About Illust
Illust is an open and decentralized augmented reality metaverse that offers any visitor the ability to engage with and publish digital experiences in the physical world. With each of these published experiences geofenced to a specific physical anchor (such as GPS coordinates and/or an NFT), visitors are able to interact with web3 artwork, fashion, games, and culturally relevant activations, all of which appear to reside natively in a visitor’s world; their parks, neighborhoods, cityscapes, and even car parks.
With the ability for all visitors on the application to mint their activity data into an NFT (Proof of Presence) and to receive NFTs rewards from publishers, Illust was challenged with creating a simple and seamlessly integrated solution to create wallets for “non-crypto native” users. After running due diligence on the universe of suppliers capable of providing this, Illust narrowed it down to Magic Labs’ product Magic Auth and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results.
Illust gives creators an open canvas to publish digital experiences on the world, own their data, and create a new channel of reality for others to experience.
Illust, an Application in Motion
All experiences and moments of engagement through the application are stored as logs on the blockchain. This is how Illust is able to decentralize its application. It introduces the concept of Proof of Presence, or PoP, a feature that delivers a visitor’s activity and location data in the form of an airdropped Polygon NFT. Metadata from these on-chain proofs act as a treasure for 3rd party partners and artists as they’re able to validate real events that happened in the world. For example, if you’re an independent artist who creates and publishes an experience on the Illust map, you can prompt your fans to “check-in” at your experience by claiming a PoP. You may then token-gate a channel on your discord for only those fans who own one of your PoPs as a testament to their true fandom.
Visitor-Owned and Open Access
Token-gating or stacking PoPs creates a new universe of geolocated games, tickets, rewards, merchandise, and more for developers. For more on PoPs, please read here. In fact, Illust is in the process of creating a GeoSpatial Registry so that all geolocated digital experiences can be referenceable and composable by any project, metaverse, or publisher. For more on the GeoSpatial Registry, please sign up for our newsletter below.
How does this relate to Magic Labs?
As demonstrated, openness, ownership, and interoperability are at the core of Illust’s tech stack. In order to accomplish this, Illust’s user accounts are tied to a Web3 wallet ID. As most of the experiences that exist on Illust’s global and local maps were generated from culturally relevant figures who have audiences who have not been exposed to Web3 nor have a Web3 wallet, Illust needed a way for new “non-crypto” visitors to be able to create a wallet without them getting lost in the complexities of custodial wallet generation. Through Magic Auth, visitors have the ability to create a wallet (in turn a user account) through a simple process.
We Chose Magic for the Following Reasons:
- Simplicity: anyone can create a Web3 wallet through an email, cell phone, or social device in a 2 step process
- Compatibility: any user can export a magic account to their web3 wallet (more on this below)
- Security: Magic wallets are non-custodial and passwordless
- Known trusted operators (from the makers of Fortmatic)
Unlockable Features
Through the Magic wallet integration, visitors who may not be “crypto-native” are now able to explore the power of Web3 built through the Illust stack. The following is a list of features that use Magic for access and permissions:
- Augmented Reality Layers
- Minting
- GeoFence Creation
- Content Studio
- Proof of Presence
- PoP Rewards
- Coming Soon: GeoSpatial Registry
Exporting Keys
Another excellent feature from Magic is the ability to export a private key to another Web3 wallet. By connecting the two wallets, an activity that occurs on a magic account can also be migrated to an active wallet. This is a great option for those who are a bit more crypto current and want to take custody of the assets earned on the Illust app.
To learn more about how to connect your Magic Wallet to your Web3 injected wallet, please visit the following article.
Outcome
The numbers don’t lie.
Illust now has over 1,000 geofenced digital experiences in the physical world. Close to 4,000 unique visitors have visited the Illust applications between SXSW and NFT NYC. Of those logged-in users, nearly 50% of Illust’s audience logged in through Magic, 30% were using a Web3 mobile application, and nearly 20% used wallet connect.
What’s next for Illust
Illust is now working on a feature that gives any visitor to the application the ability to become a 3D artist. Similar to how the Sepia filter gave publishers the ability to enhance their photos on Instagram, Illust will be releasing a series of native AR creation tools that will enable anyone to create shareable and visitable experiences in the physical world. The importance of simple and secure account creation will become even more apparent in this next chapter for Illust and we’re confident Magic will help us onboard the next 10,000 publishers to the application.
To visit the Illust publishing and discovery app please visit here.
Join our community discord as we shape reality together here.
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How to Move Through the Illust AR App
Welcome to Illust! You may have found yourself here because of an event, an artist hookup, a walk about town, or through one of our retail partners. At any point, you may land on one of the following components of the application: AR Experience Flow PoP and Claimable NFT Flow Map Navigation Layer or Quests