Artificial Intelligence — The foundation of Realm’s metaverse Pt 1

6 min readFeb 10, 2023

This is part 1 of a multi part series covering Realm’s development journey and some of the complex decisions we have made in order to leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

When we started Realm at the beginning of 2021 we had one simple mission:

Quickly create engaging virtual experiences (realms) with no code.

We knew by simplifying the creation process, we could quickly grow the number of realms, kickstart network effects and enable everyone to find experiences they enjoyed. We made 2 core product design decisions that were against the grain compared to other Web3 metaverses.

We had to be mobile first so everyone could get access on the go
Any everyone should be able to create for free, without purchasing land

The decision around creating a mobile first product was a no brainer, 61% of the entire gaming revenues in 2022 came from mobile devices.

Land, however, was a much more complex decision. The trend was to make land scarce but this massively limited the creation process and our ability to collect data that would be required to speed up the creation of realms.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning were clearly the most powerful technologies that if fed the right data could be used to automatically generate engaging experiences, and they were becoming increasingly accessible due to 2 macro trends.

Computing power: The exponential increase in computing power has been one of the main enablers of AI. This has allowed for complex algorithms and models to be trained and run, enabling breakthroughs in AI research and development.
Data availability: AI algorithms require large amounts of data to train on and improve their accuracy. The availability of vast amounts of data, along with the rise of cloud computing, has made it easier for organizations to store, process, and analyze this data, leading to significant advancements in AI.

Land Scarcity = Anti AI

We spent a long time thinking about a solution to our land problem and in the end we pioneered a dual land class design.

9,360 finite land plots in a city
Infinite number of realms

The idea was the finite land in the Metropolis city would be used to organise the metaverse and assist with content discovery and the Infinite number of realms, would be used to generate data that trains AI /ML models. The race was now on to build the tools to start collecting data.

AI as a technology to onboard & build quicker.

We are a 100% decentralised team, working in various timezones with huge libraries of code and an extremely complex platform. We quickly began looking at how AI could be used to speed up onboarding of new developers and the build process.

The idea was that we could make a tool that would help our developers learn the codebase quicker, build features quicker and then we could roll this tool out to a broader range of developers who could build on top of the platform.

In order to achieve this one of our senior engineers started working on the core AI research around knowledge-base indexing on a tool called GPT Index. He began building pathways to connect and index proprietary data to Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT. This is particularly useful as it makes AI responses much cheaper and more relevant.

In the image below you can see GPT-Index connects Realm’s codebase to OpenAI’s Davinci, which is what ChatGPT is built with. Now developers at Realm could just ask the AI how to do something and quickly be fed the relevant information, without needing to search through massive amounts of code or ask a team member who may not even be awake at that time.

Why is this valuable?

Aside from saving processing costs and offering more relevant responses, it saves lots of time! Our team consists of extremely talented people with extensive experience from the worlds best organisations. That being said we are still a very small team averaging 25 people for a full platform consisting of:

iOS and Android social app with embedded metaverse.
Multiplayer cloud based builder tools.
DAPP and in app marketplaces
Custom staking systems that connect to a users engagement with the platform.
All the multiplayer and single player game functionality, quests etc.
Live audio broadcasting from twitter/discord, chat etc.
About a 100 other social features, like selfies, stories etc.

We proudly built all of this 3–5x quicker than the market leaders with 10 -100x less capital. AI really is the best capital investment a company can make.

Ready to flirt with AI?

The next obvious step was to fix some of the key issues we see running a large platform - nobody knows how to use it!

So we used GPT Index to build a knowledge base of everything that is known about Realm. We connect this collective knowledge to every Non Player Character (NPC) in the metaverse, so they can can give detailed informative answers to a broad set of questions about Realm. This turns every NPC into a salesperson, a community support agent and crucially a storyteller.

We then use another AI that is running voice to text to transform the players questions into a text prompt for ChatGPT as typing on a keyboard in your phone seems to defeat the objective of a conversational AI.

As you can see in the video below you just stroll up to an NPC and literally talk to it.

We’ve tested this technology with many people and the depth of experience it offers is awesome. It has the ability to be both extremely informative, aid in discovery across the metaverse and crucially enables creators to immerse realm visitors in much deeper stories.

The Future — $REALM and AI

These are just 2 of the many AI services that Realm is releasing to speed up the process of creating engaging realms. In the next part we will dig deeper into our work around immersive storytelling with AI in characters.

Realm will unlock the full power of these AI models to creators, without the need for any coding experience as creators cannot be expected to write code to optimise processing costs and refine answers. Crucially all of the inputs and outputs from these AI systems feed into a larger proprietary model that Realm is training, which looks over the entire Realm platform.

All AI services will be made available to creators via the $REALM token. Creators will also earn $REALM every time somebody engages with their realm. We feel this is a win win scenario as Players get to explore amazing engaging experiences and Creators get to create wonderfully rich realms that generate them $REALM.

The price of $REALM is supported by our integrations with the largest Web2 and Web3 digital advertising exchanges, adverts can be shown in both game worlds and the social app. As people engage in the metaverse advertisers spend money to advertise and that money is distributed between Player, Creators, Realm and social impact causes.

HOVR

Enough about AI, here’s a sneak peak of something that can only be controlled by humans, or is it? HOVR will be dropping on Realm, with a Free2Own mint, gamified quest line, a paid collection of AAA boards and ongoing competition where you compete for the collection. Website launches late next week. Thank you for reading.

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About REALM

Leading mobile Metaverse with a purpose. Empowering players, creators & brands to participate in generating the future of entertainment in a co-owned virtual universe.

REALM players and creators are rewarded as they engage with the platform. The native REALM builder tool allows anyone, with no coding experience, to build personalised microverses, tell their story, and trade NTFs on the REALM Marketplace. Creators and brands can bring to life unique music, art, games, and anything else they can imagine into their realms.