US.
Making districts automatically expand to create more street space as new buildings are added is a larger technical undertaking, so we’re building this first preview district manually.
In the future, anyone with a Vision, Onyx, or Ivory access card will be able to form a district, with Vision buildings having the largest street presence.
Do you own 10 Ivories that you want to fill up with interesting retail stores, or that you plan to rent out to a particular industry? Consider forming your own district!
You’ll be able to visit districts via the Portals Grand Terminal Map, (or spaces directly via a short URL).
Customizable buildings
The buildings seen in the District Zero render are built from modular parts. Ivory, Onyx & Vision owners who decide to move their space to a district will be able to choose from different building pieces. They will also be able to choose their building colors/lights, use custom logos, and more.
Here’s the video sneak peek of what the “Preview District Zero” will look like:
“District” mechanics and features will be an explorative process.
It’s still early days for “Districts”. Not all mechanics and features are finalized or set in stone yet, so it’s still possible for Portals holders and the community to discuss and voice ideas and opinions on mechanics.
Portals PFP Project
We’re developing a PFP NFT project for Portals
It’s still very early days in the Web3, NFT, and Metaverse space, and there’s no doubt — both short-term and long-term — that Portals can benefit greatly from developing and running a PFP project that has utility in the Portals Metaverse. It’s also been a big wish from many in the community since early on.
The only way to get the PFP NFT will be via owning a Portals Genesis Citizen Card NFT. 1 Portals Genesis Citizen Card NFT = 1 PFP NFT (it will most likely be a replace/swap mechanism)
There are 10000 Genesis Citizen Cards:
- 5000 of those will be airdropped to Portals Ivory, Onyx, and Vision NFT holders in May (one per NFT)
- 5000 of those are already on the secondary market: https://magiceden.io/marketplace/portals_citizen_cards
Timeline
We will be publishing more on our expectations in terms of the timeline during the month of May (next month). The biggest focus right now is opening up Portals to the public, a massive focus on marketing and awareness, Spaces 2.0, and delivering on the last parts of the Roadmap we have already promised earlier. Here’s what we have previously published in Discord about the short-term roadmap for April/May:
Together with the Portals Community, we’ll be creating a “Roadmap/Timeline FAQ” too (based on questions, discussions, and feedback). This will include our collected thoughts on everything from token, to VR, to mobile, to native applications, to “Go-to-Market Roadmap” and other things that can be helpful to know for anyone making a decision about acquiring a Portals NFT.
The ambition
We’ll end where we started:
As we open up public access in the coming weeks and months, we aim to become the leading global browser-based metaverse platform, period.
This does not mean Portals will stay in the browser forever, most likely not, but we believe it’s hands-down the best place to start and the quickest way to onboard creators, communities, and companies/brands in very large numbers.
LFG!
The Portals Team
p.s. below are 3 other great news from yesterday too!
