The perfect application for IOTA

A Response to the IOTA Contest: The Perfect Brainstorm

Frederick Bott
Published in
5 min readNov 27, 2018

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Here, in response to the invitation of David Sønstebø of IOTA, we explain why VRENAR is the ideal IOTA application. For those with no previous knowledge of IOTA; it is a distributed ledger crypto-currency token, designed for application to the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Problem IOTA was created to solve

The anticipated future population of the Internet of Things requires an infrastructural fabric to facilitate, monetise, and protect the associated data from literally billions of devices.

Crypto-currencies as a form of data monetisation, seem naturally suited to the monetisation of IoT data. However, the limited scaleability of blockchain solutions are far from ideal for IoT application. Something infinitely scaleable, and hence much faster was needed.

Hence IOTA was developed upon a radical new development beyond blockchain. It has all of the distributed ledger properties of blockchain, but with none of the limited-by-scale performance issues.

The characteristics of this new development are such that the performance of IOTA actually improves with scale. The more users, the merrier the system. This characteristic also makes IOTA an attractive investment as a pure crypto-currency in its own right.

A new problem faced by IOTA

The market of crypto-currency investing is currently on a downward trend. This market is heavily dominated by blockchain based currencies. Both of those with the largest (By far) market holdings, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum, appear to have reached their limits of scale, around early 2018.

Neither can scale any further without some serious modifications to their protocols.

Even with those modifications successfully made, the best that can be hoped for is for their limits to be raised to some higher limits. No limit will ever be high enough to accommodate all humanity. Only infinity is acceptable.

We see this as the real underlying reason for the current downward trend of cypto-currency prices. The effect of scale limiting is a very apparent deterioration in performance experienced by users, which subsequently affects the confidence of users seeking a safe store for their investments.

In contrast, IOTA is truly infinitely scaleable. In that sphere, it holds the same status as bitcoin; it is the first of a new breed. Once this is realised, we see every possibility IOTA could replace Bitcoin as the new market leader.

Until this is realised, the IOTA price is not immune from the perceived downward trend of crypto-currencies. Its price continues to be dragged down by those of its blockchain limited peers.

The solution to the new problem faced by IOTA

IOTA must leap out of the downward price trend, to show that it is truly something different from its peers. It has to make investors aware of its unlimited strength.

There are two ways this could happen. Investors could learn from the technical documentation of IOTA, or they could observe IOTA scaling way beyond the limits previously seen in blockchain.

Much as we love IOTA documentation, and investors, the two are probably incompatible, so the latter seems the more likely successful scenario.

IOTA could achieve a demo of scaling capability by attracting large numbers of new IoT actors to the network. In this, the increased value of the IOTA community would be reflected by a corresponding rise in the price of the IOTA token.

The problem VRENAR was created to solve

The technologies of VR and AR to date have yet to see large scale adoption. They are both still pretty much specialist enthusiast pursuits. We can see amazing possibilities, the “Superhuman Use Cases”, of how they can benefit humanity, and yet those possibilities remain mostly in theory.

An example of a Superhuman Use case is routinely being able to virtually visit anyone else, anywhere, regardless of location. By that Use Case alone, we see endless possibilities of adding creative value to both humanity and our environment, with profound effects on such things as the future of work and welfare.

To date, AR and VR have been driven by separate commercial entities, each with their own separate commercial goals. This has resulted in mostly separate communities with different interests. Despite the underlying technologies being very similar, with much technical overlap, the separate communities have developed different languages to describe very similar concepts.

On technical analysis from several years of research including two at PhD level, it becomes clear that the Superhuman Use cases require a particular combination of these technologies. Specifically, a distributed architecture VR world, combined with Structure-from-motion (SfM) and Markerless Motion Capture (MMOCAP) equipped AR wearables.

But by business analysis, we see no commercially attractive path using conventional business models (Based on Profit) towards the development of the Superhuman Use cases.

VRENAR (VR Enabled AR) is the non-profit project created to solve this problem and deliver the Superhuman Use cases for the benefit of humanity.

The business rationale of VRENAR is simply that it will empower people with the Superhuman Use cases. Those people will form a highly attractive worldwide community of significant real value. Their lives will be enriched. That community being formed from elements of the AR and VR communities will subsequently boost the value of those communities also. It seems reasonable to expect all included communities will be happy to assist funding VRENAR development to achieve the outcome of boosting the value of all.

VRENAR Meets IOTA

IOTA needs to attract large numbers of new users, preferably in numbers of billions.

VRENAR will comprise large numbers of users of wearable items, essentially IoT. By making the community attractive, it is likely to attract billions of users.

Further, the nature of VRENAR is that it will encourage users to deploy all manner of wearables in addition to the main AR visor to interpret their human responses to their environment, directly rewarding them for all of that data.

The VRENAR community needs a token solution to carry out this monetisation whilst protecting their data and personal privacy.

VRENAR itself, by its business model must be tokenised, in order to financially leverage the boosted value of the community.

From technical research on IOTA, it seems a natural choice for VRENAR application.

IOTA is a non-profit.

VRENAR is a non-profit.

VRENAR and IOTA appear to be a match made in heaven.

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