Innovating NFT and Augmented Reality for the Art Industry?

There is a surge on NFT or Non-fungible tokens recently and could possibly, but not proven, exculpate the pandemic and the home setting/lockdown situations. This is just how much the world has been digitalised! Similar to creating YouTube content as a mode of earning money, individuals now are realising that NFT is another money-making platform and has become more and more popular these days.

But before delving more into it, I tried to research further about NFT aside from how I understood it from family and friends. If this is the first time you are reading about it, I would say the easiest way to describe is that NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. Most NFT is part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum or ETH is a cryptocurrency similar to bitcoin.

Here are some recent examples to give you a better view of NFT:

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and CEO, sold his very first tweet as an NFT via platform Valuables. And just so you know why you have to keep reading this blog, the highest offer to date is $2,915,835.47 by a Malaysian CEO of the blockchain company Bridge Oracle, Sina Estavi.

Again, if this is still unclear, I would compare this to buying an “autograph” of Jack Dorsey. It means purchasing a digital certificate of the tweet which is unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator.

Nyan Cat, the 10-year old iconic GIF of Chris Torres has reached $600,000 days after the Jack Dorsey announcement and is now sold for $1,009,521.00.

Stephen Curry Twitter

Stephen Curry has bought an $180,000 ethereum-based NFT from the Bored Yacht Club Collection. Go check his twitter profile photo to see the digital art.

Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 unique ape NFTs that are on the Ethereum blockchain. Curry’s ape, according to the NFT’s profile is quite rare. Of the 10,000 in the collection, only 1% are wearing tweed suits, 3% with zombie’s eyes, 5% with blue fur, 13% with yellow backgrounds, and 23% are looking bored.

Now the most popular or probably the very first question of most who just recently heard of NFT… Anyone can copy the files, why are people paying big money for their NFTs?

  • The modern equivalent of a very old tradition. It is like the Mona Lisa as the most recognized painting in the world with countless copies of replicas, forgeries, digital reproductions. But the one in Louvre holds the real and highest value. NFT serves as a certificate of authenticity.
  • Other may be hoping that it will eventually lead to a higher resell value in the future just like with physical art.


The potential and reality
With these unique digital arts being sold, the future of NFT in the art industry may or may not progress. With the see-sawing prices of Ethereum and the lack of physical world uses, some experts say NFT might just be an overheated market. However, a disagreement is also making sense as others compare it to gold as a fictional asset because you can’t buy coffee with a gold bar.

Nevertheless, collecting artwork has long been practiced. It’s just the freshness and unfamiliarity of the NFT technology that makes it much skeptical or riskier to the buyers. It’s far too early to know if it’s just novelty or the start of a long-term investment industry.

Immersive possibilities
The potential of expanding or integrating to being immersive is a possibility. Adding Augmented Reality (AR) to the static digital arts being sold may increase its price value. Or AR could establish a status quo in which digital artworks are in the high-value category.

Similar to AR, NFT has already started being a marketing strategy. U.S. band Kings of Leon recently sold multiple NFTs as part of a promotion of their latest album. The tokens also doubled up as a kind of VIP pass, offering buyers limited edition vinyl and front row seats at their live shows.

In the future, we might be able to see backstage access, never-before-seen footage, or personal greetings using Augmented Reality on these NFTs, again, adding higher value. And by that, I also meant something like Jack Dorsey’s video re-enacting and typing the tweet when you point your AR camera on that very first tweet.