Immersive virtual and augmented reality entertainment platform Terra Virtua today announced a partnership with WAX Worldwide Asset Exchange, a blockchain distributed ledger capable of recording the trades of virtual assets.

The integration of the WAX blockchain with Terra Virtua will allow developers for the platform to provide customers with the ability to view, buy, sell and trade virtual items — such as collectables, characters, clothing, weapons, furniture and other things that could appear in games.

The AR/VR consumer market is currently expanding rapidly and represent a significant part of the $26.7 billion global market in 2018, which is predicted to reach $814.7 billion in 2025 according to Zion Market Research.

Starting today, AR users can download the Terra Virtua app for Android devices on the Google Play store and connect a WAX account.

From there, Terra Virtua will read the user’s WAX inventory and then users can select which WAX collectables they own to interact with in the app. Users can then share videos and photos of these blockchain-based items in their AR environment on social media.

For example, although the demonstration is simplistic, this means that a user could decorate their own office or living room with WAX collectables — virtual artwork for the walls, character action figures, statues and the like — and then use that to take a picture and send it to friends.

Currently the first type of collectables integrated into Terra Virtua are skins from VGO, one of the largest decentralized trading marketplaces for video game skins in the world.

In a video game, a skin is a piece of artwork that changes the appearance of a character or object. A skin can change things such as hair color, eye color, face and clothing. It is essentially artwork that goes over the 3-D mesh model of a virtual object. Skins are often used by game developers as a way to allow players to customize the appearance of their characters, equipment and even housing. More importantly, skins are a common part of the microtransaction economy used by developers to make money off their games.

WAX was built by the team behind OPskins Group Inc., a major virtual item marketplace that has facilitated the trade of more than 150 million purchases of digital collectables. OPskins.com has also made news in the past for partnering with BitPay Inc. in 2016 to accept bitcoin, a blockchain-based cryptocurrency for weapon skins from the video game shooter “Counter-Strike.” 

In the near future, WAX intends to add even more categories of virtual items to its collectable database such as vIRLS — a virtual item that can be exchanged for a real world merchandise such as sneakers, apparel, video game gear and more — stickers, digital art and more. 

A Terra Virtua VR app is also being developed for release, which will allow users to interact with WAX digital items in virtual reality, including VGO skins and vIRL items.

The company also says that it will soon release an iOS app alongside the current Android app.

Virtual items mesh nicely with blockchain technology, which makes it possible to control ownership of a virtual asset. Normally, a virtual item is just represented by a row in a database, something that can be changed at the whim of a developer or host — but with a blockchain, the asset itself is controlled by cryptographic keys held by the owner and only when it is transferred to a new owner do those keys change.

As a result, virtual item marketplaces have explored the use of blockchain technology to secure the purchase, sale and trade of virtual assets. 

Examples include the cross-game virtual item marketplace DMarket and Gamania Group’s marketplace for game developers in Taiwan. Collectible card games also work well with blockchains, for the same reasons, with Horizon Blockchain Games Inc. raising $3.5 million in seed funding for virtual trading cards and “Spells of Genesis” from EverdreamSoft SA which launched in 2016.

Image: Terra Virtua