All Hail Build 0.5.1! | State of Matterless #26
You can finally touch our matterless pets — hand interaction is LIVE! Plus, bump the AR cars into each other for explosive effects!
All Hail Build 0.5.1
Today, we are one step closer to achieving intersubjective experiences in AR space is finally here; hand reconstruction in the closed beta is now LIVE! High five!
Build 0.5.1 has been rolled out to our Patreon supporters and will let you reach out with your actual, meaty, physical hand and pet the Inco. You can get access to this build now by supporting us here!
Petting the Inco is an act that breaks the boundary separating matterless and physical beings and serves as the gateway to infinite possibilities in our quest to make digital things real.
Over time, we will use the framework we have introduced in 0.5.1 to apply more complex and specific interactions with your Inco, such as hand feeding and gesture commands. We’d love to get your ideas on what we could do with Matterless patent-pending hand reconstruction technology, so head over to our Discord server, and raise your hand to let us know it's you! (sorry)
Build 0.5.1 comes as a fast follow to our last major update, 0.5. from two weeks ago. With that milestone cleared, the team will now be focusing its energies on 0.6, which is going to overhaul our feeding and mood mechanics. Learn more about it in our previous State of Matterless!
Floor It Derby
Despite being a small team, our ambitions are to create an entire ecosystem of matterless things. In the video above, our hovercar project, Floor It, has implemented collision mechanics that allow for explosive action! In addition to tinkering with how the hovercars react to other objects and the physical environment, we’re also experimenting with win conditions that gamify the experience. Creating a skill-based challenge adds a dimension to the experience where you can play against your friends, boost and brake in the right moment to dominate all floors!
The “Brake” and “Boost” buttons you see in the UI do exactly what you think they do; the former will turbocharge your vehicle to ramming speed so you can deliver a satisfying knockout, while the latter will bring you to an abrupt halt, throwing a pursuing opponent off-guard!
I’m excited to see how Floor It could evolve as a potentially competitive AR experience, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas on where we can go with it on our Discord.
What would you like to see added to this experience?
The Memetic Perspective
Last week, Nils and Damir headed down to our sound engineer Dusko’s studio in Croatia to record a podcast on the memetic principles underlying the missions of both Matterless and Auki Labs. With a three-camera setup and lavalier microphones, it was by far our most sophisticated live production.
We’ve previously touched on the core concepts of intersubjectivity and sensory congruence that drive our design principles. In this nearly-90 minute discussion, our CEO and CCO went down to the bone and spoke at length on the memetic principles underlying both Matterless and Auki Labs.
Nils & Damir sit down to talk about memes, the memetic perspective, transhumanism, and augmented reality. Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. But it wasn’t the fun term we recognize today, it was a scientific hypothesis on how culture spreads itself:
‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word meme.
Much thought has been put into the ideas and the vision for a future where augmented reality is a part of everyday life. The impulse to augment reality is one of the most foundational aspects of the human psyche. We want to label and understand, to discover and share, and as time passes, we have increasingly been shaped by our languages.
The podcast is currently available to our Patreon supporters, and we’ll be publicly sharing it on our social platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Stay tuned!
That’s our update for this week, have a good one, and see you next week!
Kerwin, social media manager
