A few months ago there was an AMA with Idan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Upland where he gave us the first insight into the future of Upland as it pertains to cars. You can read all about my analysis of that here. Yesterday in the Upland Café Idan returned and gave us some more information regarding cars. Here is my analysis of some of the things we learned.
Disclaimer, I have no inside information regarding the workings of cars. The information below is based on public information provided with personal insight as to how I foresee this working.
Your car needs energy: Spark is the energy that will enable your car to travel. The example provided by Idan was an electric vehicle. Similar to how you need to plug your electric vehicle in to charge overnight to extend its travel range, spark will work in the similar fashion. For example, if your Upland car is able to travel 100km on a full “tank of spark”, you will have to stake your spark (similar mechanic to what is done to build homes) when you aren’t travelling in order to recharge it.
At the moment, spark is only used for building things – homes and in the future outdoor décor, but we can expect that each player will need to allocate some of that resource to both building and charging their cars. Spark is never lost or taken away from you, but if you are a player who does a lot of travelling whether it be to treasure hunt in different cities, or to mint Legits and mementos at many stadiums think about how spark plays into your long term strategy
Car racing: Players will be able to race cars. Maybe drag racing, or off road, there will likely be several different types of racing. We can expect further down the line for cool graphics and AR/VR to be included in this gamification feature. Since the Upland Metaverse is mapped on top of the real world, our cars will have to conform to the real world streets and highways. Similar to the application Waze, you will be able to see exactly where your car is as if it were in the real world. This enables any street, highway, or path that is mapped on Google to be a potential place for players to race their cars!
Carry passengers and cargo: Not everyone might have the spark required to build their own car, or the UPX to buy on the secondary market. These players might need an Uber – a lift to the airport or to get to a stadium to mint some NFL player Mementos. Alternatively, you may have purchased a new piece of decor from a metaventure in San Francisco, and you need it transported to your home in Kansas City. Not only cars will be needed to do this, but also players who are willing to provide these services
Block explorers as drivers: A new utility of your block explorers will be that they are the drivers of these cars. Each different type of block explorer will have different attributes. Just like in the real world, some people are better drivers than others, the same will be true in Upland – not all block explorers are equal. There will be block explorers that are better at drag racing, or off road racing, or street racing. This mixed with potentially different attributes for the types of cars themselves can make for an interesting combination of driver-car combinations when having a multiplayer car race.
With all this car racing that we can expect to happen, you may find yourself using a lot of spark to charge your car. Similar to how in treasure hunts, after finding a limited or exclusive treasure, you have a cool down period, you won’t be able to race your car 24 hours a day. At some point in time the car’s energy will deplete and you will have to charge it for a certain period of time until you will be able to continue racing or travelling. In order to support these spark requirements, Upland has said that there will be spark bonuses for players who are the most active. Potentially something similar along the lines of players who login every day for X days will receive Y spark. Players who play daily are likely to travel a lot more, and are therefore more likely to need spark just to “finance” their travels.
We are getting increasingly more excited to see what cars will entail in 2022!