Please describe your proposed solution.
About BlockchainArtWorks
BlockchainArtWorks (BCAW) was established in 2021 with the intent of bringing to the fore the Cardano community’s expression of identity, values, ideas and emotions in the form of digital art minted as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the Cardano blockchain. Our goal is to provision a rich, immersive and seamless viewing experience for everyone in their journey of discovering and engaging with these unique works of digital artistry.
Using our substantially developed deep-zoom technology we delivered our abstract generative art publication (“6 million blocks”) and are now looking to deploy this technology to display ALL the NFTs minted historically and also those which will be minted in the future on a continual basis on Cardano to:
- Enhance visibility of the large volume of rich and diverse artworks contained within NFTs minted on Cardano;
- Drive discovery of NFT portfolios amongst NFT content creators and owners alike, from both within and outside of the Cardano community;
- Generate engagement between community members and people outside of the community.
Problem Statement
At present, the Cardano ecosystem features NFT viewers in isolation, i.e. either a single NFT is viewable at a time, or a group of NFTs under a single Policy ID is viewable. This way of viewing NFTs, while adequate for NFT owners and other users to view and enjoy digital arts, requires knowledge of the NFT Asset Fingerprint and/or Policy ID - without these, they are only able to view NFTs that are featured in lists (e.g. Marketplace listings), or those being minted or transferred (e.g. transaction viewer).
This poses a lost opportunity of discovery of the vast array of rich and diverse portfolio of artworks within Cardano - work(s) that content creators have poured numerous hours of effort into - as it necessitates people to keep on top of new mints, or actively browse NFT listings to discover NFT artworks. Additionally, the viewing experience is neither seamless (jumping through multiple pages or continually scrolling with breaks) nor rich (isolated frames or boxes), resulting in very little browsing/face-time and therefore engagement.
To counter this problem, the proposer has produced a prototype of a Deep-Zoom Interactive Viewer (DZIV), that would bring all the NFTs minted on Cardano into one webpage, providing a rich, immersive and seamless viewing experience for everyone.
Solution Design & Current Prototype
We will use deep zoom technology to build the viewer and a <u>working prototype can be found in the link below</u>:
https://cardano.blockchainart.works
- The prototype features c. 300,000 NFTs minted between epochs 300 - 310.
- NFT images are placed in an algorithmically generated grid with random cell positioning
- NFT images are sequentially placed in order of their mint-date, starting from the top left, working downwards in columns.
- The prototype features NFT images at 128, 256, 512 and 1024px resolution
- The prototype has working interactive capability including, but not limited to, panning and zooming (controlled with mouse, keyboard or touch) and full-screen viewing to provide a fully immersive viewing experience.
- <u>NB. The prototype has been hosted on a cheap, low-cost virtual machine. As such, the performance/loading speeds is not indicative of the final MVP’s outputs. Provisions have been made within the budget for this proposal for the purchase of dedicated hosting solutions that will substantially improve loading speeds.</u>
The proposal is intended to fund development works (i) to scale this MVP to contain all the NFTs minted on Cardano to date, (ii) and a working solution for newly minted NFTs on an ongoing basis.
Future Product Roadmap:
- <u>Metadata Implementation</u> - Click on an NFT to acquire metadata plus raw image
- <u>NFT Search Functionality</u> - Search by Asset Fingerprint ID
- <u>Marketplace Aggregator</u> - Display if NFT is on listing(s) for sale/offer