On Feb. 21, the creators of New Here, the groundbreaking film chronicling the inception of the cryptoart movement, announced that the Arbitrum Foundation has come on board as a technical and financial partner.

Their technology will power an innovative new collection from the New Here team called Glimpses.

These evolving visual tokens, viewable at glimpses.art, are “the beginning of a new interactive media experience powered by blockchain technology and collectorship,” New Here posted on their official X account.

Free to claim (with a small minting fee of $11) now at Zora, the Glimpses tokens are linked to 11 New Here short films, premiering in April 2024.

Created by the New Here team and evoking the visual ethos of many of the stars of the film—including web3 luminaries like Claire Silver and Snowfro—the Glimpses start out as beautiful sketches. Each will evolve, gaining color and motion, based on their holder’s journey in viewing the upcoming New Here Shorts films.

The technology, built in conjunction with Web3 interactivity experts vibe.xyz, is an innovation that allows the New Here team to incentivize and gamify viewing their content.

nft now spoke to Dan Sickles, director of New Here, about the strategy behind Glimpses.

“Our thought is that it will gamify the viewing experience—I don’t want to say how many stages of evolution there are for each token; this is part of the mystery. But each token can evolve more than once. I think that’s all I should say right now. So, people can continue to work with their tokens in different ways, which will lead to different stages of unlocking different visuals,” he told us in an interview.

As the way that Glimpses will evolve involves multiple stages—and can vary based on the order in which a user watches (or skips) the New Here Shorts, strategy comes into play, with holders seeking out rare evolutions—or holding onto a “virgin” Glimpses token in the hopes that a future buyer may want to shape its evolution.

To Sickles, the gamification of Glimpses through engagement with the upcoming New Here shorts is a pivotal strategy to introduce a web3-curious audience to the space.

“I feel like the short films are our touch point for wider audiences who don’t necessarily know the space but can’t necessarily commit to watching a whole film about the cryptoart scene just yet. It’s a way of starting to release content that gently introduces true newbies to some of the artists in this space. We’re getting them to a more curious place so that they hop on and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to learn more about Snowfro, or I want to learn more about Claire Silver.’ Then that can lead them on their own journey,” he said.

The Glimpses collection will also feature at a special Shake Shack showcase event during ETH Denver.

Even at their starting positions, each of the Glimpses shows off the unique vibes of the individual artists that inspired it; Claire Silver’s is filled with her characteristic pink-hued, gothic maximalist aesthetic, and Snowfro’s Glimpse features a Squiggle turned into a surreal, pastel hillscape.

“The Glimpses were created using a combination of our mood boards for each of these worlds. Then, we were training models based on those mood boards—these were created using AI. From there, there’s no AI—it’s all very high production in Unreal Engine and live action. So once you start to see your Glimpses evolve, you’ll start to see pieces of each episode within the actual token,” Sickles said.

Source: nftnow.com