Metacomm

Inspiration

With the boom in metaverse technology, there is a growing desire for identity and creative expression, and ownership. However, traditional social networks are far from adequate to meet this demand. Most of your messages in current systems are sent via low-information vehicles such as texts, pictures, and emojis; the person you are communicating with has no way of knowing your expressions and emotions when you send these messages; the surface meaning of the message can be far from the true expression. Your chats are all stored on servers of large corporations; you have no way of preventing people from viewing them. You are subject to censorship of what you send, you do not own the chats, and you do not even have rights to delete them.

What it does

Chat content is encrypted end-to-end; messages are stored on decentralized servers; NFT 3D avatar chat is driven by real-time expression capture technology; 3D chat messages can be minted as NFTs and permanently recorded on the blockchain; artists can create original 3D Avatar NFTs in our creation centre.

Polygon provides us with an excellent platform with stable and fast on-chain reaction, as well as convenient project integration, allowing us to implement features quickly.

We also use IPFS to store files such as images and videos uploaded by users, store the IPFS file CIDs on chain, and use IPFS to provide external access to resources.

How we built it

Our team consists of 3 parts, front-end, mobile and back-end. The front end is responsible for the development of the web management side, mainly the management of the NFT upload and release function. The mobile terminal is mainly iOS, which is responsible for chatting, NFT display and purchase, and the display and use of NFT 3D avatars. The background is responsible for the deployment of contracts and the development of related APIs.## Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge is how to detect facial expressions and have the 3D model drive synchronized changes based on the expressions. Finally, according to Apple's scheme, we use blendshapes to complete the synchronization of expressions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We provide a new instant chat system that uses 3D avatars to synchronize expressions to make it easier for users to enter the metaverse world, and uses NFT to protect users' creation and ownership.

What we learned

We learned a lot about OpenGL and NFT, especially we learned a lot from our teamwork.

What's next for Metacomm

Our NFT market is still small, and the number of 3D avatars is not large. In the next step, we will promote it to more people and let more excellent designers publish excellent NFT avatars on our platform for more people to use.