Machi

Okay, we have bunch of concepts from digital being, white room, and Machi. Today, I am going to take a look at the project from a different angle--making it fun and worthwhile for the user.

While our larger vision is to make a virtual world for future ai agents, before we get there we need this project to be a phenomena, and to be a phenomena, it needs to capture hearts of its users.

So, in this document, we will explore bunch of concepts.

1. Vibe Room Concept

We looked at vibe room concept where user come in mostly to listen to lo-fi music and just look at some little digital beings moving on and about.

It is ultimate cozy space with may be some cowork vibe room functionality where you can be with other folks who just want some cozy space to co-exist.

I personally like this idea very much because I don't really play much games (too much investment) but I'd personally like a place I can just listen to music and just co-exist with others.

It could also be marketed as a "Winamp of 2026" where it is just a hippy space that doubles as a music player that can play ai generated music.

Cost to make it is very small. Granted the value addition to people are minimal but it is something people need. It is just a music player that people has been wishing without incessant ads.

For the characters, we can use SpriteDX character generation engines. Then for rooms we can always expand to different vibe rooms.

One possible addition to this room is to allow people to drop Memes in the virtual space or little posts that are fun tweets.

2. Living Artwork Concept

Alternative concept is to have a scene like the one below. Then have set of agents acting its parts. This is more like going to be a gif image than a full product.

But the idea is that we can make a more living picture that feels alive.

This naturally is more or less one time view effect and not something that can be repeated. One possibility is to have this world be generated entirely using genAI features and people can tweek its parameters to customize it on their own.

But the devils advocate here is that this is more or less a glorified screensaver. Personally, I don't think so but agree that it doesn't do much. It is mostly for visual satisfaction.

3. Magic Circle Concept

In one of the old posts, we mentioned "magic circle analogy." The analogy was that our gen AI prompts are like magic circles we draw and genAI conjure up things on top of it.

It is not really following that analogy but, a decent ideation we had is that we can sell "magic circles."

Users come into the platform and they can obtain various magic circles that enable users to do things.

A magic circle that makes fire.
A magic circle that changes weather.
A magic circle that teleports.

Instead of having these as learnable skills, we make them as collectables. They can be obtained after some level of effort. While simple circles can be obtained easily, there are unique magic circles that can be obtained only by the few.

Those rare magic circles defy the logic and defy the mechanics of the world allowing the owners to have unbalanced power on the world.

These types of unique magic circles can be generated by generative AI (visuals, the logics, effects and etc.) and be distributed to the users who are invested enough to obtain those.

It is similar in a way to Card system in Ragnarok Online where it is extremely rare to obtain those rare cards and once you obtain those you will have multiplicative effect.

Fun thing about this is that there is infinite discovery options. Instead of fixed amount of rare circles, we can use gen ai to continually produce new types of these world changing circles then distribute.

4. Your Own Cafe Concept

Another idea that has been developed from the whiteroom concept is to allow people to own their own room and make it into a cafe service "coffee drinks."

In this world, "coffee" roughy equates to what people feel when they get cup of coffee from a cafe. When you buy a coffee from a store, you get access to comfortable space, drink that wakes you up and enjoyment for next 1 hour or so.

You as a user get to own your own space and decorate it and figure out what kind of drinks to serve.

In this world, a coffee can be implemented as "experience bites." Imagine you can give a little manga strip. Or a meme. Or a mini game. Or it could be something like a little radio recording (fun and witty) something people would easily get into and can be used while people are driving or working on their own stuff.

This idea leans into cozy vibe space with social network. You own your cafe and your popularity is your power.

This idea while lovely, cozy and touches many of the limbic systems, the idea has no novelty. Cyworld mini rooms are implemented in similar ways. The only benefit nowdays is that we have ability to generate props, rooms and music. It also has very small barrier to entry where anyone driven enough can create. The difficult part will be to get people to be hooked in.

If we go this route, we will need to reposition the company as a social network or a hippy studio which rides on viral tidal waves.

Given all these ideas, I think I think it is going to come down to which resonates with me the best.

First of all, Your Own Cafe idea is cool but not novel and not something that I feel strongly about.

The living artwork, I do feel strongly but has no engagement loop.

The vibe room is one of the stronger ideas with minimal investment but then again engagement is pretty low. I can experiment with it but perhaps it will be time-boxed research.

More interesting to me is this "discovery-loop" from Magic Circle idea. I like discovery nerve. I want to explore possible combinations of magic circle that produces something truly amazing and unique that other folks has no way of knowing. To me this is pretty interesting. The idea of discovering something others have not. In a way this is similar to random root with steering. also similar to vibe coding and all other midjourney like diffusion model loops.