Stageverse Roadmap for the Social Metaverse

At Stage, we believe that the metaverse is an opportunity to foster deeper connections online, enabling digital communities to thrive in ways not possible with the 2D web. We’re prioritizing features that enhance the online social experience for communities as well as the development of an open and ownable metaverse through core Web3 priniciples.

The following is a peek into our product development roadmap and what you can look forward to as a member of the Stageverse community. We’ve released a ton of features to date, and our app is currently available in public beta on iOS, Android and the Web, for you to explore. We have so much more on the way though, so let’s dive in!

Phase 1: Metaverse Infrastructure

Needless to say, the metaverse is complex, and there is an immense amount of resources that go into contributing to the next generation of the internet. We’ve been diligently building now for several years to lay down the foundational infrastructure to enable immersive 3D experiences online.

Some quick background on where we’ve been and what we’ve done so far. For more on this, check out the blog from our Founder & CEO, Tim Ricker.

In Fall 2021, we launched our first public beta, a 3D metaverse concert experience in partnership with Muse and their Simulation Theory Tour, available on both mobile and VR. It is a first-of-its-kind virtual concert experience, with immersive 360-degree video, spatial voice chat, high fidelity avatars, and a fully explorable virtual stadium, allowing fans to connect and experience Muse in an entirely new way. Following the success of the Muse experience, we realized that the technology stack we created to support such an immersive and social 3D experience could be applied far beyond concerts.

While fans initially came to Stageverse for the concert, they ended up staying, and returning, for the unique social experience enabled by our immersive environments. Following this realization, we began evolving Stageverse and the underlying technology platform toward a more holistic metaverse offering, dedicated to enabling creators, communities, and brands to easily host a wide variety of high-fidelity 3D experiences. We’re excited about the vast opportunity for our technology to make an impact beyond virtual concerts, and grateful for our early community that helped us reach this refined direction for the company.

Phase 2: Community Foundations

Following the development of the core infrastructure and piloting of a fully immersive concert experience with Muse, we shifted to expand on our social and community-centric features. This included a variety of new ways to connect and interact with friends and promote identity of both individuals and communities.

Social Interaction, Token-Gated Spaces & Livestreams

Immersive social interaction is at the core of our product development efforts. We’re constantly evolving our thinking, testing and introducing new social features to make the Stageverse experience the best it can be. Some of our initial features include the ability to create private parties, custom emotes (emoji expressions), as well as visit several unique spaces — each with a specific purpose including a clubhouse, nightclub, media room, gallery, private island and desert theater.

We offer tools that enable any community to set up their own token-gated space in the metaverse. These beautiful, immersive, social spaces provide communities the opportunity to hang out, connect with friends, meet new ones, and experience the serendipity of happenstance encounters inside Stageverse.

Stageverse takes pride in being home to the best spatial experiences in the metaverse. In addition to token-gated access, our experiences also feature beautiful design and amazing visuals made possible by high fidelity graphics. We support spatial audio, allowing multiple conversations among groups of users in parallel, without overlap.

Currently, NFT communities congregate on 2D platforms such as Discord and Twitter. While these platforms are great for asynchronous communication, interacting in chat windows still does not compare to socializing IRL. Stageverse provides a platform that closely captures that “real life house party feeling” by combining immersive 3D spaces, full-body avatars, and spatial voice chat.

We’ve been actively customizing several of these spaces for our early partners, providing custom artwork and hosting livestream events, including our own live DJ event from NFT/NYC with Party Degenerates featuring an epic lineup of talent, including Diplo and Blond:ish. This is only the beginning!

NFT / PFP Integration

Our public beta on iOS and Android is integrated with MetaMask, allowing community members to import their verified PFPs into Stageverse. PFPs appear as a floating badge above your Stageverse Avatar, enabling a sense of unique identity within the metaverse, and giving a new dimension of interaction to your NFTs. In the future, we will allow community members to use full-body NFT avatars within Stageverse.

Phase 3: Space & Avatar Customization

The next big feature release from the Stage team will be a suite of customization tools for both spaces and avatars. For the first time in Stageverse, people will be able to highly customize their own personal spaces and avatars. No need to be an advanced 3D designer to take advantage of these customization opportunities. We’re making it easy for anyone to quickly personalize their avatar and make a space their own.

Today, you can select from a collection of predefined avatars, but soon you’ll be able to fully customize your avatar, including face and body characteristics, clothing and more!

We’ve already launched previews of many of our spaces, which can be accessed via our web or mobile apps. These include the Private Island, the Gallery, the Desert Theater, amongst many other immersive new environments. When we launch space customization, you’ll gain access to these spaces and be able to make them your own and customize them with your own art, video and more!

We’ll report back with a full teardown on avatar and space customization soon 👀

Phase 4: Ownable NFT Ecosystem

We believe the future of the web (and the metaverse) is one that is ownable, and people should be able to retain their assets and identities wherever they are on the web. There are three core components of the Stageverse NFT ecosystem, including Land, Spaces and Avatars.

The Stage Land Sale

The first NFTs that we’ll be offering are in the form of Land on the Stage, our first community-owned world and focal point of the Stageverse experience.

The Stage Land Sale has multiple phases with a total of 200,000 land plots available. The first phase, coming this Summer, includes a total of 12,000 plots for public sale. Check out our land sale blog to get all the details and create a neighborhood to get in on the pre-sale!

Stageverse NFT Avatars

Our first big drop following the the Land Sale will be the the Stageverse Generative NFT Avatar Collection, which will consist of unique, high-fidelity, expressive 3D avatars usable within Stageverse and beyond. The development of these avatars has already begun — we’ll be teasing more info on the creative direction soon!

Stageverse NFT Spaces

Stageverse is all about shared immersive 3D spaces that bring people together. We believe in a future where beautifully-designed environments become a new art category in and of themselves; 3D immersive art that you can interact with, socialize in, throw parties and events at, own, collect, trade, and customize. We will be launching collections of spaces as NFTs that have unique characteristics and can be also be customized. Ultimately, these spaces will become important extensions of our online identities and a core component of online self expression.

Both our avatars and apaces collections will also include NFT objects associated with them, such custom jackets, shoes and specific items like furniture and decor. These can be collected, traded and displayed within the Stageverse ecosystem and eventually others as well.

We are committed to rewarding early adopters on our platform across NFT Land, Avatars and Spaces. With that in mind, owners of assets from earlier releases will be rewarded as our platform grows and new collections are dropped. Much more to come.

Phase 5: Pro Creator Tools & SDK

While our first goal is making the metaverse accessible to everyone via easy-to-use templates and tools, we also know that the biggest opportunity for creativity in the metaverse comes not from us, but from our community. Thus, we’ll be introducing creator tools for advanced designers to imagine and create entire worlds. Our hope is that Stageverse becomes the best place for creators to build and monetize high-quality 3D assets and experiences in the metaverse.

Realizing this goal starts with developing tools and infrastructure that will make it easy for artists, brands, entrepreneurs, and creators of all types to build on top of the Stageverse platform, whether it be avatar fashion, immersive architecture, beautiful environments, 3D art, or events. Many of these tools are already in the works and are currently being dogfooded by Stageverse’s in-house creative content studio before broader release to the public. We’ll be tackling this for both Spaces and Avatars.

• Stageverse Spaces SDK: Enables pro-level 3D creators to produce beautiful spaces and environments that plug directly into Stageverse and can be distributed as NFTs.
• Stageverse Avatar SDK: Enables pro-level 3D creators to produce beautiful avatars and avatar fashion items that plug directly into Stageverse and can be distributed as NFTs.

These tools will unlock endless possibilities as we move into a world where meta designers may be more important than IRL designers. Whether our creators are building a gown for the 2023 Meta Gala or creating a new species of alien avatars, our tools will be there to deliver. In the coming weeks and months we will provide more information on our work in this area — stay tuned!

Phase 6: Web3 Economy & Interoperability

We’re building incentive structures and economic systems that reward creators for the value they produce in a manner consistent with web3 ethos, without extractive middlemen and exorbitant platform taxes. Included in this is an NFT Marketplace and Utility Token, which will be used for trade and payments across the Stageverse ecosystem.

We will also be introducing grant programs and partnerships that reward high quality creation and innovation on the platform. Stage NFT and Token holders will have governance rights as it relates to the future development of various aspects of the Stageverse ecosystem, making the community owners of its future direction.

We believe that the metaverse should not be full of silo’d experiences, rather it should be as interoperable as possible across different ecosystems. We are committed to supporting this in our product development and will be introducing specific functionality that makes it easy to bring assets in and out of Stageverse, as well as direct interaction opportunities with other metaverse environments.

This post is meant to give you a window into the future of Stageverse. In true web3 fashion, we are asking our community members to come along for the ride and believe in our team and our vision. We know this is not something to be taken lightly and we are committed to consistent communication and community inclusion every step of the way.

While this roadmap will serve as a guide, we know the metaverse and web3 move fast and we fully expect to make adjustments along the way. We promise to treat every member of our community like we do our team, listen to feedback and update everyone along the way.

We can’t wait to build the future of the open metaverse with you all. 🚀