Eat Well, Be Well | State of Matterless #30
It’s time to get om-nom-nomming because Build 0.6 is here! Grab some snacks and let me show you what’s new.
Eat Well, Be Well
Build 0.6 of the Incos app has dropped, bringing much-needed customization and interactivity that will move your AR pet another step closer to the digital reality we’ve devoted ourselves to fostering.
The first of the two major features introduced in this update is interactive feeding, which is a major step up from the UI-based slider in previous builds. Now, you can choose different food items and drop them into the physical world. Your Inco (being the bottomless gastronomic cavern it is), will then saunter over and devour the tasty meal!
There’s a lot of nuance to this feature that our team had to work through, and chief among them was improving the Inco’s pathing capabilities so that it would turn and move towards the food naturally and accurately. Adding big features like this sometimes necessitates cutting older ones, so we’ve temporarily removed food harvesting to re-tool and re-integrate it with the current build’s feeding mechanics at a later point.
The most surefire path into anyone’s heart is through their stomach, and the Inco is no different! Having a feeding experience that brings you and your companion together is a huge priority. This is just the first deliverable instance, and we will keep improving this feature!
This Is My AR Pet. There Are Many Like It, But This One’s Mine.
The other major feature in 0.6 is a system that generates a randomized, one-of-a-kind skin for your Shiba based on your unique identity hash. Up till now, the only thing that distinguished your matterless pet from others was its name. With a custom skin, your companion feels like yours and yours alone. It’s much easier to tell it apart from others during shared AR sessions!
You might wonder why we don’t have a feature that lets you select skins. Your matterless pet is not a commodity that was made in a lab but a living digital being that has crossed over from its digital realm into ours and has willingly bonded with you. We think that allowing for extensive player customization would make it feel more like a product you own rather than a creature you have been gifted and must nurture.
Regardless of how you feel about it, I’d love for you to share your perspective on this on our Discord. We’ll also be announcing there how you can get your hands on the build to try it for yourself, so stay tuned!
Under The Hood
As touched on previously, every new build includes several less glamorous but essential quality-of-life improvements. In 0.6, we’ve significantly reduced the app’s load times thanks to call batching, which sends and receives multiple calls in the same ping-pong trip. We’ve also finished setting up our automated build pipeline, which, if you’re not familiar with software development, lets us rapidly deploy new builds with a simple button push. Before, if we wanted a build, JD or someone would have to do it on their laptop, essentially wasting a bunch of their time. Having this set up will save several hours per week, and we get to test more frequent in-progress builds.
Can Dolphins Make Memes?
We recently uploaded the second episode of The Cyberdelic Podcast, which features our CEO Nils and CCO Damir in a deep conversation about memetics and augmented reality. In this episode, we touch on how memes are so fundamental to social structures that even dolphins have them, and how we can harness the power of AR to steer the technology away from a dystopian mass surveillance society and instead down a path that preserves everyone’s privacy while forming new human behaviors in ways that were previously impossible. Listen to it here!!!
In the span of a few months, we now have hand detection, custom skins, and interactive feeding! The march towards digital reality continues, so we’ll see you next week for new updates. In the meantime, check out our Linktree to see everything we’re doing in the Matterless realm.
Kerwin, social media manager
