A pseudonymous NFT creator and collector named JDunk has released interactive versions of all Shakespearean works in the Otherside metaverse. The Otherside team called this a Proof of Vibecode and highlighted his work as part of a weekly series that spotlights creators building in the metaverse.
JDunk was able to deploy 36 Shakespearean books by feeding the Message Markup Language (MML) documents to Claude artificial intelligence (AI), opening the door to experimentation. Notably, this creator is not just an NFT collector; he is also an actor and engineer.
To advance his work, the collector acquired all 74 resources in the Otherside. He had learned that these could help him build interactive objects on his land in the metaverse – a shelf of books users could open and read. JDunk was inspired by one of his favorite games, Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls Series, especially his time in Oblivion at Arcane University picking books to learn mage spells.
Named The Complete Works, users can navigate Shakespeare’s plays by act, as all of them follow a five-act structure. JDunk reused the navigation feature across each work, labeling each from ACT I through ACT V.
Claude designed the spines of the books in colors to differentiate tragedies from comedies. The AI model assigned blood red for tragedies and grass green for comedies. While loading pages, the model converts .txt files to images, using an inbuilt text parser. The parser also knows where to place page numbers, title, act, scenes, and highlight character names.
It is worth mentioning that JDunk’s work was not without its challenges. The most prominent one was the MML editor supporting only one plain font. Due to the nature of Shakespeare’s plays, this was not ideal in designing over 100 pages with titles, headers, and a real layout. The creator worked around the challenge by saving text files and having Claude convert them into images; hence, the built-in text parser.
According to the Otherside team, JDunk said: “Press the AI toward your actual vision and don’t settle early. If you can solve one thing and make a prototype, you can make a million things that follow the same pattern.”
While JDunk’s work is fascinating and immersive, the goal remains being able to open a book and start a quest. Fortunately, the engineer is already working on that. Interested in seeing what’s next for this NFT creator? Stay tuned for updates!
