By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 10th, 2024
BNV World, once launched, aims to be building for collections to be shown off in higher fidelity, allowing to earn tokens while attending events.
Brand New Vision (BNV), the platform that provides 3D product creation, tokenization, community building, and interoperable wearability for fashion brands to enter the Web3 world, has announced a plan to launch its own metaverse. Dubbed “BNV World”, the metaverse will showcase complex and intricate digital fashion pieces for virtual world citizens.
According to Brand New Vision CEO Richard Hobbs, BNV World will serve as a bridge between traditional fashion brands and design tools for the metaverse. Besides, he said that existing metaverse platforms such as Decentraland and The Sandbox have gained popularity due to their “permissionless” structure. However, it is not enough to create complex designs.
BNV World will be built on Unreal Engine, graphics software tool from the Fornite creator Epic Games. This will help BNV go far beyound the design limitations of current metaverses.
Hobbs stated:
“Those experiences, those metaverses, which are being built or dreamed of being built using Unreal, are the ones where I think you’ll get the most traction with fashion brands. You can use the power of Unreal to show material physics in a way that’s different. [Before], there was no movement in the materials, they were literally rigged to the avatar, and that was it.”
BNV World, once launched, aims to be building for collections to be shown off in higher fidelity, allowing to earn tokens while attending events. Besides, it will have token-gated areas that will offer NFT holders “different levels of accessibility and wearability.”
Launched in in April 2021, BNV aims to take fashion beyond physical reality and into the metaverse, defining new spaces where virtual fashion can thrive. In February this year, the company completed a $4 million Series A funding round led by Animoca Brands. Other participants included AngelHub, K3, Arkstream Capital, Grizzly Capital, Meteorite Labs, and more.
Fashion & Metaverse
Fashion industry has been one of the latest to realize the necessity of accepting changes and integrating technology. The rise of the metaverse represents not only a big challenge for luxury brands, but also a massive opportunity. Some luxury houses have already started looking for ways to stay relevant in the digital world.
For example, in April, luxury brand Louis Vuitton announced the launch of a game app “Louis: The Game” to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of founder Louis Vuitton. The Game features 30 non-fungible tokens that players can collect throughout the gaming journey, 10 of which are from world renowned digital artist Beeple.
Further, in May, Balmain announced a long-term global partnership with an NFT marketplace MINTNFT as a part of its strategy to get into a much larger decentralized dimension. Together, they introduced a one-of-a-kind NFT defined as a “Non-Fungible Thread.”
Another example is the first ever Metaverse Fashion Week that took place in March. Dolce & Gabbana and Tommy Hilfiger were among several major names to participate in the event, which saw them create elaborate experiential boutiques in the Decentraland metaverse.