Psychic VR Lab is developing STYLY, a cloud-based Metaverse content distribution ecosystem that provides augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR/VR/MR) artists with cross-platform services to showcase extended reality (XR) projects.
Last year, STYLY also introduced tools to enable platform enthusiasts to instantly place AR/MR geotagged immersive visuals on top of real-world urban environments.
The service hosted NFT.NYC, a digital takeover event introducing the XR content distribution suite along with Japanese XR STYLY artists.
To promote the NYC event, which took place at Times Square, New York, STYLY made featured projects available for sale as NFTs on its recently integrated OpenSea-powered marketplace.
XR Today spoke with Ryohei Watanabe, CMO of Psychic VR Lab, to discuss STYLY’s OpenSea integration and last week’s Times Square takeover.
XR Today: How has feedback been for the NFT.NYC event?
Ryohei Watanabe: The experience was very well received. It was not only profitable for attendees, buying and selling AR artworks in the city and distributing them as NFTs, but it was also very attractive for the artists exhibiting their artworks at landmarks where many people gather.
In the future, we will work with the NEWVIEW community to launch a project that will mediatize places around the world and promote the development of XR NFT art. We aim to support the development of XR NFT art and create an artist and creator economy.
XR Today: Why did STYLY choose OpenSea to support the platform’s integrated NFT marketplace?
Ryohei Watanabe: As a first step, we chose Ethereum, the standard blockchain in the industry, and OpenSea, an NFT marketplace. In the future, we would like to support other chains and marketplaces based on the requests from our community.
XR Today: What benefits do STYLY creators and users receive compared to OpenSea’s traditional credit card payment scheme?
Ryohei Watanabe: We think it will greatly reduce the hurdles to buying and selling. There are still very few users who have crypto assets, so we think it would be a great benefit for the distribution of artists’ works at this stage.
OpenSea to Simplify NFT Trading
The news comes after OpenSea integrated credit card payments in April, allowing individuals interested in NFT investments to participate without requiring a crypto-wallet.
The move dramatically democratizes the NFT market for buyers by enabling traditional payments and lowering the barrier to entry for new users.
Through OpenSea’s MoonPay trading forum, users can now buy, sell, mint NFTs, and participate in secondary trading. The platform also accepts transactions from traditional payment systems, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
Later in the same month, OpenSea unexpectedly purchased NFT aggregation service Gem, enabling the platform to continue its operations as a stand-alone service while securing OpenSea with features that support low-cost transactions across multiple NFT marketplaces.
