Get to Know: Highstreet

Team

The core team itself has been working together for almost 6 years now. We had a company named 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 Virtuelle based in Montreal. Incorporating their gaze tracking software into our metaverse 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 Mckinsey 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've 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.

Product + Vision

We're an MMORPG that combines all the favorite classics growing up from Maplestory to World of Warcraft, except all the in-game items are real products backed by real brands! Our merchant portal is also super easy for brands to use, kind of like shopify for the metaverse where using metaplex as a protocol brands can easily upload products to the metaverse and have it seamlessly weave into the lore of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QBYWviLZ0k&t=2s&ab_channel=HighstreetMetaverse

For the past 6 years our team has slaved away within the VR industry trying to figure out how we can possibly get to the world painted by Ready Player One or Sword Art Online, as hardware continues to advance and software tricks the brain into perpetual suspension of disbelief, the on chain layer is the last piece of the puzzle to create the first immersive metaverse prototype. With an MMO players can enter the world and take on a completely new identity and explore a vast open world populated by brands and partners. We integrate real products  and brands into the game because its a way to actually create a sustainable ecosystem. PLayers playing the game is not just clicking for yield, but instead providing real value to brands, while brands in turn by existing, create more content for players.

Key Differentiating Factors

There are a couple things that make us unique:

1) Phygital Products, our in-game items are tied to real items in the real world

2) Our limited edition market place garuantees liquidity for users by selling products on a bonding curve

3) We have a full metaverse in form of an open world game the integrates projects and brands in a collaborative manner

4) We have VR support from the ground up

5) We target high fidelity graphics rather than low poly browser based rendering

Roadmap

So our marketplace actually opens tomorrow (Sept. 29th) haha! Drop Zero will be announced and everyone can participate. We released our NFT ducks last week and yesterday opened our Lunar Vault. Holder of Fomo Ducks (https://highstreet.market/ffds) can send their ducks to the vault for a chance to grab HIGH Vouchers. Each voucher represents vesting tokens that convert directly to HIGH after TGE. These vouchers can also be used to buy drop zero tomorrow, giving users a chance to earn quite a bit of rewards ahead of public sale and exchange listings.

Beyond public sale and listing, we're looking at a Public Alpha release near halloween where we'll invite everyone to come join us in the metaverse, followed by subsequent releases until Christmas where hopefully we'll enter beta. We've got a special treat for mobile users come jan/feb where they can participate in the metaverse as well, but a bit differently haha

We've got big announcement for new investors coming soon next week, as well as partnerships to be announced with metaverse crossovers

Community Questions

Bubba Partivvel: Hello travis barker, just kidding😁@TTar248

Now that NFT and GameFi are developing so rapidly, will Highstreetworld face any obstacles in entering this market? What are your plans to take full advantage of the market potential? I don't know if the Highstreetworld platform is specifically for gamers or other users? What about non-gamer users? Can they still generate income even without playing your game? Do you have a guide for novice or non-gaming users like youtube or other channels?

Travis: While an MMORPG is a game, it really is a new take on life. You can complete quests, run errands, hangout with friends, even start your own brand and sell through the metaverse. I think as more and more things in life gets gamified, there no longer will be a distinction between gamer vs non-gamer. If you are alive and actively participating in society, you are a gamer. As a resident in Highstreet, you are automatically a gamer regardless of what activities you partake in! We will have plenty of youtube tutorials posted throuhgout our socials and also have tons of influencial youtubers covering our content 🙂

Dika: Logistics overheads plague NFT's secondary marketplaces, such as StockX. Do these sorts of instances also occur inside highstreet or are your rules different? Once a buyer is selected, I, as a seller, must ensure the delivery of the goods and its quality; do these types of cases

Travis: we solve this entire problem using bonding curves, sellers do not choose a buyer, you sell to the market directly and the vault pays you out 🙂

Ridita Riya: Can you explain more specifically about the moon vault? What can we do with the voucher? What does it represents?

Travis: By completing our gleam challenge you can potentially get allowlisted and earn the right to mint a duck

Each duck has 3 chances of going into the lunar vault, within the vault you'll get a chance to win 50, 100, 200, 300, 500 worth of vesting High tokens in form of Vouchers. These vouchers can't be sold on exchanges but can be used to buy products on the bonding curve when our market opens tomorrow. since voucher holders are earliest owners of High the price you enter the market at is quite low, akin to 2019 Unisocks. Vouchers automatically convert to HIGH at a later date.

Vaults will have new utilities opened to them every so often and ducks will replenish their abilities to enter the vaults with each new event. So hold on to your ducks! Even after they've spent their trips~

ShelenaMarsya 🍒: According to your website that as we live our lives half online and half in real life. Products in your market are made to exist in both physical and virtual form and always come directly from the brand. So since the products in your market are made to exist in both physical and virtual form, what is the difference between physical and virtual products especially in terms of quality? Why do you need to sell multiple virtual form products if physical form products are available? What will be the use of Virtual forms product? How can it be used? Does HighStreet have a marketplace where we can access your platform's physical and virtual products? As you said the product is direct from the brand, so can you tell us what kind of product is available in your market both physical and virtual? thank you

Travis: Yes, in game items are based on real products from brands and in game utilities are derrived from them.

T-shirt or sweater for example --> Armor

Lipstick --> Sword

Perfume --> Buffs to increase speed

Food truck item --> Replenish Health

ĐANG ĐU ĐỈNH: How safe is your platform to use? Have you done a smart contract audit=? And what security measures are adopted from bugs and smart contract hacks? And what are our advantages as holders? And what is your strategy for dealing with supply deflection?

Travis: We've been audited already by certik, but we are now switching to a security as a service partner where we will be audited monthly as we scale up our contracts to include more features

Hardy: Given that only a small percentage of gamers use cryptocurrency,How will you integrate   gamers who are unfamiliar with cryptocurrency in your  platform so that you can reach a wider audience in the GAMING and cryptocurrency Industries ?

Travis: We actually are targeting regular PC and VR gamers too. No prior knowledge of crypto is needed, you come in and play the game we hold custody of your tokens until you are ready to connect a wallet of your own. We've integrated other DEFI product partners in our Highstreet City in the Defi District where players can go into their buildings to learn about crypto slowly. We also partner with other players as well we've got a flamingo themed island for flamingoDAO that shows off their digital currations to hopefully inspire players to make their first purchases, we also have Binance Beach being built that represents the Metaverse manifestation of the Binance NFT platform. In a way players have a new way of discovering crypto by playing our game.

Hugs Jis || Bdcrypto: To mint a new product tokens Everytime  a user  need to deposits DAI or ETH into the product Reserve Pools. But how does the token value calculated? And do you offer on ramp solutions for non-native user who do not own DAI or ETH?

Travis: Excellent question:

1) We are taking High tokens and denoting currency with stbalecoin/USD. In a way to ensure liquidity we will have a pool of stablecoin as reserves, if prices of High fall on exchanges we will buy on dex to market make for stability. We do have on-ramp services like transak integrated, however only for value below 500 and we'll take it and convert to High regardless

2) Oracles will be in place for token value calculations

Sumala: Hello sir, Travis

I read that you have been in the space since 2015. Can you tell us some of the story of your early days? When exactly did you get the idea to create Highstreet project?

Travis: Yes, actually one of our earliest backers was the late Tony Hsieh of Zappos, we were inspired by their popup shop in vegas back in 2014 where they created the very first Augmented Reality shoe store. IT was super early tech back then where a dinky room with a few projectors created a projection mapped shoe try on process. That completely blew our minds about what the future of Retail could entail. Over the past 6 years we've worked on using computer vision to create mixed reality spaces, transforming phsycial enviornments like malls and markets into immersive virtual worlds. It wasn't until this year did the whole notion of metaverse started heating up, so i'm quite excited to say all the hard work we've done is finally getting appreciated.The crypto bear market was only 2 years of hardship and a lot of people already felt like it was overbearing, but for us we endured half a decade of it until finally the market is trending up and we can finally show the community what we've built.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOWJz2XyKc&ab_channel=LumiereVR

Hoang: I'm also a big fan of WoW and especially Maple Story!!! In MS and WoW, we can buy cosmetics and flex it with others. Moreover, Maple Story and Wow have built a strong community where members bond strongly together. What will you do to build a strong HighStreet community?

Travis: Strong community is forged by strong content, we are working on a lot of crossovers with both brands and IPs to make our metaverse as fulfilling as possible. We also have seasonal events that can hopefully keep things rotating and fresh with new products being introduced all the time so your in-game wardrobe can be as exciting as your real world one. We love the cash shop concept of maplestory, so by connecting with real brands I think we can take this whole thing to the next level.

Want to read the full AMA with Travis? Click here.

Stay up to date with everything Highstreet:

Medium: https://medium.com/highstreet-market

Twitter: https://twitter.com/highstreetworld

Telegram: https://t.me/highstreetworld

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/439FhsrMu2

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