Already this August the Arcona augmented reality ecosystem launches its Marketplace on a trial basis. This will enable the system participants, developers, people interested in AR/VR technology to operate on a platform of their own when dealing with each other, offering the services and surely land trading. We’d like to emphasize that the Arcona Marketplace is considered and built as the platform where the users solely could buy the Digital Land plots for further remote placement of the author’s interactive content all around the world.
The principles of blockchain will underpin the commitment to maximum transparency and accountability of the system trade, that’s one of the main ecosystem technical features.
“For such a massive multi-player project like ours, the blockchain technology is the ideal solution”, says one of the Arcona co-founders Ilya Korguzalov. “By 2020 we plan to create an AR layer covering the territory of more than 40 000 square km in different locations all over the world. So, we are talking about millions of landowners and a huge number of interactive projects – of gaming, social and business kinds. It is incredibly difficult to create a universal infrastructure for such a system that will simultaneously take into account the interests of landlords, tenants, software- and content-providers. Therefore, we had to work hard on the smart contract for quite a long time to make it automatically record and securely store all the information needed about the status of each land plot and users’ intellectual property. As a result of this emphasis on transparency and security, when the ecosystem is fully operational, our users will be able to focus on their creativity and making money out of it and not on organizational issues. In addition, due to decentralization and introduction of internal currency, the financial interaction within the ecosystem will be easy and safe for people living in different parts of the world.”
Hexagonal Digital Assets
The Arcona Marketplace will start functioning with a series of special land auctions, where the most interesting areas in the 10 biggest megacities will fall under the gavel. These plots are all ready to get listed on the trading platform having been digitized first of all. We are talking about Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Beijing, Istanbul, Rome. Barcelona, London and Mexico City. These lots in are not only already divided into equal hexagons with the help of GIS technologies and accurate mathematical calculations, but have their precise coordinates are indicated in the smart contract system.
“At first glance, the choice of this hexagonal shape for the Digital Land plots is not evident”, says Ilya Korguzalov. “However, it appeared to be perfectly relevant for two reasons. First, it basically resembles the Arcona brand symbol. Second and most important, it allows for minimum possible distortion.
As the Earth is spherical, it’s surface can be easily modeled using the figure called icosahedron consisting of twenty triangles which, in its turn, can be divided into smaller and smaller ones, and then – into hexagons.
At the moment, more than 35,000 plots have already been generated. They are located in the most attractive – for 3D content positioning – megapolises areas. To choose and select them, our research department distinguished a number of conditions, important both from a technical point of view and in terms of content-usability. So, the prior factors are: the location in the central city areas and thus huge traffic and the landscapes “convenience” for stable allocation of descriptors, on the basis of which the interactive users’ content will be geographically linked.
Step Into The Future
The full-feature version of the Arcona Marketplace will be implemented before this year’s end. It will present ample opportunities for multi-level trade in land, 3D content, software, AR/VR services for all the ecosystem participants. The Marketplace will be a space for communication and cooperation for developers, artists, lawyers, copywriters, musicians, animators and other creative professionals interested in the project and earning money within one single AR ecosystem.
“Recently, we have made a fundamental breakthrough in the technological platform development”, says Ilya Korguzalov. “We have published the latest version of Arcona Core which is the core of the platform for 3D content remote positioning and management. That’s a result of three-year research in the field of computer vision and artificial intelligence. The new release includes our original concepts and achievements related to distributed GIS and mono-SLAM technology. Due to this, the Arcona Core already demonstrates the highest speed and accuracy of the reconstruction of the earth’s surface. In its functionality the Arcona Core is not inferior, but in some cases goes beyond most of popular counterparts in the field of computer vision, such as OpenCV and PCloud. Moreover, due to the use of neural networks, it has huge advantages for the formation of augmented reality environment in the open space.
Parallelly, our developers team is working on the Arcona AR Viewer, which is a cross-platform application for smartphones, tablets and various AR headsets. It will be a universal frontend for everyone who wants to see the world of Arcona. The procedure of camera calibration for different kinds of users’ devices has already been implemented. We bet on it when it comes to virtual objects correct positioning in augmented reality.
Thus, this fall we are going to introduce a beta-version of the platform, with which our landowners will be able to remotely launch their trial interactive projects in the largest cities of the world. That’s when they will need all the functionality of the Arcona Marketplace, so that we will provide a wide range of not only ready-to-use 3D models, but also the scripts, music and texting in different languages for the interactive shows. We expect the developers of different kinds to join the work on the platform improvement and further expanding, and the experts in the sphere of marketing and advertising from all over the world to find interesting and fascinating tasks.
“We are sure that the Arcona ecosystem will bring together many professionals and enthusiasts in the AR field,” says Ilya Korguzalov. “It has scope for becoming an information environment, where the breakthrough ideas and solutions will emerge pushing the whole industry forward, at this incredible moment in time from the wildest futurists’ dreams”.
In order to make AR technology genuinely popular, its necessary to make this one last step – to open it up – make it intuitively simple for every-day users to create and manage AR projects without leaving their couches. Just like today we can publish our own photos, videos or 3D graphics in various social media. The primary task of Arcona blockchain ecosystem is to provide millions of users with simple and affordable tools for launching own AR projects around the world. The ecosystem is built on a unique technology platform that automatically generates a layer of augmented reality – the Digital Land – anywhere in the world. Each square meter of this virtual environment is tied to a particular location in the physical world and is perfectly prepared for the remote placement of interactive content. For example, being in 
Arcona is a decentralised multi-user system and its success largely depends on the activity of the participants. In the Arcona community, there are already thousands of people ready to master the new Digital Lands and create a fantastic world of mixed reality across the planet.