Lockwood Publishing pushes digital fashion with New Codes event

Lockwood Publishing, the British metaverse game company behind Avakin Life, is sponsoring the New Codes digital fashion summit. That comes just after Lockwood‘s support for PlanetPlay, which in turn is supporting projects such as eco-friendly stoves for the developing world.

New Codes is a digital fashion event focused on new horizons in fashion innovation. The two-day summit will take place on October 30 to October 31 at the Royal Institution in London’s Mayfair. It’s part of a series of partnerships Lockwood is creating to expand its user base. And it’s a sign that the idea of the metaverse lives on in fashion even though the metaverse hype has died down.

Avakin Life is celebrating its tenth year as a live “mobile metaverse” in December, has garnered a global community of over 200 million downloads and 1.3 million daily active users. The game allows players to design their avatars using a vast array of virtual items and accessories, including real-world brands. It provides a platform for users to explore, create, and connect with others in a dynamic virtual world. Lockwood previously was the developer behind much of Sony’s PlayStation Home virtual world, which was an early attempt at establishing a metaverse.

Lockwood CEO Halli Bjornsson will join Social Signals: Avatars & Digital Society, a panel at the event, alongside industry leaders, visionaries, and creatives. Other notable speakers at New Codes include Oliver Yonchev, CEO of Flight Story; Lucy Yeomans, co-chair of Drest; Marco Marchesi, CTO of The Fabricant; Lisa Cameron, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Textiles & Fashion; and Scott Walton, head of global business development for Kornit Digital.

The summit will delve into the rapid developments in AI, 3D immersive tools, XR, and web3, and how these innovations are shaping the future of the fashion industry.

Nicole Kane, Lockwood Publishing’s digital & AI fashion designer and a member of the Metaverse Fashion Council, said in a statement, “Fashion in Avakin Life is the primary expression of individuality and identity exploration, and AI innovation coupled with user-generated content is powering the next stage of this evolution.”

Lockwood Publishing is based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with additional studios in Newcastle, Lisbon, and Vilnius.

PlanetPlay

In September, Lockwood partnered with PlanetPlay and Grammy-nominated musician Fat Joe to inspire Avakin Life players to adopt real-world eco-friendly behaviors. It’s part of a movement that is aimed at getting gamers to take climate action in virtual worlds to save our real world.

As part of this alliance, Avakin Life is introducing a range of more than 30 in-game green items, available for players to purchase. These include eco-friendly virtual items, providing players with the opportunity to embrace sustainable living within the virtual realm. Items marked with a green leaf indicate that a portion of proceeds from their sale, via PlanetPlay’s platform and API, will generate Green Coins that can be donated straight to Kenya’s Hongera Clean Cookstove project.

This project supports the distribution of 150,000 efficient stoves to rural Kenyan families and will mitigate more than 1.7 million tons of CO2 over the project’s lifetime, said Rhea Loucas, CEO of PlanetPlay, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Loucas said PlanetPlay creates a platform and and tech to help game studios pull off live events where they collaborate on raising money and awareness for certified green projects.

“We create real world change directly and immediately from day one. So we currently is running a few projects, and the biggest one is in Kenya, where we’re helping the local communities
update their cooking methodology from a traditional stone-cooking to using a thermal efficient cookstove,” Loucas said. “On the climate side, the thermal efficiency could reduce massively the amount of dry wood used, reducing emissions. Most importantly it reduces the requirement that families have to go to the forest often to cut down trees.”

“With our players, we’re trying to do something good for our planet, like anything from planting trees, or to helping with emergencies and things like that, like,” said Bjornsson. “When I heard about PlanetPlay, I really liked what they were doing. It aligns well with our audience.”

The parties have been working for a couple of months and Bjornsson said the partnership will continue as players have responded well to it. There has been a four-fold increase in purchases of the green items that were put inside the game. Millions of players have been exposed to the green promo. A percentage of revenue from the Green Coins goes to the green cause.

PlanetPlay has also worked with other game companies. Lockwood Publishing has about 20 people working for it.

“It’s a great partnership where we rely on the players and their willingness to go green together,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of positive results. We want to make it easy and accessible for players and companies to join together and make their own contribution.”

There will be more Fat Joe content dropping shortly.

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