Introducing Stage Land Prisms

Published in

Stageverse

6 min readJul 21, 2022

The following article takes you through our creative process and the story behind the Stage prisms. Each Stage landowner will receive a land deed with a beautiful 3D Prism imprinted on it, which can be shared on the web or within a metaverse space and beyond.

Before we dive in, a quick reminder to make sure you don’t miss out on snagging one of these prisms — the Presale Mint starts Sunday, July 24, 2022 @ 3PM PST / 6PM EST. You can find more information on the Presale Mint here.

If you haven’t done so already, make sure you register or join a neighborhood ahead of then to access the Presale; and join us on Discord for Mint announcements!

Stage Prisms — Gateways to Immersive Worlds

As we developed the architecture for the Stage, the map and the associated 3D worlds, we needed to develop a foundational construct that:

Represented identity and ownership of an individual plot of land;
Created a consistent visual style across the map;
Represented a gateway, or nexus, between the finite land plot and the expansive world that can be tied to it.

This was the brief tackled by the creative and product team at Stage. I’m very pleased to share today the result of this process.

Constructing the Elements

Since our metaverse platform is fundamentally spatial, we looked for foundational spatial concepts to serve as symbols of land ownership. This took us mathematically and philosophically to Plato, who hypothesized that the classical elements were made of regular solids, the Platonic Solids. These are foundational primitive objects that we frequently use in 3D content creation and serve as the ideal building blocks to represent our expansive new metaverse world.

There are 5 Platonic solids, each associated with the five elements of nature:

Tetrahedron (Fire): 4 Sides
Cube (Earth): 6 Sides
Octahedron (Air): 8 Air
Dodecahedron (Cosmos / Ether): 12 Sides
Icosahedron (Water): 20 Sides

In addition to the 5 Platonic solids, we added 7 other Polyhedra drawn from Archimedean solids to round out the total unique shapes to 12 to correspond to the 12 sections, or hours, associated with the Stage map.

The Stageverse Sphere

We had already established the core structure of the Stage and the map itself as a circle. This circular layout reflects classical radial urban planning from Europe as well as contemporary examples like Burning Man. The circle gives focus to the center. Concentric rings and hours create neighborhoods and centers of energy. The circle is the universal symbol of unity, totality, wholeness, original perfection, the Self, the infinite, eternity, timelessness

There is one last shape that is used in Stageverse, and that is the Sphere. It is a representation of the entirety of Stageverse itself. German astronomer Johannes Kepler, proposed that the distance relationships between the six planets known at that time could be understood in terms of the five Platonic solids, enclosed within a sphere that represented the orbit of Saturn.

His book, Mysterium Cosmographicum (Cosmic Mystery), explains his cosmological theory, based on the Copernican system, in which the five Platonic solids dictate the structure of the universe. In a Copernican system the sun is at the center of the planet’s Heliocentric orbits.

In Stageverse, The Sphere is situated in the center of the Stage map and will also be used as the pre-reveal asset when viewing minted land on Opensea. The Sphere is a three-dimensional analogue to a two-dimensional circle (ie: the Map) and symbolically represents a sense of oneness.

Types of Prisms

Since our platform is as much about light as it is about form, we were attracted to the concept of Prisms, objects that reflect and refract light. The word prism (from Greek πρίσμα (prisma) ‘something sawed’) was first used in Euclid’s Elements. Thus, we looked to evolve the 12 polyhedra shapes using prisms, bringing them more depth and dimension.

There are three types of Prisms:

Optical prisms are transparent optical elements with flat, polished surfaces that are designed to refract light.
Dispersive prisms are used to break up light into its constituent spectral colors because the refractive index depends on frequency.
Reflective prisms are used to reflect light. They use total internal reflection to achieve near-perfect reflectivity on their facets

Prisms refract, disperse, reflect light creating new patterns, designs and moods. Stageverse provides something similar for the real and digital world, whereby familiar experiences are refracted, dispersed and reflected to create new, immersive and imaginative experiences.

We’ve taken these concepts and designed beautiful and alluring Stage Prisms. Each has their own unique characteristics and rarity. Here is a preview of some of the different shapes you can expect at the Land Reveal:

Prisms as Portals

The Stage Prisms represent the nexus between your plot of land on the Stage and the immersive world you can connect to it; we call these immersive worlds “Spaces”.

The Prism is a centerpiece to your land with each plot featuring a unique floating Prism as it’s centerpiece. These will also act as a portal in and out of the your plot of land, a literal Nexus from the land scene to connect metaverse spaces. Adjacent plots from your land plot will be semi-visible and eventually be fully traversable, connecting these land scenes into an explorable world.

Prism Land Deed

Finally, the prism itself is a unique piece of art, an NFTs that all landholders will receive and can display and own long term. These objects have an inherent beauty that is captivating and infinite. With the variations of color and light this collection will include many specific rarities. These renders take many hours to produce on state of the art hardware, and involve ray tracing hundreds of light bounces and refractions in near infinite directions. Similar to the years of pressure it takes to create a diamond, the energy and computational hours it takes to produce these renders in essence makes them digital diamonds.

Each land deed will feature a prism along with associated unique coordinates, making each land deed NFT unique. While we’re not going to give it all away until time of reveal, see below for a teaser of what a Stage land deed might look like.

This has been just a peek into our creative process at Stageverse. Each element that we introduce goes through rigorous exploration and development, and the Stage Prisms were certainly no exception. We can’t wait for you to get your hands on your own unique land deed and showcase your own prism in and out of the Stageverse world.

And another reminder — the Presale Mint starts Sunday, July 24, 2022 @ 3PM PST / 6PM EST. You can find more information on the Presale Mint here.