Trivver – Smart Objects in a Way You Have Never Imagined

Almost every electricity powered item’s control can be connected to the internet in so called Internet of Things. This is labeled “smart”, with an additional zero at the end of the consumer price. Technology is developing with lightning fast speeds, technological innovations are occurring in every industry, but why we don’t know about them? Do they spend all of their budgets on development, with none left for advertisement? Of course they do not. But unlike consumer product industries, the advertisement industry hasn’t changed much since online advertisement. Everyone is using internet, but the majority of people are using ad blocks, in order to skip immediately the annoying pop-ups and inappropriate ads. In the same time we can’t imagine a world without our smartphones, our small virtual worlds. As we already said, the technology is moving forward, and the next big innovation is the extended reality (XR), being augmented (AR), virtual (VR), or mixed (MR), the extended reality era is coming with predicted revenue by 2035 of $3 trillion, and is providing new opportunities for work, education, entertainment and… you guessed it – advertisement. There are many ideas for advertisement in the XR, but none of them seems natural and fitting to the environment, until now…

What is Trivver?

Trivver is an advertisement platform, created for the extended reality needs. Imagine this: You are putting your extended reality glasses, expecting a mind blowing experience, interacting with the virtual objects in the application that you are running, but instead of that you are overwhelmed with annoying pop-up ads, interfering with your experience. That was a bad imagination was it? Now, let’s try to imagine the same, but using Trivver as advertisement engine. ER glasses on, application on, and none popping up advertisements. You are interacting with the objects in the virtual world freely, when one of them turns out to be an advertisement. You can interact with the object and if you like it you can purchase it for the real world with ease! OK, enough imaginations, time to explain the platform… The general idea of the platform is to create uninteresting with the environment advertisements in different environments that are fitting with every particular environment by size, angle, illumination and even shadows. The goal is to make the advertisement looks like it belongs to the environment, with just one model sent from the advertiser. This one model has to be automatically resized, illuminated and fitted in the environment to look like part of it. OK, we got the idea, but how it is executed?

We can agree that these advertisements are appearing in the virtual world as objects. But they are not just standing objects, which are not serving any function at all. They are functional and intractable and that is why they are called “smart objects”. The user can interact with them in different ways like seeing additional information about the advertised product and even directly purchasing it. There is also the possibility the advertiser to offer the advertised product with personalized discount, for every individual user, based on its preferences and needs. Another functionality of the smart objects is to record the way that the user is interacting with them and send it to both publishers and advertisers in form of statistics. Of course the information for these interactions is always anonymous for each user, keeping its privacy safe. In the same time advertisers and publishers are well aware of how effecting are their smart objects.

In order one smart object to become an advertisement, it has to be created. Of course the advertiser can use its own, created form the ground up smart object, but Trivver is also having library with not branded smart objects, ready to become advertisements, or “Branded Smart Objects” (BSO’s). There are two types of smart objects, being low and high volume 3D assets. They are both indexed in the Trivver smart object catalog, but only the high volume ones can be considered as high volume objects. There is a difference in the ways they are getting paid too; the low volume assets are getting paid in TRVR from Trivver’s allocated for that token pool and the high volume ones in fiat currency from the advertisers. This is smart way to create a lot of entries in the smart object catalog, for advertiser’s ease.

Project Overview

Trivver’s founder and CEO – Joel LaMontagne is one of the most incredible CEOs I have encountered. He is not only a great entrepreneur, but a real computer scientist and mathematician. This set of skills allows him to see not only the financial part of the project, but to deeply understand the fundamentals of the project itself, how it works and what the project’s stronger and weaker sides are. He is awarded four software patents and one design patent and is having seventeen pending patents in the areas of 3D digital ad and blockchain. That is why I think Joel is a great company leader, understanding the real market and the technological challenges around it. Another interesting member of the leading team is the CTO – Simon Keating. HE is coming straight from the gaming development industry and with its over twenty years of experience in projects from indie-sized to Electronic Arts games. His experience is making games and overall 3D applications is helping him to understand how to implement the smart objects into the environment naturally. The rest of the team are also very experienced and talented individuals in their spheres. Overall the team is pretty good and can easily create a great product together.

Social networks are a pretty important place for advertisement, but Trivver is an advertisement platform itself and it is in pretty early marketing stage, so there is not so high demand for social network activity, and there is not. But they are still having social networks, where they share interesting articles about their project and XR technology. But let’s mention some of the numbers. Trivver are having around 500 members in Telegram and around 2000 followers in Twitter, They are having Facebook page, but not many followers there. They can also be found in LinkedIn and Medium as well. Their posts are not looking like spam, and the most of them are including just a slight note of self-advertisement. Overall they are having a nice appearance in the social networks for their needs.

Trivver’s website is pretty well made, expressing the modernistic nature of their project. Of course they are having modernistic design, created with mostly different shades of purple, accented with light electric blue. The appearance of the different “slides” of the website, while scrolling down, is looking pretty slow to me. Some of the pictures are not high enough quality, looking a bit blurry. The navigation bar is in the expected place, but I found it pretty unnatural to find whatever I need. In the mobile version of the website is pretty hard to find a link to the whitepaper, which I consider as a really big problem. Overall the website is looking good, and it is explaining the main parts of the project pretty well. The amounts of information are not too much, so the user is not bored and there is still reason to look into the whitepaper for more information. Overall the website is looking OK, but there are definitely some things to be tweaked, especially in the mobile version.

The whitepaper of the project is pretty well made. Everything is well ordered and written. There are ten main themes collected in 32 pages. The style of the whitepaper is using mainly the light blue accent color of the website, without the purple. For the text is used pretty small font, so more information can fit in one page. The information itself is very well written, with well-structured exact sentences, leaving no place for questions about the topic. On page 13 the last sentence of the page is looking like it is not finished, neither continued on the next page. That can be considered a human mistake, but we see similar mistakes at a lot of places in the website and the only conclusion that we can make is that the project is not polished enough. These small mistakes are not talking really well about the project as a whole. But overall the whitepaper is really professionally written, with great illustrations, helping to understand every aspect of the topic well. Nice job, a little bit of polishing needed.

The roadmap of Trivver as a project starts in 2014 with 1.3 Million angel funding. From there to now the time and funds of the project are mainly in research and development as well as patenting their achievements. Some of the patents are granted, but the most are still pending. From now on to the early 2019 the main focus will be working with predictive analytics. In the early 2019 is planned development for UnReal Engine and WebGL, as well as blockchain technology. Until the end of 2019 the focus is on market development as well as language optimizations. Overall the timespan of the project’s development is pretty long, while the project is already near the finish line. A lot of the time is spent developing the technology, while less time in market developing. That may become a problem for the platform in the future, but for now everything is looking great. I like that the project is taking its time for development and is patenting everything that it develops, so it can stay on the top of the XR advertisement scene.

Similar blockchain based platforms

There are another similar to Trivver blockchain technologies, connecting the real world with the XR world. And when I am saying connecting I mean adding a whole new level of reality on top of the real world. Such project is Arcona. Its goal is to “merge real and virtual worlds worldwide”, creating a digital layer of reality and enabling its users to purchase parcels on that virtual land, where they can whatever they want from city plantings to yep... advertisements. They are imagining these ads like traditional banners that we know and… don’t really like, in the virtual space. The problem though is that the city streets are going to become something like “The Big Market” from the movie “Valerian And The City of Thousand Planets”. But you may ask, “What is the deal here? Arcona are selling their parcels, Trivver is making its ads.” They are not interrupting with each other! Arcona is a great example for application, where Trivver’s technology can be implemented, making Arcona better platform as well as creating a large market for Trivver. Looks like another blockchain based projects oriented in the XR space are not a problem for Trivver, and even can help each-other. I think that collaborations between such projects can lead them to their success.

Conclusion

Trivver is one very interesting project in the world of extended reality. I really like it, because it is providing ways for the advertisers to create advertisements that are making sense in the virtual environment. I also like the way that the project is creating and pushing different technologies ahead. Smart objects are a great Idea, and Trivver make sure that their library will be filled with quality content pretty fast. A better ways of advertising, not ruining the XR experience is going to make more companies creating XR applications, because now they are much more profitable. The project itself is led by great leaders, experienced in the technology. There is also the opportunity to collaborate with a lot of different other projects working in the XR industry, like Arcona. Of course Trivver’s appearance to the world has to be polished, but that will not stop the project form growing and developing technology, to create the best possible platform for advertisement in the XR environment. Overall Trivver is one very interesting, technology oriented project, that deserves some attention.

More information:

Website - https://www.trivver.com/

Whitepaper - https://www.trivver.com/docs/Trivver_Whitepaper.pdf