PassW0rd – 10 April 2024 (Into The Metaverse)

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Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password, the program that that explores the future of tech on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. In this month’s episode, we explore a whole new world: the metaverse. The virtual place that has become the place to be since Snoop Dogg bought a plot of land to build a virtual mansion in the 3D gaming platform Sandbox. And a fan has just bought the plot next door for $450,000. Snoop Dogg, a big backer of NFT technology, the crypto system that is short for non-fungible tokens that lets you buy digital artifacts, intends to turn the Sandbox replica of his house into a music venue for the digital cognoscenti, an idea that may not be as odd as it sounds. In this program, we take you to the ends of the metaverse and explore just what the future could bring in the virtual world that is already morphing into reality and ask In worlds where tech companies create the environment, who owns you? Currently, the metaverse is something of a confusing concept, perhaps best explained by dipping back into a bit of ancient technological history and asking you to drag your mind back to those dim and distant days in 1996 when the internet suddenly lurched into your consciousness. Remember all of those different portals? There was Netscape, America Online, and particularly CompuServe, a sort of walled-garden internet browser that offered games, online chat, a messaging forum, software libraries, and a picture exchange system. So old-fashioned, yet sounding slightly familiar. Well then, you’ve just imagined the current conception of the metaverse: a 3D world where you can play and talk and pay using digital tokens for the things that you want to use in it. Here’s Michael Cruz, the head of content at Summer Friday, a New York-based creative agency and a fully paid-up metaverse habitué.

Speaker C: So I’m part of the HapeBeast Club and they’re just releasing these coins and the coins get you into specific events. So those events are built on the monetization of selling those coins, that it’s a business. And when you’re at those events, then the The opportunity becomes talking and mingling and very real. You’re meeting people, you’re doxing or doxing, which is basically removing the anonymity of that person from their digital self to real self, and relationships are formed. And if it’s a group that’s powerful, then you’re now in a circle that’s powerful.

Speaker D: Do you buy these coins or do you have to earn them?

Speaker C: You buy. So there’s public sales and then there are ones that go to you for being early adopters. So it depends. There are rules around all of it. Rug Radio is an interesting case study if you want to look at one, because it’s essentially like what if YouTube was built on NFTs? Because in order to be a host or an influencer on Rug Radio, you’d have to be tokened in. So you have to purchase their NFT or their token. So there’s a difference between NFTs and tokens. I kind of mentioned derivatives upfront. Derivatives is sort of like you’re in it just for the art. So there’s no real utility per se. It’s just community, it’s hype, it’s cool art. And then when you think about utility, those projects are typically launched as tokens. Like those are all utility. And then there’s a spectrum where you can have an NFT that has utility. So it’s, there’s everything in between as well. And I think that the way I try to shape it and make sense of it is like, it’s kind of your world. You can, you can kind of make it what you want. Because again, the foundation is set on a beautiful, on a beautiful technology, which is a blockchain, cryptocurrencies that allow you to build an ecosystem. So within your ecosystem of community, you can build your own coin. And that coin has no value anywhere except for in the community. But that value within that community could actually be quite monetizing in the real world.

Speaker D: I interviewed an expert on currency who said all currency systems are built on belief. So therefore, if people believe, then it’s the currency, correct? Now, this, of course, raises this very interesting idea. I mean, at the beginning of the internet, everybody thought it was this wonderful Wild West where nobody was really in control, etc., etc. We’ve all been hearing about all of these very, very large companies like Apple, like Google, obviously Facebook, now Meta, wanting to generate their own metaverse and their metaverses of experience. Who will own you in the metaverse? You seem to be suggesting that at the moment you’ve got the right to own you, but it could be up for grabs.

Speaker C: It’s a beautiful question. It’s 100%. I think that there’s a whole big group fighting for decentralization and full autonomy and no ownership at all. And there’s the movement of capitalism and big corporations who are coming in with awesome experiences that people will eventually gravitate towards. Like Horizon in the metaverse right now, if you jump into Oculus, which is Meta, owned by Meta, Facebook, right? You jump into your Oculus and you have all these choices. Horizon is kind of cool. You can go in and watch like a 2 Chainz concert and 2 Chainz in 3D, like massive and you’re like hanging out watching the concert and you’re chatting with somebody from, I don’t know, Turkey. I was chatting with someone from Turkey while watching 2 Chainz in the Horizon metaverse. And what’s cool is the experience drove me there. So yeah, at that point, what they want to take in terms of my entry fee and what I give up, that’s a real question, 100%. I don’t have any— I don’t have a utopian perspective on the fact that we’re going to win over capitalism. I think in the end, corporations are going to take a hold of the platform like anything else, and we’ll find another place to flourish. But what I think is the real interesting component now from an economic standpoint, and even having young kids, is sort of like the skill sets of how our skills are evolving in the workforce to support something like this and what’s becoming relevant in making money and monetizing. And that’s what’s amazing is that even on Web2 level to here, when corporations get involved, it just evolves the space in a beautiful way. And then we’ll find the next one. But the world is evolving to technology. The currency is moving digitally. So there’s gonna be real, real shift in this. And if you’re not focused on or steward of it or focused on it and studying it in some way, shape, or form, there’s gonna be a growing gap from what you’re able to contribute to when we’re there, right?

Speaker B: At the moment, according to Cruz, the metaverse is not the world that Facebook or Meta would have us believe, a world that meta-supremo Mark Zuckerberg is making a land grab for. It’s more like a series of fashionable venues that act as portals into particular worlds. The names trip off Cruise’s tongue like the names of legendary northern nightclubs in the UK. For Liverpool’s Cavern club of the 1960s and Manchester’s Hacienda of the 1990s, substitute the new worlds of the 2020s: Hype, Horizon, Discord, and of course Snoop Dogg Sandbox. Places where you can play games, go to concerts, and experience. You can even get a job according to Cruise because making the metaverse costs money. Everything in the metaverse costs money, particularly your avatar.

Speaker C: Right, an avatar. And at that point, the purchase of that avatar, you start to identify with it, but it’s investments, it’s dollars. And while you may not realize that level of investment just keeps pulling you in, and eventually you’re spending $100, $200 on something when you’re considering whether or not you should spend $50 on dinner. So you’re actually spending more on this digital life form because it brings you some level of joy or security. I don’t know what it is, but I think that’s where we have to be careful in terms of our investment into the space and what that actually means for us. It’s going to be a balancing act and it’s different for everyone. But I can say that when you’re in it, you can play at any level you want, which is kind of cool.

Speaker D: I mean, you’re talking though about gaming metaverse here, aren’t you? Because other people are talking about these completely different levels of metaverse where you work, you go on holiday.

Speaker C: Yeah, but that’s not— I mean, I can ask you now as a marketer, what’s the most expensive thing you can pay for? Attention. So it’s all currency based. It’s not just gamified, right? So if you’re— there’s no passive way, I guess is what I’m getting at. I’ve seen people who are getting paid to work at the digital subway. You have a metaverse subway, but you need a person in there. So that’s a job. So your job is 7 hours in the metaverse and you’re getting paid for it in real life, but that’s your attention, right? And if you’re going in and you’re vacationing and you’re doing that, that’s your attention and your time spent. So it’s going to have a real impact in your real life one way or another because you’re spending something. There’s an investment, there’s capital.

Speaker D: Well, therefore, then it makes some sense to pay £200 for your Subway skin if that’s going to give you the— sorry, $200. Yeah, that’s going to give you the $50 for dinner in the real world.

Speaker C: Correct.

Speaker B: To give you some idea of how this world works, you have to use a bit of imagination. And after all, the best pictures are on the radio. So there you are on your computer, and you’ve opened a browser— Google, Edge, Safari, the successors to CompuServe and Netscape that broke open the gated world. In opening the browser, you have, in true Star Trek style, teleported into the internet’s town square. Instruct the browser to make a search and the buildings that used to be on the high street appear. The websites that used to be shops and offices are standing before you, indistinct, but you know what they represent. Make a search for a metaverse portal and the internet’s town square begins to look a little more real and you can elect for whichever world you want to be in. If you entered via Meta, the social media star formerly known as Facebook, then you are already in Zuckerberg world. It’s a world where you pay to play your view of the world and what you can afford to be in the world. Already, advertisers and marketers like Cruise are looking for prime advertising real estate, the places that everyone has to pass. Metaverses are already sporting branding, once again in the pioneering Sandbox and in Decentraland, where the beer brand Miller Lite have opened a pub featuring a rundown brick exterior, graffiti art, arcade games, and a bouncer who tells you he’s not all muscle, but he’s got a taste for poetry and a big heart. As Cruise says, manning the bouncer is a potential job and a potential pitch in the future because art is big business now in the metaverse. With the street artist Banksy now achieving big prices in the cryptocurrency Ethereum for NFTs of his artwork and other artists joining in the process, that has left many people bemused, though not if you consider that those works could be used to adorn a room in virtual reality available to visitors instead of a locked vault in a bank. A point made by a Washington Post journalist in a visit to an art exhibition called Verse held in a stately building in San Francisco called the Mint. Once, the vaults of the building had stored almost one-third of the gold in the US, Now it was putting on an exhibition of virtual art. An NFT art market that by the end of 2021 has seen $41 billion worth of purchases, and one that is predicted to also include music as people buy unique slices of a concert or sports match as merch instead of hats and scarves. Indeed, as Anne Spalter, another New Yorker and one of the first teachers of how to NFT art, explains, The practice, it promises, will free artists from the garret and the poverty once associated with it and put them directly in contact with audiences and buyers.

Speaker E: I think sort of valorizing poverty and not being able to afford to live where you want to live or have health insurance or provide for your children, that there’s nothing so wonderful about that. That might sound great in a novel or sort of retroactively in history, but living that is really not a great experience and I don’t think contributes to artists’ lives. And I think if artists could spend more time on their art, we would see more and better art. If you’re working full-time at a job that sucks out your energy, you’re not making the art that you could otherwise make.

Speaker D: One of the big arguments about the internet, one of the assertions that people have been making is that first of all we had the internet of the technicians, then we had the internet of the companies, and the next iteration of the internet is for the artists. That this is now the time for the artists to sort of come through and enjoy the fruits of the technology. Do you think that this is an example of that?

Speaker E: I don’t know, but I love that sequence.

Speaker D: No, I mean, it’s that Obviously, first of all, you had to make the internet work.

Speaker B: Then you had—

Speaker D: well, practically and technologically, technocratically, you had to make it work. Then the, the financial people came in to try to make money and make the thing work. Because before then, all of the internet libertarians were saying, no, everything has got to be free, which seems to be a recognition of that real world that you and I have been talking about, you know, where living in a garret’s not the greatest fun. And now what’s happening is that the artists are waking up to this new potential of the high street or the internet high street, and they’re starting to decorate it and turn it into, into the thing that they do well, something that’s beautiful.

Speaker E: I like that interpretation. And to go back to what you were saying at the beginning, maybe it’s sort of the street art of the internet.

Speaker D: We’ve been trying to interview somebody who says that he’s the Banksy of the digital world, which is a bit strange because he says that he’s elusive and mysterious, yet is sending out emails trying to solicit attention. But nonetheless, I mean, obviously, you know, the internet should have Banksys. They should have people who are sort of putting together impromptu artworks. Seriously, is this NFT-backed new art? Is that going to be very, very useful for people? And then You know, in that way we can suddenly— I think so.

Speaker E: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that because of the computer and the ease of creating visual things— so I mean, we had the camera and it became easier to create visual imagery because it’s easy to take a photo, but now that’s multiplied, you know, thousands, millions of times in the ease of creating it and communicating with it. And then there’s all these powerful graphical tools like Photoshop and 3D rendering tools and interactive tools and programming languages like Processing that artists can use. So I think there’s just a whole new realm of visual communication and visual expression that’s open to people. And now this is a way that people can share those communications with each other. Then one of the exciting things in the NFT community is that artists buy each other’s work a lot. So I think that’s really— it is a whole new thing, and it is sort of exponentially growing and encouraging visual creative, visual communication.

Speaker B: Anne Spoolter, who has one of the largest private collections of early digital artworks, which can be viewed online at spoolterdigital.com, pointing out that the artists not only decorating the metaverse. They, like the marketeers, can see advertising value in it. Having a pitch in a subway on the metaverse could be the equivalent of being a busking Banksy, who can then buy their mansion next to that of the digital bouncer who made it big performing poetry. Anything is possible, according to Gregor Pryor, the British co-chair of the entertainment and media industry group for the New York-based law firm Reed Smith. Who recently negotiated with Snoop Dogg’s lawyers over a piece of digital real estate in the metaverse. For Pryor, anything can be digitized and given new life.

Speaker F: Fitness is a good example. So in modern-day fitnesses, if you look at a service like a British business called Fit, in fact, and they are able to measure certain aspects of your physical performance and then turn that into a competition with other people. Now, you know, if you’re doing a workout in the gym, you’re not necessarily competing. But if, you know, 4 of your friends are doing a workout and then you’re competing and there’s a scoreboard, well, for sure you’re seeing some kind of overlay or gamification. Also, I think when you look at the possibilities of creating a competitive— games are a way that engage us as human beings to do stuff. And you could see how even the most basic kind of legal training models these days have some form of gaming component. So I think it’s no surprise that the video games industry is now far in excess in terms of size and industrial scale than the music, movie, TV industries combined.

Speaker D: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that there is this sudden rush of philosophical examination of all of this, which essentially says, where am I? And that’s also spilling over into a certain amount of ethics as well. But that point of where am I, what is this, is interesting. How much more do you think that that will go because of the development of the metaverse?

Speaker F: I think as everything becomes more and more lifelike, you could see there are opportunities for assimilation. So a good example I would give is if you look at The video game Gran Turismo had a competition several years ago to find the best Gran Turismo player. And that best Gran Turismo player was then invited for a real drive in a real car in a real competition. And guess what? They were pretty good. So the people who were brilliant at Gran Turismo ended up being actually brilliant in the, you know, in the real world. And as simulators, and both for fun and for work, improve due to that kind of metaverse experience, you can see that you could train people, you could end up deriving a real benefit from the metaverse because it would save money, it would be more efficient for businesses to train people It’s a world that is increasingly real.

Speaker B: Allegations have already been made of an unwanted sexual advance in the metaverse, and people are beginning to discuss the bounds of what should be and what should not be, and how it will be policed. Indeed, like many organisations, Reed Smith, which has offices in London and Chicago, is now looking into whether it should open an office in the metaverse.

Speaker F: When you look at the extent of the opportunity there, we don’t think it’s quite there yet for us. I don’t think that there are enough companies to make— and also, it’s a lot of work and investment. You don’t just build it haphazardly in the metaverse, you almost have to treat it like a real-world operation. But we’re considering it for sure. And certainly many of our clients have real existences in the metaverse.

Speaker D: So what we appear to be saying is the metaverse is real. Yeah. But is the woman who got groped in the metaverse, is that therefore then real?

Speaker F: I think the law’s going to work that out. I think it’s Is it an unwanted advance on the internet? Yes, for sure. Are there laws that regulate that kind of behavior? Yes. Was it physical? But I don’t think any court today at least is going to argue that it was real-world physical. But whether the law catches up and says, hey, whether you groped me in real life or you groped me in the metaverse, it’s one and the same, I think we’re a little way off that. Although it’s fascinating watching how the law is catching up with trolling. In the old days, you know, some people would say the good old days, although I wouldn’t, it was perfectly acceptable to send someone a death threat on the internet. Nobody really cared.

Speaker G: Nobody blinked.

Speaker F: You just said, well, that’s just part and parcel of being on the internet. Not now. You know, the police will come round, you’ll be arrested, and you’ll be in trouble. So, you know, that kind of development, if you look at the kind of early days and the current state of play legally when it comes to the internet and how you behave, behave, I could see a future where you better not assault another avatar. But I think, you know, we’re several years away from that.

Speaker D: It is fascinating, isn’t it? Because people would say you weren’t physically assaulted. But let’s just examine that thing about crime. If we are dependent on this virtual world, then anybody attacking or hacking or trying to disable, interfere with the presentation of that virtual world that will become a significant crime, particularly if there are large amounts of money involved in the, in moving around on it.

Speaker F: Yeah, it’s, it’s— I think there’s a difference when it comes to metaverses, and I use that phrase carefully because if you commit a crime in real life in the City of London, then you know the City of London Police have jurisdiction, Metropolitan Police have jurisdiction. You know that the English courts have jurisdiction and you know you’re going to be prosecuted according to the laws of the UK. In the metaverse, well, certain things may be acceptable in different metaverses depending on who owns them and who controls them. If you’re operating in the Facebook, the old formerly known as Facebook metaverse, that’s going to be quite different than Decentraland, could be quite different to Roblox. You’ve got corporations in some instances who are making the rules. They’ve got two sets of rules apply. You’ve got laws, whether you’re in the US or Brazil or wherever you are. And then you’ve got the wall, what I would call the walled garden of the metaverse, where you’ve got an additional set of rules. So if you’re Meta, you could say, absolutely, if you grope someone in my metaverse, you’re out. And that’s your sanction. Your ultimate sanction is your bot. But you’re not going to get prosecuted and done for assault and imprisoned.

Speaker D: I understand Snoop Dogg has bought a house. Um, what happens if I break into his house? Well, Snoop—

Speaker F: I’ve just finished a big transaction with Snoop Dogg, or rather Snoop Dogg’s lawyers. So yeah, I think he’s certainly forward-thinking when it comes to the metaverse. He has bought a house. Lots of people are now trying to buy the houses next to him, which is even more interesting because he’s put up the value of the real estate. I think if you break into Snoop Dogg’s house in the metaverse, then the consequences will be defined by that metaverse. I think what’s super interesting these days is the idea of decentralized control. The community decides. There isn’t one overlord. There isn’t one godlike being in a metaverse that can decide something. The community would decide. And that, I think, is a new phenomenon that we are getting more comfortable with, but it’s quite difficult to follow.

Speaker D: Well, when you say the community decides, what do you mean? The people will say you did a bad thing, we’re going to ostracize you?

Speaker F: Well, I think the community makes the rules in a decentralized way of thinking on the internet. You don’t have one governing entity or individual who’ll make the rules. You have clubs, you have— look at the NFT communities that have developed, they set the rules. And so, you know, you can almost end up with metaverse societies. Hey, I want to be part of this tribe or this culture or this society within the metaverse. And, you know, that’s got to fit with your own way of thinking.

Speaker B: Gregor Prior of the US law firm Reed Smith. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM, and after our exploration of the world of the metaverse, you can hear DJ Ritu and the world in London. Emily Jolly, the CEO of Zoe Immersive, has worked with all of the metaverse’s superpowers—Meta, Dreamscape, and Unity—traveled to the orbiting space station, holidayed in Peru, swam deep in the sea, and even been to Mars. According to her, the metaverse will take us to places we could never dream about.

Speaker A: You get to be in an experience, and the real world is one thing, but like all of the imagination in the world, you can be into crazy virtual worlds that you can’t even think of. So art is also a pretty big part of this as well, right? You can be immersed in someone’s vision. You can be immersed in, in the real world somewhere else. There’s so many options that are available.

Speaker D: So art, you mean that in the future there will be some art that will essentially take advantage of this metaverse world. So it’s not necessarily going to be the static sculptures and paintings that we’ve been used to.

Speaker A: It’s something that is actually part of this world. Yeah, absolutely. And there’s already a few, they call themselves virtual artists. So they’re they’re gonna be literally painting in 3D live in front of you so you can get into their art. So it’s another form of digital art, but it’s really amazing to watch. There’s been also some work around taking classic paintings and then putting them in the metaverse and in virtual and have you experience them differently, which is amazing. So yeah, it’s gonna bring up different, you know, additional forms of art.

Speaker D: So this presumably is where an NFT comes into this, because with the NFT, you buy that sector of your perception and that angle that you’re coming at this from.

Speaker A: Somebody else might be doing something completely different. Absolutely. Yeah, the, the, well, the NFT space in art has been a good marriage so far. There’s still work to do in terms of ownership and how, what is actually an NFT and how do you make them. It’s definitely an opportunity to exchange things that you’ve been doing. My vision is that in the future, if we are in the virtual world and I want to give you something, I’ll just give it to you and then you own it and that’s it. I’ll just give it to you with my hands.

Speaker D: But if you go to a concert as well, instead of getting the merchandise, what you’re going to do is say, actually, I’m going to NFT a bit of this so that I can see what this concert was like when I was there. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Virtual concerts are, have been pretty, I’ve gone to a few of those, so they’re, they’re interesting. Makes me think about, do I want to go see the real concert or the virtual concert? We’ll see. They’re good competition for each other though. Yeah. As well.

Speaker F: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker A: And they’re, they’re trying to be inventive in how they deliver those concerts. It’s not just a video of the concert. It’s an actual living live 3D experience. So it’s something you can only do there and you can’t see at the live show. So that’s interesting.

Speaker D: Which is interesting, isn’t it? Because if you think about the potential, if you think about some of the things that people sing about at concerts, and they would be considerably enhanced by being able to develop this virtual reality experience. We’ve had the videos. Now we’re going to get the thing that we can be part of.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And you get to meet people as well. That’s kind of interesting in those in those concerts and you’re around other people that are like anywhere, right? So I don’t know, there’s something about the connection there that’s interesting and the artist is there representing themselves in a certain way. It’s kind of cool shooting lasers with their hands or whatever as they sing. But yeah, it’s a— I’ve seen some interesting things happening where the singer is actually in the studio at their home and actually doing the music and everything, but you see them as a virtual avatar person singing live. So very interesting.

Speaker B: But for Jolie, the real value of the metaverse is not going to be in gaming. It’s going to be in the crossover world that it creates, where games merge with education, education with increased efficiency, and that results in a better world.

Speaker A: Imagine the next step now we’re together and we’re actually creating something together. And that’s just how awesome is that? I think it’s going to be extremely beneficial to everybody. It’s not just something for gamers or for— it’s going to be everywhere. We’re just going to be evolving from the flat to the 3D.

Speaker D: That’s the interesting point about this, isn’t it? Because the games technology may be the means by which people are beginning to get there. But in terms of getting there, it then expands into a real world. With very real implications for the world. We won’t need to travel as much as we used to, theoretically.

Speaker A: Which is also good for the environment, by the way, in certain ways. There’s other things that aren’t great as far as using servers and things like that, but there are some other benefits. And I mean, in my field, we’ve been working a lot with young generations, students that have been affected by the pandemic a lot, and just being able to go into those worlds to be creative even by a distance has been amazing. And it also has fostered new interest for like young girls or in STEM and things like that. So there’s really an opportunity there to kind of bridge, I think, frontiers between different countries and different cultures and blurring that out a little bit for everyone.

Speaker D: So when you say it’s creative, give me an example of how you can be creative in the metaverse.

Speaker A: I’ll give you a concrete example that I have like that. It’ll, it’ll give you a good anecdote. So we, And our platform enables students to create 3D interactive experiences. So they can actually create a story or a program. And so there were two students from China who came in and wanted to build a training program to teach Chinese farmers how to unpollute their soil. That was their goal. They wanted to build something like that. So they collaborated with the students in the US and they built this whole program very easily. Like they had no knowledge of anything. They just came in and they created this world that now can be used by others to learn about how to unpollute your soil. So there’s, you know, there’s opportunities there for them to learn by creating something. We could create a story, we could collaborate on a design, we could design objects. We can just learn about different types of topics. And instead of just watching a video of something, you’re actually doing it, which makes the learning a bit more effective than if you’re just watching a video, because a lot of the learning has been on Zoom this year, which means a lot of listening to people talk. It’s not always fun.

Speaker B: The value of the metaverse in changing education has not been lost on Dr. Thomas Funk, an academic who has just launched Tomorrow’s Education, the world’s first metaverse campus who sees the technology breaking up one of the most conservative organizations in our history. Education, says Funk, is long overdue for technological reform.

Speaker G: So what we’ve seen in the past 2 years since the pandemic started, at least or at latest, is that many universities actually struggled to go online. And if they went online, it was just putting one layer on top on top of the traditional education methodology, which is teaching in classroom, and that one layer was the video call. So essentially what we saw over the past 2 years is not a change in how we do educate people, but just keep on doing how we educate people, but bringing offline online. And that’s one of the big flaws because technology can be used so much better and so much more effective to disseminate knowledge, to reach more people, to connect the people. So it’s not necessarily the thing that we need one person standing in front of thousands or hundreds in the lecture hall telling the people how things are. This can happen asynchronously. So all of that knowledge dissemination can happen asynchronously, whereas the resource, the knowledge resource of the professor, for example, can be used more in mentoring and tutoring and helping challenge so that the time is used more wisely. And this is essentially what education needs to do now is to use technology to make learning more effective in terms of using the time more effective. So if you ask me what do I see as the future role of universities, the university is still a content repository generating new theories, doing brilliant research, but we need to find better ways to disseminate that knowledge which is generated within the universities.

Speaker D: But that’s the issue, isn’t it? Because the universities haven’t thought about how they should teach forever, really. They’ve always sat there and thought that really the idea should be that somebody just speaks knowledge at somebody and the other person just listens and gets something from that. And that then theoretically there’s a discussion about that afterwards.

Speaker G: Exactly, and that’s the big problem. We’ve seen that for 1,000 years and we know now since at least 30 years, if not more, so since 3 decades, that learning can happen way better. Think of the Bloom’s 2 Sigma effect where we know, and that was found in the ’80s, that traditional classroom teaching is merely as effective as mastery learning or as mentor and nevertheless the universities are still designed for the teacher and they’re not designed for the learner. So looking at the large lecture halls, it almost looks like they’re designed for that one person which is so smart which sits on the high horse and talks to everybody and just the others have to then somehow digest all that information and are left alone with it on how to use it. And this is what we need to change. We have now the means and the power to design universities learner-centric so that we really focus on the utmost effect of actually the learner growing in terms of competencies. And that, that’s really what we need to use technology for, and the metaverse is just one part of it.

Speaker B: Thomas Funk, the academic who wants to put technology into the teachers and the metaverse into the mortarboard. He’s not the only one who can see the metaverse and the underlying artificial intelligence that we rely upon permeating every facet of our lives. Richard Kerris is the general manager of the Omniverse for the computer graphics giant Nvidia, and he aims to link together all of these worlds to create an environment that mirrors our world.

Speaker D: It’s a huge undertaking.

Speaker H: It’s something that we needed as well as our customers. So what is it? Well, it’s a number of different things. If you’re building some kind of new structure with lots of glass and mirror facades and things like that, if you don’t understand the sun and how it’s going to react on these things, you may end up building something that’s just a big reflector in the middle of the city creating havoc. So you need to understand these things from a simulation standpoint. But it also works for things like factories. We’ve showed a vision of the factory of the future where at our last GTC with BMW, where the entire factory was simulated in our Omniverse world. And why that’s important is when you’re producing 2.5 million cars a year, as BMW does, every day matters. So when you’re changing the line for a new vehicle to be constructed, knowing where the machinery is gonna go, knowing how the people are gonna flow and how the parts are gonna come in and go out, and all of those things become a very costly exercise if you’re doing it in the physical world. And by simulating that in the digital world, you can make all of these decisions and you can use things like artificial intelligence to help train the robots and train and understand how layout is going to go and things like that. So that when you make the commitment in the physical world, you’ve actually done all of the testing and validation in the simulated world, which gives you a higher degree of cost savings than you would’ve ever had before. BMW says it’s saving them about 30%. In their cost of just running the factory by having digital twins. It is going to be the next big thing for that. That’s another example of where a world in the metaverse is being used in an industrial-like thing. But then you have plenty of games and things like that, you know, on and on.

Speaker D: So a businessman said to me, this is wonderful. This means that if I want to model a business idea and how it will work on people that I’ll be able to do it. Is that something that’s possible? Oh, absolutely.

Speaker H: If you were building an automobile or you were building, you know, something that somebody would wear, if you were building a watch, a monitor, or different things like that, you get to really simulate these things in a simulated world and get to take into account all the different variations that might take place. Without having to do all of that in the physical world. So for example, let’s say you were building a robot for the house, a vacuum robot or one of those types of things. When you build it in the physical world, you build it and you plug your computer in, you train it, you give it intelligence and it starts to map out the house and things like that. That’s kind of the traditional way of a model and a robot being constructed. In the future, we’re going to see these things being constructed in a simulated world before they’re committed to in the physical world, because you can do a lot more. You can train, instead of one robot, you could be training hundreds, if not thousands of robots. And by training them in the simulated world, when that intelligence is downloaded to the physical robot, it’s gonna be that much smarter and understand so much more. And so things like that, from a personal standpoint on a business idea, many, many different things you need to simulate.

Speaker B: In a sense, the Nvidia vision almost appears to be a digital equivalent of The Lord of the Rings. One thing to rule them all, but for the best of possible reasons, because according to Nvidia, you should be able to move seamlessly between these worlds, as Karras points out.

Speaker H: Yeah, I think it’s going to be all of the things. I think there’ll be 3D virtual worlds that people can go in and out of, and really explore foreign locations, or they can do things like go into a world and visualize what a factory might look like and walk around it, or a building that they’re working on. There’s all sorts of types of worlds that we believe will be out there. Some will be 2D experiences off of your screen or your mobile device. Some will be full 3D rich experiences simulating reality., and the idea of what connects all of these things so that there’s some commonality, like what is up and down, what is colors, what is light, what is— all these things need to have some common understanding in order for you to be able to go between these worlds with some sort of continuity. And so that’s one of the things that we work on around Omniverse is to be the connector of those worlds.

Speaker D: Right. So what you’re saying is that this isn’t one whole model of the world. It’s the way to move between different data sets, different visualizations, different groups of data.

Speaker H: Yeah, absolutely. Different experiences, different types of, you know, there’s simulating reality or subjective reality. There’s all sorts of things that will be out there. You might go, like I said, the example of an architect and a designer walking through a virtual building that they’re looking at constructing and being able to experience it in all its richness, or an entertainment-based thing where you’re in a surreal environment and playing games, communicating with others, meeting new people, or, you know, there’s just all sorts of things. So there’ll be so much more of these worlds out there than what we’re used to experiencing in the real world.

Speaker D: So in a sense, you’re making the paths and roads between these different worlds, and you’re, you know, it’s up to people. Where they will go. How will you find your way around in this world? Will it be utterly visual?

Speaker H: I think it’s going to be a mixture of a lot of things. If you look at how you find your way around the World Wide Web today, a few things that happened with the start of the web that kind of, you know, was the tipping point. When it first started off, you had different chat groups and things like that. You didn’t really have an experience, but then HTML came along and became a foundation that everybody could rely on, that meant everything could be consistent. So whether you were sharing a document or sharing an image, all of a sudden the web became— it had a common highway, if you will. And we believe that USD, or Universal Scene Description, which was originally developed by Pixar and it’s what we’ve used as our foundation for Omniverse, is the HTML of 3D. And by having that, you now have a common way with which to experience things. And so our goal is really to help connect these experiences together.

Speaker B: Karys believes it is essential for metaverses to be linked for the world to function properly economically, something that Michael Cruise of the creative agency Summer Friday, who we heard from earlier, says is also important if people are to be able to liberate the commercial potential potential that they have generated from existing in their respective metaverses.

Speaker C: So that’s what I mean about the beauty of Web3, where you can build clout. Clout is a real thing. So that’s the new terminology, right? And they talked about it early days, but I think it’s super important to recognize clout is the new currency to some degree.

Speaker D: Clout is basically reputation, your reputation in your community. And that essentially means that you say, I’m going to do this. It’s a bit like, I’m going to do a new rap record. And somebody says, oh, so-and-so is doing a new rap record.

Speaker C: We better listen to that. And it’s beautiful because again, what we’re seeing is it’s very similar to what we’ve been doing. This is just a new technology to do the same old things in some ways, but the way it’s empowering us, it’s pretty incredible. So yeah, we’ve always been consumers. And if, if my, I’m a big fan of LeBron James and he’s doing something different on one end, I might buy that, but it’s based solely on my admiration to this person. And in the same way, when we’re thinking about all these communities starting to form and these circles being formed in a platform that can support it, that’s awesome. Right? Like, so. Discord is awesome because, and I keep bringing it up, but to me, that’s like the Web3 platform. That’s where it starts. That’s where the metaverse starts to take shape in terms of NFTs. And Twitter is another one that’s super empowering, like the metaverse, right? It gets people to know who’s doing what. You get connected to the community. You get your whitelist that gets you into the metaverse, into special places in the metaverse. You get, if you’re involved in a project, you might get releases that are very limited just to people who are involved in that project. So that builds up your clout and it’s just a cycle.

Speaker D: So Discord is curious, yeah. In a sense, a long time ago, I suggested to this American lady that I met, this American lawyer, that because I’m interested in poetry, because I write poetry, I suggested to her that we should do a transatlantic poetry club. Linking together someplace in the UK with someplace in New York. And we should do that really in reality. What you’re saying is this is a way of doing that without actually having to make that physical connection. So it’s where a group of people who are interested in a similar thing can expand their audience.

Speaker C: Correct. And the way it’s the way you can break it out is by rooms as well. So your server allows you to to add rooms and you can unlock them. So let’s say you have special poets who are the elite group that are more your board members. They can literally have a separate room specifically for that. And then, and it’s an unlock system. So somebody who’s popular and working their way up in the Discord and leveling up, which you set the rules of the room, they can eventually level up to the board membership, right? So again, the beauty of this is tracking, right? The beauty of it is authenticating that this wallet is this person. And as they level up in the community, we can assure that this is the same person too. So, but there’s still anonymity. So it’s actually pretty powerful. And then the rules that you set in place can be as complex as 1,000 tweets or 50 invites or—

Speaker D: To attain your particular level. Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah, or a publication that went viral is the only way. If you can publish a poem is the only way to get into this level. And that’s that gamification. That’s the metaverse. That’s Web3 because it’s outside of just Web 2.0.

Speaker B: For Cruz, the idea is that if you are the Ronaldo of the FIFA football game and you have acquired both reputation and digital collateral in the form of NFTs and digital tokens,, you should be able to export that to another similar platform in the same way that football players can transfer between clubs. And you should be able to announce your move in exactly the same way to maximize on your reputation. That is your clout. And in the same way that you have assembled an extensive digital wardrobe with skins and an art collection backed up by NFTs, you also should be able to move those around too. Because making your digital possessions portable into other domains will obviously increase their desirability. A notion that is oddly worrying some people who are not yet in any metaverse, because in a world where our experiences are increasingly digital, so are our memories. And if you don’t have a digital repository, where are all of the mementos that used to decorate our bedrooms and our shelves? The pop posters and scarves, the record collection buried in the phone, the pebbles from the beach, the driftwood of our lives. It is a concern that has already occurred to some of those on the periphery of the metaverse, according to Emily Jolie of Zoe Immersive. And the answer is simple: digital graveyards and systems to hold your digital legacy.

Speaker A: Of course, there’s several companies that are working specifically on, on digital legacy and also So what to do with all your stuff after death, for example, that’s a really interesting company that’s working on that specifically. Blockchain technology can help also with the ownership, you know, and a lot of companies are using blockchain to make sure that you own your data and have a ledger of what you have basically and where it leaves on. And then maybe say, okay, I want all of my virtual avatars or my, or these things that I learned go to my daughter or my granddaughter and then pass that along.

Speaker D: So I know this is very interesting too.

Speaker B: It’s a fascinating idea, isn’t it, that you could go to a graveyard in the future and be digitally re-engaged with somebody and who they are and what they are and what they did by their gravestone and some identity in the metaverse.

Speaker A: It is necessary. We all have a lot of pictures on our phones and elements and like Personally, I was born just at a time where I transitioned from having phones with digits to iPhones, and I have so much stuff right now on my digital person that I want this to be— to stay with me at some point and be able to transfer that away.

Speaker B: That was Emily Jolie talking about a digital legacy that sounds more tangible than the memories evoked by a gravestone and the potential for digital cemeteries in cyberspace. It’s a world for the past being built in a future that is only just starting, because just as CompuServe suddenly gave way to an internet world we did not expect, so the metaverses and the omniverse could just as easily be overtaken by one revolutionary idea and a sudden lurch of public sentiment. As Meta is finding at the moment, for the first time, as it’s suddenly seen a drop in both profits and subscribers. Though, as Summer Friday’s Cruz points out, the future could involve bypassing the interfaces currently being developed, and rather than the much-hyped merger with the machines and the robots, using cranial implants to mind meld directly with the metaverse.

Speaker C: Yeah, I, I think that, you know what’s funny is like when you think about the way Oculus even came to play It’s this idea of making it easier to access. So the easiest form, in my opinion, would probably be AR, and in that way, we’ll be completely connected to the metaverse always, which is sort of what Mark Zuckerberg was saying. So your glasses that you are wearing right now, it’s sort of what Google Glass tried to do in the past. As our technology gets better, it’s going to get better. So the smell experience, for example, can come into the metaverse. So for example, I walk into a McDonald’s and it smells like fries. So my AR experience could just be a freaking forest of fries. And in that way, you’re blending the two worlds, right? So you don’t need to deliver the smell to the digital platform world. You can deliver it through AR and blend the two worlds. So that’s how I can see it’s easily adopted. And if it becomes that good, the technology, That’s, in my opinion, the— when it hits the masses and everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, right?

Speaker D: That’s the issue though, isn’t it? Because the issue is the interface. And if the interface involves wearing something on your head or it involves you having to make a significant investment, then people will say no. One of the reasons why Facebook and a lot of the And the social media companies took off was because of the ability to interact via smartphone and any smartphone.

Speaker C: Correct. And I was tethered when the SK1 came out with the Oculus, the first version of it, it was tethered to a big PC and they knew that they needed to untether it so that there could be bigger adoption. And then, you know, now it’s the comfort of the goggles, still uncomfortable, and that will change and become more comfortable. And eventually, you know, it— again, mass adoption, it becomes reality when you remove the friction, when you remove the challenge. Same reason why everyone owns laptops now and there’s no computers, and we went from CD-ROMs to just uploading to the cloud. It’s about removing friction, friction, friction, friction. So I think that at its current state— this is a long run— at its current state, we’ll be giving more attention to the metaverse I think enthusiasts are the ones who are going to mostly adopt and be in the space for some time. But when you start to remove the barriers, there’s going to be just more attention, more attention. And eventually, to your point, I believe that the experience of the metaverse is the one that blends reality with the digital world. So to me, it’s more the direction of AR, augmented reality.

Speaker D: I’m glad you said that. We are in absolute agreement. I mean, it strikes me that really, I mean, you talk about a frictionless engagement. The frictionless engagement would probably be via glasses very similar to the ones that you’re wearing, very similar to the ones that I’m wearing, where you can get something fed into your ears, your nose, and your eyes, and that they’re sensitive enough to allow you to default out so that you can engage with reality and when you need to.

Speaker C: Or you go a step further and you just do implants. Yeah, it’s not beyond the realm of reality. We know that now. We’ve been mapping our brains enough where you can do a chip like Elon Musk. So it’s very real in my opinion, and it starts to question the nature of our reality as we see it now, right? I’ve always been a steward of this idea of like, your blue might not be the same blue as my blue, but you know what, we agreed to call it the seeing the same thing. So even that reality is somewhat perception-based. And then when you get into that, I mean, you can just blow your mind in this stuff.

Speaker D: Of course. I mean, Van Gogh’s sunflowers aren’t your sunflowers. And you make the point very well that all our noses and ears are our senses and that they are then converted into electrical impulses that go into our brains. So you can quite easily intervene in that process, although it does actually then suggest that hacking becomes much more of a crime than it is now.

Speaker C: You don’t want to have your brain hacked. Well, you certainly don’t, but it’s a small step towards— I told my mom when she was my age or whatever that I would be exchanging digital currency and relying on all my money to be virtual, and investing in a JPEG, she’d think I’m absolutely crazy. And people think it now. So it’s the slow gives, right, that get us to a place where we can’t imagine. But if we’re really going there, then implants is the most intrusive AR experience you could potentially have.

Speaker B: You’ve been listening to Password on Resonance FM. It’s written and presented by me, Peter Warren, and produced by Blue Buffery for Future Intelligence. To find out more about the Metaverse, artificial intelligence, and our technological future, and how to take part in it, log on to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. Goodbye. This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you heard, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.