OVRLand Governance

Over 340k OVRLands sold, a growing community of builders and scaling solutions behind the corner, times are mature enough to start laying down the first version of the details on the OVRLand governance.

Why a first version, you may ask? 

That’s because we’re transitioning from a semi-centralized version of OVR – unavoidable in the early stages – to the full vision of OVR as the Decentralized Metaverse Platform. The following are the OVRLand governance rules that we, as founders of OVR, envisioned as the best possible for the thriving of the platform. Later on, this governance will be passed to the community through a DAO and a quadratic voting system.

 

OVRLand Publishing Rights

In OVR, we have two main layers, a Private Utility Layer and a Public Utility Layer.

Under the Public Utility Layer, we have all of the contents categorized as public goods. Those are contents with public utility but cannot be created and maintained by private owners of single OVRLands, both for lack of coordination between individual owners and lack of sufficient economic incentives. Public goods are also defined by Non-Rivalry and Non-Excludability goods  some examples of such goods applicable to the OVR platform are information on locations (E.g., Wikipedia and OSM public knowledge), public services, buildings, and infrastructures. 

Such contents go beyond the control of the owner of the OVRLand and can be showcased on any geographic coordinate even if those coordinates are already owned. 

There can be different positions on what is and what is not a public good; in the first phase, OVR will decide with a very conservative approach showcasing in AR Wikipedia and OSM information on locations, in the future, the censoring of public content will be entirely entrusted to the community of token holders.

OVRLand owners may argue that a public utility asset could interfere with the Private Utility Layer experience. For this reason, while Public Utility Layer will exist on the exact coordinates, the visualization of the Private Utility Layer and Public Utility Layer will be separated on the OVR app; this will avoid interference between the two while empowering the final user to experience both by switching between those.

On a similar layer, we also include applications that create positive externalities to OVRLand owners – more on this on the next point – such as treasure hunt even if those go beyond the canonical definition of a public good.

Under the Private Utility Layer, we have all the experiences and resources that are not part of the previous category and, in general, all the content that OVRLand owners decide to geolocate on their OVRLands.

Play-to-Earn Layer

Treasure hunt is a powerful implementation of AR technology also very familiar to the worldwide public thanks to the diffusion of applications such as PokemonGo. OVR already deployed a very successful treasure hunt implementation with users exploring over 1 Mln OVRLands chasing treasures. Yet, as you may have noticed, treasures coffers are distributed over the whole planet beyond the Public Utility Layer. 

While treasure hunt and other play-to-earn models are not strictly public goods, those create positive externalities for OVRLands owners since the presence of an earning opportunity on an owned land can generate more traffic on such land. That’s why those currently exist beyond the Private Utility Layer. But what if we could extend the single-use case of the OVR treasure hunt by allowing geolocalized AR play-to-earn games open to other metaverses and NFTs? 

That’s what we are currently building, and we will create a third layer on OVRLands, then having three layers:

1. Private Utility Layer
2. Public Utility Layer
3. Play-to-Earn Layer

 

As for the Public Utility Layer, visualization of the Play-to-Earn layer will not interfere with it by separating the views on the OVR App, yet there is a significant difference: while OVRLand owners will not get any direct return from Public Utility Layer experiences on the coordinates of the OVRLands they own – still, they will have an indirect positive traffic externality – revenues generated by Play-to-earn layer will be shared with the underlying OVRLand owners. Moreover, suppose on an OVRLand there is a private utility experience. In that case, the play-to-learn experience will be opt-in, this means that the user will have to choose to visualize it actively, and in that case, the play-to-earn layer will be merged with the Public Utility Layer. 

 

OVRLands Renting

The OVR platform aims to be an infrastructure for the spatial web; because of that, we need to allow for maximum availability of all OVRLand to build experiences over those. At the same time, owners of the OVRLand have complete control on the private layer of the geographic coordinates mapped by their OVRLand, and owners can decide if renting out or not those coordinates.

In general, the objective of maximum availability of the OVRLands for builders can conflict with the complete control of the Public Utility Layer retained by the OVRLand owners; in fact, the owner of an OVRland can decide to afford the cost of refusing a rent offer. That is also how physical real estate works, and we expect economic incentives will safeguard against owned lands’ unavailability. 

Yet, in a decentralized Metaverse as OVR, there are edge cases not present in the physical world that we need to address to allow for maximum availability of the OVRLands while safeguarding the owners’ property rights.

Such cases are:

1. a) loss of the private keys controlling OVRLands 
2. b) lack of attention/interest on OVRLands from owners

To address these cases, we will establish the following rules for renting out the OVRLands:

There will be two principal ways for OVRLand renting, passive and active. All the OVRLands can be rented out by default without the intervention of the OVRLand owner. Yet, the OVRLand owner who controls the private keys of the account holding the OVRLands can actively intervene in the renting procedure.

All of the OVRLands will be rentable by default for one month at 10$ fee (paid in OVR)

Different renters can bid for the same OVRLand by bidding on it with a window of 24 hours that get extended to other 24 hours after each new bid.

After the last 24 hours, the rent bidding window is closed; there will be an additional seven days period for the OVRLand owner to check if the content that the renter wants to publish on his land is acceptable or not and if the economic offer is sufficient. After that period is passed, the content will be automatically published for 30 days. If during those 30 days the OVRLand owner does not intervene, the winning bidder will be able to extend the renting at the same price and with the same content for another 30 days. 

If the OVRLand owner is active, all of the above rules are overtaken by direct agreement between the OVRLand owner and the renter. OVRLand owner can immediately decide to refuse or accept the renting offer, propose a different price to the bidder, reject or accept the content to be published, and choose the renting period’s length.

 

Hosting Fees

The publisher of contents on the OVRLands (owner or renter) will have to pay hosting fees to have his experiences active on the specific OVRLand; the base price will initially be set to 1$/month (paid in OVR) for hosting contents up to 100 MB. It will also be possible to have heavier assets, but since those could negatively impact user experience (download times and hardware requirements on the user side), the publishing of such files will be disincentivized with an exponentially growing hosting cost:

1. 100 MB 1$
2. 150 MB 3$
3. 200 MB 6$
4. 250 MB 12$
5. 300 MB 24$

If an OVRLand owner owns contiguous OVRLand, they can create an OVR experience that spans through the multiple lands he owns. In that case, the hosting cost will be calculated on the single experience and not on the number of contiguous OVRLands where the experience is located.

 

Visualization of Neighbor OVRLands’ Content

Many community members asked us if while the user is on a specific OVRLand, they can also visualize AR contents from surrounding OVRLand. While this is technically achievable, it could create negative externalities such as owners of neighbor lands publishing content conflicting with assets in the OVRLand where the user is located or an excessive combined weight of the experiences. Considered this, we will allow visualization of surrounding lands from a specific land only when a single owner holds or has rented the surrounding lands. For example, let’s imagine somebody owns Mount Rushmore and owns (or rented) the lands in its parking lot; in that case, the OVRLand owner can allow users located in the parking lot to see in prospect the experiences geographically located on Month Rushmore.

 

Local Experiences, Remote Experiences Definition and Visualization Rules

Publishers of experiences on the OVRLand can define two kinds of experiences that can coexist on the coordinates of the OVRLand: Local and Remote experience. Local experiences can only be enjoyed by users that are physically in the coordinates of the OVRLand, while remote experiences can be seen both in the actual location and remotely. 

Some experiences only have meaning in the specific location (e.g., an AR historical reconstruction superimposed on the physical ruins of a temple). In contrast, other experiences maintain their meaning even out of contest (E.g., an AR Chat or a VR ambient like an ART gallery or the Sistine Chapel VR reconstruction). Introducing Local and Remote experiences will allow publishers to have complete control over the differentiation and customization of what users will see while in the physical location and while visiting it remotely.