Creating augmented reality (AR) Vee friends from hand drawn 2D?NFTs

3 Years a go a friend of mine from the USA (Kevin Sofen) asked me if I had been watching Gary Vaynerchuck online I replied yes! we’ve been friends ever since! Subsequently we are working on a VR training programme with the US dept of defence.

Surely you have all heard about Vee Friends NFTs? well if you haven’t they are a set of 10,000 NFTs created from Gary Vs hand drawn characters. They were sold at a Dutch auction!

Fast forward 3 years and the same friend and I are talking about the Vee friends NFT drop by Gary V and if we have our Metamask’s ready! (He got one, I didn’t!) so once he had one in the bag I messaged my friend Okse (UK 3D digital artist) and asked if he could mock up a 3D model of my friend Kevins Vee friends NFT which is Grateful Gar!…see message below from me to Okse.

Okse and Charlie were already on it! and I had plans to make it a virtual world in VR and AR! Okse arranged a few meetings between us all and we got talking about what we could create.

I hadn’t met Charlie so it was interesting to hear about the previous things he had worked on!

We decided on motivated monster to be the main proof of concept.

…..Okse had been found by Charlie and commissioned to create a 3d model of the motivated monster.

I’ve known Okse the artist from when I was 16 and did work experience at a computer games company called ATD (1996 uk) where I learnt the basics of game development and 3D art creation

Okse then took the 2D Gary V drawing and translated it to 3D!

Charlie then commissioned Okse to create a few of the characters and he ended up donating /gifting these figures to Vee friends NFT holders.

Okse then introduced me to Charlie in numerous IG video chats and we discussed the potential of what I thought I could bring to the party.

After multiple discussions we decided that we were onto something and Charlie had a big NFT NYC gig coming up so the plan was to make an Augmented reality version of Motivated Monster and show it to Gary and the people attending NFT NYC.

Sketchfab 3D model of Motivated monster link below for tablet, browser, mobile.

https://skfb.ly/oqGIx

We decided we needed the Okse model to be re topped and made as AR object and then to be hosted on a QR code so anyone with a phone can scan the code and have the model pop augmented in their environment.

When you extrapolate this out the obvious place to go is an AR and VR virtual world / metaverse where people can show off, interact with, talk to, play with vee friends in 3D and maybe in the future we could have a VR metaverse where we can all meet up and show off the 3D versions (or the 2d versions) or our NFT’s and these models can be interoperable between different virtual worlds where the stats or properties can be created or added to while doing tasks in these virtual worlds.

We need a levelling up NFT system for 3D characters.

For more information on this project as we think about the virtual world and AR games with the Vee friends community go to this new IG page where there’s a QR code that I don’t want you to scan!

Link to IG account for this project https://www.instagram.com/veefriends_reality/

Alex Harvey Opensea collection and links https://linktr.ee/alexharvey

https://instagram.com/veefriends_reality?utm_medium=copy_link

Okse IG account https://www.instagram.com/theartofokse/

Charlie IG account https://www.instagram.com/charlie_cavalier_3/

Alex IG account https://www.instagram.com/alextench/

Alex Harvey Co founder & creative director of www.rivr.uk