At Trilligent, we pride ourselves on working without walls. While we don’t lease physical office space, we believe that collaboration is essential to maximizing creativity, mentorship, and growth. Our commitment to collaboration – coupled with our clients’ boundary-breaking efforts to build #web3 and shape the next generation of computing platforms – made the metaverse a natural home for our global headquarters.
We dedicated 2022 to designing and building Trilligent’s first metaverse headquarters – an information pavilion intended to showcase the Trilligent brand and invite visitors to connect with our team. While our ambitions in the metaverse extend into 2023 and beyond, we’ve distilled a few key lessons learned during our first foray into metaverse construction.
Lesson 1: Choose the platform and parcels best suited to your specific metaverse goals.
Before becoming virtual land owners, we evaluated the universe of available metaverse platforms, spending time in The Sandbox, Decentraland, Roblox, and Horizon Worlds to find the best home for Trilligent’s information pavilion. For our first-ever build, we gave preference to mature platforms with active user bases that would allow us to customize a space to our exact brand specifications. We decided on Decentraland for a few reasons:
- Its broad popularity and active user community;
- Its relative longevity in the market, a testament to its durability and continued relevance;
- Its software development kit (SDK), which allows for advanced designs and animations, ultimately allowing us to fully customize our space; and,
- Its accessibility by internet browser, which makes it an easy onramp for metaverse neophytes (or anyone holding out on purchasing a headset).
Our next order of business was to identify the specific land parcels we wished to purchase. Here, a new set of considerations emerged, including location, cost, and size. We leaned on our development partners to advise on the number of parcels we’d need to house our pavilion (four). Armed with this information, we then toured Decentraland’s various districts in search of a property in a business-centered neighborhood which might provide opportunities for engagement and networking. We were pleased to find one that fit the bill: two adjacent two-parcel properties (which we combined into a four-parcel estate) neighboring Fidelity Investments and the metaverse Trade Center. Better yet, the property offered convenient road and plaza access, making it easily navigable by users and clients.
Everything we now know about property acquisition in the metaverse, we learned by doing. To others considering a similar investment, we’d recommend spending time at the outset of your search articulating your “need to haves” based on how you hope users will interact with your space. Lead with these criteria. And if you’re not yet sure what matters most to you, play tourist!