Highstreet Founder Travis Wu AMA Recap
The time when playing games used to be accompanied by a feeling of guilt — similar to eating chocolate during a diet — is over. Nowadays, as you may well know, you can make a massive amount of money by actually playing your favorite games. However, Highstreet is about to bring this opportunity to a whole new level.
The platform plans to allocate a staggering amount of 30% of Smart Tokens (Highstreet official token) for their Proof of Play(PoP) feature, which rewards you for succeeding or even just competing at games and events. (I mentioned this first since my nostalgia hit me as I was writing the article!)
What else?
- Gamified shopping experience(that feels like Alice shopping in the wonderland!)
- Stunning game visuals
- Street Smart
- Data-driven shopping assistant
- Buy and sell stuff in no time
There are more features to Highstreet.
On Saturday, we were honored to have the founder of Highstreet, Travis Wu, for an AMA with the BullPerks community on Telegram.
Here is what he had to say!
Travis Builds: Hello guys~ thank you for having me~
BullPerks Admin: Hey everyone and welcome to Highstreet AMA with BullPerks! I hope you’re all as excited as we are. Highstreet’s Founder, Travis Wu, is here with us to answer your questions. So, without further ado, Let’s get this show on the road!
Hi, Travis! Ready?
Travis Wu: Absolutely~
BullPerks Admin: First, can you tell us about HighStreet and how did you come up with that name?
Travis Wu: Highstreet is essentially Shopify on an MMORPG game; it allows various brands from HIGH fashion to STREET wear to easily launch their own virtual shops in our metaverse. The game itself is inspired by some of our childhood classics, from Maplestory, Avatar the Last Airbender, Treasure Planet, and One Piece.
From a user’s perspective, it should feel just like any other MMORPG game; with monsters to fight, quests to complete, with the only exception that the shops within the world are very much real products from real brands and that it’s built with native VR support.
BullPerks Admin: Pretty impressive!
Can you tell us who the team members behind the project are?
Travis Wu:
here’s a quick in-game capture of our L’Oreal showroom in Highstreet City
The core team itself has been working together for almost 6 years now. We started as a traditional equity-based Virtual Reality company called LumiereVR where we use our computer vision technology to help brands and retail companies turn underutilized real estate into mixed reality experiences. Since our inception, we’ve built and picked up a few entities along the way.
We have an award-winning studio arm backed by Sundance Festival that consistently pushes the boundary of Art and Tech; in fact, last year, my co-founder produced a piece that won an Emmy.
In 2018 we also acquired a data analytics company called Retinad Realite Virtulle based in Montreal. While incorporating their gaze tracking software into our metaverse, it allows brands to receive consumer behavior data in real-time. How long a product had been interacted with, how many times a logo’s been seen; every piece of information is natively picked up and processed for brands to help improve their customer experience.
Our team today consists of people from corporates like Mickinsey and Sotheby’s, as well as crypto natives and traditional alt asset traders. However, the one thing that binds us all together is that we’re all super hard-core gamers that have been building our vision together for the past 6 years. “Ready player one: is like a Bible for many of us, so building Highstreet is really that first piece of the puzzle.
Eran Elhanani: One of the reasons we’re super bullish!! Real team with long-time experience and connections both in crypto and the real world!!
BullPerks Admin: That is pretty cool! I personally love it!
How about your advisors and backers?
Travis Wu: We are super fortunate to have had a ton of support on our journey from both Traditional and Crypto investors. From HTC on the VR side giving us that major hardware support since the early days of VR, to funds like Mechanism and NGC who provide support on the tokenomics side. We are really humbled to have so many great industry leaders who share the same vision and perhaps childhood nostalgia of living in a fantasy or game world.
Our traditional investors like Cherubic Ventures and Palmdrive Capital also play a quintessential role in helping us expand our communities beyond just crypto natives. Their almost daily introductions to leading luxury brands and celebrities alike help us close the gap between crypto and non-crypto users by enhancing our onboarding and user experience design.
Beyond household VCs, we also have institutions like Jump Trading who’ll also take on Market Making when we hit centralized exchanges, Japanese VC firm Incuba Alpha who’ll aid us in IP negotiations and licensing from the games we all played growing up. Other than investors, on the Advisory side, we’ve brought on Jaeson Ma, founder of Triller and 88Rising to help us rally the support of traditional musicians and artists, Miss Bitcoin and Mr. Block from the community and influencer side, along with an ex-president at Sotheby’s as well to help design our virtual real estate and in-game auctions.
BullPerks Admin: Can you share with us your short and long-term goals for HighStreet?
Travis Wu:
Highstreet City Square, big focus on arts as well!
Short term goal for us is obviously to launch phase 1 of our product; our Metaverse Alpha is already starting to get into the hands of early testers, while upon our Public Sale sometime next month, we’ll launch our phygital marketplace for limited edition products to the public, accessible directly on the browser. Every product, of course, whether you buy it on the browser or on PC/VR, will go towards the same Vault, creating this two-way street between the digital and physical world.
Longer-term: Our Public Beta is currently slated for the end of the year in November, whereas mobile companion apps are set to release early next year. We are already working on interoperability between our metaverse and other games; it’s a really hard architectural problem to build upon, so hopefully, we can start opening these inter-dimensional doors by the second half of next year.
More into the future, Highstreet world is an archipelago similar to the world of One Piece. So once the beta is in action, we’ll slowly start opening up more and more islands secretly that our users or “Explorers” can go out and find. There will be treasures and quests that’ll allow you to not only earn $HIGH tokens, but also claim valuable real estates.
here’s a quick video highlighting our Crypto Lounge, where users will soon be able to hang out and charge up their $HIGH tokens
BullPerks Admin: OMG loving this more!!
What are some of the special features you have and differentiates you from anyone?
Travis Wu: I think there are a lot of super-unique features in our project but here’s a couple:
1. We are building an MMORPG from the ground up to support VR natively.
2. We are integrating real brands and real products into this world.
3. We don’t sell land, but we sell real estate in the form of condos, villas, and even castles.
4. Every Product in the game is phygital meaning either you can redeem it for a physical product, or they’re fractional NFTs that allow you to pick either to buy just the digital component or the entire phygital pair.
5. Our limited edition product market uses a bonding curve that automates price discovery for new brands as well as guarantees liquidity for buyers.
A super interesting proposition to brands is also our ability to use computer vision and bring certain components of the metaverse into the physical world for activations in retail locations.
Here we reconstruct a location, then re-skin it by selectively bringing in our metaverse to fit its space, and create a complete virtual retail experience for our users, along with holographic AI store managers and various mixed reality components.
BullPerks Admin: First class! very interesting!! 🔥
And then, one of our community members, Kar, had an interesting question about the project. Here is the answer from Travis!
Kar(BullPerks community member): How can you connect the brands with customers? How do you convince them? And what would that benefit the project? And if we are users/customers, what is the benefit for us?
Travis Wu: [In reply to Kar]
Brands:
- New Market into gaming with demographic they might have previously been alienated from, especially older luxury brands; GenZ, Crypto natives are a big and growing market.
- When we sell products in the metaverse, they are all phygital: you buy the first fraction of an NFT for the virtual version, the second fraction for the physical products. Brands effectively make a pure profit on the first fraction.
- Data analytics is handled natively. Previously brands would pay companies like Nielsen Research upwards of half a million dollars to get people in a room and study their behavior through watching certain ads. In the metaverse with built-in eye-tracking or gaze tracking, this entire process can be automated at a much cheaper price and produce better and more accurate results.
Players:
- Play to Earn (if you play 4–5 hours a day, you probably can make about 150–200 dollars), while still producing value to the world by helping brands improve their products.
- We’re trying to emulate all the fantasy games and sci-fi VR stories loved by this generation. While “ready player one” is a love story to the 80s, we’re quite literally a nostalgia trip to the 90s. So I’m sure for a certain demographic this is purely a form of enjoyment.
- Product and Brand discovery — With E-commerce overtaking retail, some of the joys of shopping have been taken out of the world. Frictionless check-out allowed better efficiency but you lose the magic of going to the mall and discovering something fresh. With the metaverse, we bring the sense of adventure back into shopping. Visit Highstreet City and always find a new brand ready to engage with you on a personal level.
Travis Wu: Thank you for having me!
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