Galverse #11 - Galverse turns 1!
WAGMAA! We're all gonna make an anime! One year down, eternity ahead!
Welcome to the eleventh Shinsei Galverse monthly newsletter, shooting across time & space to make the galaxy a better place! Here’s the rundown this week:
1️⃣ One year of Galverse with a major celebration in Shibuya!
2️⃣ Awesome work in progress out of the anime studio!
3️⃣ Galverse AI experiments and R&D!
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Galverse x Lens Protocol Party!
We were super lucky to celebrate our one year launch anniversary and the opening of ETH Global Tokyo with our amazing friends at Lens Protocol!
Galaxy Gingakei in Shibuya came to life with laser displays from a teamLab artist, massive flower installations, custom drinks, gyaru style makeup and hair, T-shirt giveaways, cosmic jewelry, and more.
And in case you got hungry, we had freshly made dorayaki covered in Galverse and Lens logo art.
We were blown away by the crowd in Tokyo for ETH Global! On top of bringing together all the Tokyo web3 locals, an incredible contingent of international visitors and crypto OGs showed up to party with us!
Special thanks to amazing Gal Asami for planning the event! And Benoit for assisting on event planning too.
And of course, super special thanks to our friends at Lens Protocol for celebrating with us and helping bring this amazing night to life!
This poster illustration was done by amazing Gal Kihi with animation and text work by David from the Lens team 💖
Some more thanks and credits to go around as well!
Music by DJs Si Oux, Hana Watanabe, and Mariennu.
Lasers by Takeshi Mukai from teamLab.
Floral installation by Tatsuki Inoue.
Make up Shioro Kitagawa.
Photos + Video by Timothée Lambrecq.
Get your Gal in our Music Video!
Director Ayaka never sleeps when she’s working on the Galverse anime, and that means our WAGAMI LABS Interns aren’t allowed to either!
We launched a new WAGMAA Assignment this week. It’s your chance to get your Gal featured in the upcoming Galverse Music Video!
Your task: design the full body look of your Gal.
Ayaka has room for around 10 Gals to feature in a critical scene of the video and wants an awesome, aesthetic cast of characters to appeal.
Any artwork of your own Gal is eligible - collages, sketches, AI generations, or even artwork you’ve completed in the past.
It’s easy to take part:
Make sure you’re a verified Gal Holder in the #gal-verify channel
Head to the #studio-floor channel and make your submission!
There’s AI tools in #ai-generator-001 if you’re not an artist yourself!
WAGMAA on the Way!
WAGAMI LABS has been hard at work on the anime with our production partners ARCH, and we’re excited to share some of the first character sheets to come out of the studio!
The character designers inside the anime studio have taken Ayaka’s initial designs and productionized them. These sheets show the character’s design, dimensions, and different angles and poses so the animators have a source of truth to work from.
You might have seen this character already - ‘Zero’ has been our Twitter PFP since Galverse launched all the way back in January 2022!
Ayaka and the character designer have been working together to perfect the nostalgic look of the character, with special attention paid to the shape of her face, eyes, and hair.
It’s about perfecting the concept of nostalgia x future that Director Ayaka is always talking about!
The team has also been working through script and story meetings in Tokyo with professional writers, and we’re looking at ways to bring Galverse fans inside that process too - maybe a livestream coming up?
Ayaka is also deep into Music Video work. Unfortunately, we’re not able to share a lot of that work until the video is released due to confidentiality agreements - but once we can open up the curtain, we think you’ll be amazed by her creative vision!
We’ll be sharing more regular anime and art updates in the Discord too, so make sure you’re plugged in to the #staff-announcements channel there!
Cosmic Scramble commences!
You might remember our cosmic portal puzzle experience that we put together with our friends at The Pssssd which launched during NFT NYC last year…
This was an amazing, interactive experience where two NFT communities came together to chat, work together, and solve puzzles with some giveaways for good measure!
GalTech engineer Devin Dimension has spent a lot of time refining and improving the technology and concept behind cross-community portals, and we’re happy to announce the launch of our next experiment!
The Cosmic Scramble / コスミック-スクランブル is our vision for a community hub that spans across Discord servers and brings fans all across a country together!
We’ve started with a focus on Japanese-language speaking communities. First up are our friends in IRI-DO and XAN XAN, two awesome Tokyo based projects that we’re fans and holders of!
The Scramble will expand over time with more great Japanese projects joining the fold. We’re always looking for ways to increase collaboration, grow communities within our space, and make friends across time and space!
The best thing is, no one has to leave their home base - XANG members from Xan Xan stay in their Discord server, but can chat to Gal and Iri-Do holders without going anywhere!
You can check out the portal in the #コスミック-スクランブル channel today!
Don’t worry - for our English-speaking community, we’ve got some more exciting cross-community activations and experiences in the works as well.
The Cosmic Translator comes to life!
GalTech wizard Devin Dimension has been super busy this month! He also launched the cosmic translator.
Beyond building bridges with other communities, we want to make it easy for the different language speakers within Galverse to get to know each other and interact!
Hooked up with the latest DeepL translation tech, the Cosmic Translator comes to life in any of our Holder channels when you react with a language emoji!
It instantly and accurately translates messages, right inside of Discord itself. Handy!
Galverse AI - the future of creation?!
We’ve already hinted at some cutting-edge AI work that Team Galverse has been diving into. Devin Dimension and Wailoaloa even gave a talk at a tech conference back in March all about our vision for Galverse AI art!
Well, we’re happy to say that Galverse community member and ML researcher Jarvis has jumped in to work with us on key research and development for Galverse AI!
Jarvis’ early results training Galverse AI models are pretty incredible - replicating traits, styles, and even coming up with new features that fit into the world and universe of Galverse.
“I’ve been working hard to bring some AI tools to the Galverse, super excited to see what the creative Gals will create with the model,” Jarvis says!
So, what’s the point of all this research and work?
While Ayaka’s art and creative works will always remain the creative centre of Galverse, we’ve seen what happens when we put AI tools into the community’s hands.
Gals have been creating amazing AI art for WAGMAA assignments since the day we put Niji-journey into the server!
Back to Jarvis for another comment → “Now think of what we can do when we have all the images, frames, sketches... from the anime!!!! Only up from here. ワクワクしかない.”
Can you imagine a future where you can generate stories, artwork, manga, and maybe even videos of your Gal, all in the proper style and aesthetic of Galverse? That’d be something special.
Right now, the models and training for Galverse AI is getting better every day. Jarvis is working hard to refine his work and improve prompting to get really consistent results.
We have some plans to get these tools and models into the community’s hands. Stay tuned for next month’s AI update!
Galverse on Lens + Claim your Handle!
On top of throwing an amazing party with us, the team at Lens Protocol have been kind enough to grant Gal Holders access to the claim list for Lens!
What is Lens? It's a decentralized social graph. That means anyone can build apps on top of their protocol - think 'Twitter for Lens', 'Instagram for Lens', 'Facebook for Lens', 'YouTube for Lens' and more cool ideas you've never thought about before!
Even better, you only have one profile for accounts across all of those platforms, and you keep control of all your private data and content you create! Your profile takes the form of a Polygon NFT that lives in your wallet, and can even be traded and exchanged.
You can do cool stuff like let followers collect your posts (for free or payment), or even split proceeds with other content creators too. Beyond just basic social apps, there’s all sorts of cool implementations popping up - like Dumpling TV.
Watch a never-ending stream of Galverse video content on Dumpling.lol - in what we can only say is a nostalgia x future design that fits in perfectly with Gal Vibes.
We’ve already submitted the first round of addresses to the Lens team which are being added to the claim list as we speak!
If you missed out, ping Wailoaloa in Discord and we’ll see what we can do.
Updated Socials!
As we’re on the road to some big releases, it was time to break out of our Twitter cage and expand out to the wider world of socials! We want to make sure Galverse is reaching audiences in all corners of the internet once the anime explodes.
Make sure you follow us on Instagram! The grid will be filling up over the next months with all sorts of badass Gal content, and you can tag us in meetups and other cool events for a chance to get added to our stories!
You can also subscribe to us on YouTube! Right now, you’ll find great videos like the Origin Story mini-docu series, as well as the NYC and Shibuya party reels. This will fill up over the rest of the year as well!
Don’t stress - Gal Holders will still get the first look at everything in Discord, but as a project and community, we’ve got a great story that we want to tell the world!
Emi’s Neural Fad goes to Bright Moments!
Congratulations to Emi for launching her art collection Neural Fad during Bright Moments Tokyo this month! You can read a great interview about the project in Right Click Save.
Her AI work reimagines Tokyo street fashion culture from times and spaces that never really existed, but somehow still feel nostalgic. It’s very cool.
Gals in the Verse! Community favorites!
This section might look a little uglier than usual since Twitter doesn’t allow embedded tweets anymore… so let’s see how we go! There are so many Galverse community highlights this month, with a big focus on Tokyo with our birthday party!
Startracker started things off with a showing of Gal PFPs in Shibuya. Hey! Is that a wild Wailoaloa on the table?!
Granite followed up with another Gal meeting on a different night. Wait, is that the same table?! I guess that’s why they call that particular Izakaya the ‘Galzakaya’!
Soyjoy dropped this awesome concept art for one of their Gals - which has made an appearance in the Music Video WAGMAA Assignment this week!
Kay shared this awesome video from the Galverse x Lens party! Click through to check it out!
Ava-sensei shared her clip from the party too! That looks like Asami style!
Director Ayaka shared some fun work from Jarvis! He’s launched an AI-powered talking Gal on Twitch. You can type questions in and she’ll answer back. Ayaka’s comment, translated to English, says:
“When the developer Jarvis tried to make her chant the Heart Sutra, she used too much CPU and shut down her PC. Destructive GAL is cute!”
You can check out Jarvis’ Twitch stream here.
Sitacke shared their skateboard featuring Gal sticker! Too badass!
Superstar Jutsu is 129 days into their #GalOfTheDay crusade! Only 8759 left to go! 頑張ってね! Thanks for helping us share these amazing Gals to the world.
Asami captured the sparkly wonder of our Shibuya party night with her VTuber flair!
Gals love Lens! Thanks for capturing the red bean sweetness of our dorayaki, Emi!
shu-hei headed to Shibuya for the party too! “It was a party where you can still feel the strength of the Galverse community”. Thanks, shu!
Another one from Emi! This time, cosplay of her Galverse PFP. Should we do a Galverse themed halloween party in Tokyo this year?
And finally, a custom shirt from Nao, inspired by Cowboy Bebop, but entirely its own thing! So cool!
A special thanks for 1 year!
We want to give everyone in the community and reading our newsletter a special thanks for sticking with us for a year already!
Work on Galverse started much earlier, in 2021, but it was a fateful night in April 2022 when our mint went live and promptly sold out, bringing us one step closer to bringing the Galverse dream to life.
From everyone on the team, we appreciate you all for entrusting us with the dream of community-driven creativity, and of Shinsei Galverse! Galverse forever!
