Creating Bespoke Metaverse Worlds with Paul Hamilton - Step into the Metaverse Podcast: EP10

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Remenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I am a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society. This podcast is part of my new book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse, the investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview I interviewed Paul Hamilton. Paul is the Managing Director at Mina Ogilvy Consulting. He has a strong focus on innovation, combining extensive top level strategy, digital and innovation experience, both design thinking and traditional tools and techniques. Next to his work for Ogilvy, he founded V Together, which is a startup agency focused primarily at the moment on Entry point into the Metaverse. During the interview we discussed the key characteristics of building an open metaverse, the role of communities and how we can create a diverse and inclusive metaverse. We also covered the role of identity and how avatars will help shape the metaverse and your identity. We also discussed the dangers of the metaverse and how the enterprise can benefit from the metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

Maybe you can start with sharing a bit of background of yourself and how you are involved in this space.

Yeah, sure. I mean general background. I've been. I mean I left university 30 odd years ago. I've got a degree in computer science and psychology deliberately at the time because people are more complicated than the tech. But I was good at the tech, I wanted to understand the people. And I've been involved in various different bits and pieces ever since. I mean I was building stuff in Second Life, you know, back in early 2000s when Second Life was it, we built. I did my MBA at INSEAD. We had an INSEAD campus in Second Life then and we're kind of trying it out then, but it was just way too hard, right? It was just a really, really complicated way to look at some slides. So I got involved again a lot more seriously Summer last year. So Burning man last year, like many things couldn't happen in the real world. And Burning man had picked a theme called Multiverse before COVID ever became anything anybody ever heard of. And the idea was originally it would be happening physically in the real world. And then it became a digital thing. And so we built Burning man across eight different types of platforms from something that was basically a visual map for clicking into different zoom rooms was kind of the simplest one through Spatial Chat, through full on headset Immersive VR. And I built stuff in three of those different platforms and we had a blast. And at that point everybody's locked down, right? So I've been doing some consulting. I'm in a strategy and innovation consultant. It's kind of what I do when I'm not doing entrepreneurial stuff. But having learned how to do some of this stuff, there's a couple of guys I was working with and we were looking what should we do for our next project? And said, well, why don't we try building some stuff in VR in these different types of VR. And we kind of experimented. What's come out of it is V together, which is what I've been running now for the last year and a half, really. We've actually backed away from full on immersive VR because not that many people have a headset. They're not that easy to use. Right. I mean, I'm pretty techy, but there's a bit of a learning curve. So we've been building stuff mostly, not exclusively, but mostly on a Spatial chat platform. And we describe it as dipping your toes into the metaverse because it has a lot of the features. So it is a place, you have that sense of place, it is permanent. You can have the feeling of being immersed. So we have spatial sound in there, we can completely customize it. We have moments of delight, all those good things you get in sort of fully immersive metaverse VR. And it's been a really interesting, really interesting experiment that we've done. We've had little companies, big companies, global companies going in there. And what I love about it is people have no idea what you're talking about when you try and describe it, right? So you try and describe this stuff and we just get them in there. We say, look, come and meet us there. And the platform we're building mostly on, you can go in a regular web browser. You don't need to download anything at all. You can just go in and all of a sudden you can have this immersive experience with ambient sound, with things that surprise you with those little moments of delight. Because we've put something in there that resonates personally. So, yeah, it's been a really, really fascinating experience doing full on immersive headset VR is awesome. I Love it. It's just not accessible for a lot of people yet. So that's kind of where our focus has been mostly for the last year. It will come. Right. You know, when a headset looks like this, these things, you know, great. But it doesn't yet. Yeah.

I guess we need to sort of do the iPhone moment for the VR to make it like super easy and not necessarily in the first iPhone moment, but the iPhone 3G moment, because then it becomes really useful.

Yeah. And it's not that far away. Right. You know, I'm going to say it's three to ten years away, because honestly, I don't really know. Right. Ten for sure. Three maybe.

Yeah.

And yeah, that's as good as a guess as I'm going to give you.

Fair enough. So that's very exciting what you're working on and what is it, according to you, that the Metaverse is.

So there is a kind of end game where it does become a set of virtual environments through which you can move freely whilst retaining your Persona. I mean, not necessarily the same avatar, not the same look and feel, but the sort of Persona behind it. And we can't quite do that yet. There are some where you can start to move a little bit across them and, you know, maybe the answer is you have your own personal nft. Right. And that's what moves between the world. So I can see that as kind of an endpoint. But in the meantime, what it is is an environment where you go to and you feel a sense of place, not a sense of tool. So, you know, you and I are talking over zoom, Right? Zoom is a great tool, it's very good. But this doesn't feel like a place, doesn't have any sense of permanency. You know, this call will end and that's the end of it. What I find with Metaverse virtual spaces or virtual spaces is that then becomes a place that has some sense of permanency in as much as the real world has permanency. Right. You know, I live across the road from a wonderful park, and every month the park has changed. The plants are growing. Now it's, you know, now it's the winter, the leaves are falling, all that kind of thing. But, you know, there is a sense of permanency to that. And the kind of spaces that we're building have that feeling that it's a place that you go to. And once we start to explain to people, it treats it as a place, not as a tool. Then you get that real light bulb moment, then the flip Side of it is that it doesn't have to be in any way related to the real world. So we build offices for people with a balcony, which is the beach, because. Why not, right? Because you can. So you walk out onto the balcony and you're on the beach. The waves are lapping. You can hear the waves. And there's a little ticky bar playing 247 reggae, whatever, right? So you've got that combination that it's a place and has some sense of reality, and yet there are no bounds to that reality because it's digital. We make it whatever we want. And then I think the third thing that I think distinguishes the metaverse is somewhat not obviously, it's all about human beings communicating with each other. So lots of stuff on other versions of the Internet are about broadcasting. So it's zoom. I mean, there's two of us, right? So it's great. But a zoom call can be a thousand people. On a zoom call, you've got one person speaking at a time and 4,999 people listening or not listening after the last year of zoom. But it's very much about broadcasting, whereas the metaverse is all about interacting. It's all about human beings talking to each other, interacting with each other and the space, because all sorts of things can happen in the space. But I find it's much more actually about human interaction, which is great, because I think that's coming back to what we should have been doing, you know, for a long time with the Internet, rather than people pontificating a point of view with no response, no debate.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. So what are some of the characteristics, or maybe sort of the technical characteristics of the metaverse?

It sounds like something desperately complicated, but actually it's a bunch of images, right? So everything that you're going to see, whether it is on a laptop screen, as we are, or through a headset, is actually a 2D projection right onto a screen. So even in your headset, where you got 2, 2D production giving you that sense of 3D, but actually it's images, right? So ultimately, you need an image store, you need enough bandwidth, and we're there, right? We have. Bandwidth is still going up and up, but we have enough bandwidth now to project those in high quality. And then the tricky bit is actually the rendering. And I think that's the big thing that's changed over the last few years is that the available computing power and the available algorithms to do that rendering, to turn those images into something that then gives you Much more sense of. Of reality or surreality, depending on where you are. I think that's the thing that's making it happen now. Right. So I mentioned Second Life before. It's been around for ages and ages, and Second Life was awesome and still is awesome. Loads and loads of stuff still going on in Second Life that. That people have kind of forgotten about, but it's great. But it doesn't have that. That sense of engagement and reality that some of the stuff that's coming along has now. And all of that. A lot of that stuff has developed through gaming. Right. One of the things I see about the Metaverse is, you know, I'm quite old, right. So I'm in my 50s. But people in my generation who aren't gamers, which is most people, it seems like a big leap for them that you could go into some kind of digital environment and that becomes a place to communicate. My kids, who are both at college now, both university, my two boys, they have stayed in contact with their friends through their Xboxes for years. So we used to live in the Middle east, we moved back to Europe. And the way they stayed in touch with their friends was by going on the Xbox and playing games just to chat, you know, often just to do that. So they've kind of embraced that already. That's. That's perfectly normal to them. And, you know, that's really the kind of technology that needs to exist for the metaverse to happen. And it's all there, right? It's all there already. The accessibility bit, the truly immersive bit about the headsets. You know, we're getting there. Oculus 2 was a massive step forward, or at least not called Oculus anymore. You know, that was a massive step forward. There's more stuff coming. You know, everybody's super excited about what Apple are going to do really soon. So, you know, the latest HTC headset, super cool. So you know that. That technology that really allows you to be immersed, which is basically putting the screens right in front of your eyes so you can't see anything else. You know, we're there now, and now it'll start to become better and better and more mainstream.

Absolutely. So. And then we're talking about the social component. How important are communities for the Metaverse?

Yeah, massively so. One of the things that. I mean, Internet 1.0 kicked it all off people and, you know, all sorts of basic chat stuff, that that kind of community sprung up so quickly, and now you find. And you know, it has its downsides as well. Right. With People going into an echo chamber where they're only within that community. But it's a further extension of, you know, everything the Internet has enabled us to do, which is to find your tribe wherever they are in the world. So it becomes that physical distance doesn't matter. What we can do now with the Metaverse is you can have a projection of your digital self, which really isn't anything necessarily like your physical self to enable you to fit into that community. One of the things that we've seen relatively recently coming into some metaverse environments is wheelchairs, wheelchair users saying, I want to have a wheelchair in the Metaverse. I don't want to have legs that work in the Metaverse, because my legs don't fully work in real life. And that's part of me. That's part of who I am. And therefore, I want my digital self to reflect that. But everybody.

Very interesting, because you would almost expect that people would be wanting to walk in the metaverse if they can't walk.

Well, that's. I'm assuming you're not sitting in a wheelchair.

Oh, yeah, true.

And, you know, and if that is part of who you are, that's very important to who you are. And I'm sure you're right. I'm sure there are some people who, you know, would want to and once prefer to do that, just as in the Metaverse is great to fly, right? We all love to fly. Everybody would love to be able to fly, and that's great, and that's cool. But I think that's a very mature evolution of the metaverse to start to say, you can be who you want to be and you can be who you are. You know, a lot of the mental health challenges that people face around the world is not being able to express who they are. Well, you can do that in a metaverse, in a community, and in an environment that exists anywhere in the world at any time of day or night. Yeah, I think that's the other thing. You know, day and night becomes less relevant. We, the Burning man that we built in 3D VR in old space this summer actually had day and night on California time. Right.

Yeah.

Umpire time, as it's called. But it doesn't have to. Right. Those things can change. Days don't have to last 24 hours. So all sorts of variables that we accept as a natural part of the world, that all of a sudden we can play, we can change, we can do different things with it.

Yeah. So that leads to my next question. How do we create diverse and inclusive Metaverse, inviting all generations into the metaverse and as you say, allowing anyone to be whoever they want to be.

Yeah, and I think that's a great question. And it's interesting that it's not obvious where the work needs to be done to be more inclusive. So, you know, I've been working with clients who've said, okay, so we'll be organizing events in a virtual space. And it was one I did, and it was for a sort of very grand club in the center of London that's been there for a couple of hundred years. They would normally have a dinner every year, and because of COVID they couldn't. So we recreated the space. We actually took a copy of the wallpaper that they have in the real space and we redesigned the rooms, we put the curtains in, we laid everything out, we put the bookshelves in the right place, that kind of thing. But they said our members are quite old. You know, many of them are over 50. You know, they might struggle. I thought, yeah, to be fair, I'm over 50 and I've built it. But what we found was, like a lot of things, it's attitudinal, so a lot of those people absolutely fine with it. You know, the meme of the Silver Surfer, you know, my dad is one of them. He's phenomenally good online. But actually that mix of people who could find it very easy to navigate and people who didn't was actually very little different to people who were in their 30s. The big switch point seems to be around that age of 30, because then you're into the gaming generation. And even if they're not gamers themselves, they've seen their friends as gamers and they kind of get it. So there seems to be a step up about, you know, as of 20, 21, people about 30 years old. This seems to be like a fracture point. People younger than that find it much easier. People and older, that there is a percentage of them who need a bit of help. The one thing we find universally is once people are in, they get it and they smile.

Yeah.

So you don't find a lot of people smiling on, you know, Zoom, Skype. So something people naturally do. There's a fabulous bit of research. I'm sure you've seen this from Stanford. That explains why. So when you have just a screen full of faces, we are wired as animals to look for danger signals. So we're watching eye movements and we're watching maxofaciliary muscles moving, because there is a chance that one of those people Might want to kill us, and there is a chance that there might be somebody we want to mate with for life. And cognitively, that's a lot of hard work going on to try and work out which one's going to kill you and which one's going to be a future mate. So that's why it's tiring. What we find in the virtual spaces is it's not tiring, which we think is because there's context. So because there's a lot of context around the avatars, the Personas, whatever they are, depending on the space, that somehow takes away that. That feeling of threat, and therefore you can stay there for a long time. Surprisingly fascinating.

I'm not aware of the study.

I see a link here.

All right, awesome. I would appreciate it. Thank you. So then, related to that, of course, how do we create this if everyone is going to be themselves? How do we create an enriched environment economy? What is required to enable that?

So what we've found that we need to do is create something that sparks a point of communication. So, you know, we're designing virtual spaces that you access through a laptop on screen most of the time, and therefore you could go anywhere you want. It doesn't matter which XY coordinate you're standing at. All makes zero difference. But what we do is we design the spaces such that there are visual points that appear to be points you should stand at. And it turns out that human beings follow those guidelines really quite well. So they will walk over to something that looks like a table, or if you leave a space in the woods, they'll go to the space in the woods. Or if you put even just a rug down in a. We've experimented with this. Just put a rug down in an empty space, they'll go to the rug. And that therefore gives them a start. What we then do is we start to put in. We always try to put in something that is specific to the clients we're working for. That resonates where they recognize this is part of my real world life. So it might be the name of a local bar or a coffee shop. It might be a bit of art that hangs in the office. We've got a Christmas party in a couple of weeks for a big broadcaster. They have a mural in their office in Lisbon. So we've taken a copy of that mural and put it on the wall in the virtual space. People come in, they go, hey, that's me. That's part of me. I recognize that. Honestly, though, for a lot of people, because it's New. The starting point is how weird is it, right? And that's enough to get a conversation going. Some interesting side effects, though. So what we found is that people who are normally a bit more reticent to network in the real world find it a little easier. So typically, you can see with an avatar, at least you have a name above it in some way or a name on it, so you know who you're walking up to. Well, that doesn't happen in the real world, right? You're at a conference, people have these little badges that are always way too small to read their names. So in virtual spaces, you can actually see who you're approaching. And the other thing is that in a virtual space, you never approach anyone's back. You might not have noticed this. You never approach a back, you always approach faces. So in the real world, people tend to group and they tend to stand in something approximating a square or a circle, but everybody facing in. So if you're shy, you have to somehow break the perimeter of that circle or square. In a virtual space, you don't have to. In a virtual space, you're always approaching people's faces. So. And that's people telling us that, Right? So that's one thing. Also, on inclusiveness, what we've had is people who early evenings, we do a lot of events, right? People who early evening may not be able to go to an event because they have childcare responsibilities or other responsibilities at home or just live a long way away from the office and just need to get home. They can now turn up to the virtual events and actually turn up. Go put the kids to bed or feed them and then come back again and join in again and again. We've had that feedback from people saying, these social events, I normally wouldn't go to, I would rarely be able to go to them. And now I can. And we have events that, you know, we always say, pick a time, right? So I run it from 7 to 8 or 7 till 9, and we never, ever kick people out. So if people are having a good time, fantastic. So we've had lots of events that ran for an hour or two and didn't finish till midnight. People are in the virtual space and they start to talk and they move around. Some of that was driven by, you know, the various lockdowns due to Covid. But I would say, apart from something we did recently in Australia, where they had another lockdown last month, we have not done anything related to lockdowns for four or five months now. Everything we're doing is to do with geographically distributed teams who otherwise wouldn't be able to meet either at all because they're very, very geographically distributed or wouldn't be able to meet very often just because of the hassle traveling.

Yeah. I'm just curious. Bit of a sidestep. So how detailed is your environment? Because you have questions, debate or debated this. Different approaches. You have the cartoony version from like Horizon and Microsoft. You have then the hyper realistic of the metahumans and some other companies focusing on that. And you have the one in between, which is sort of like a ready, pay me to sort of give you a real and a full body, but then simplify it because of computing power. What are you using and what do you think is the direction it will go?

Yeah, so there's two we're using mostly. So old space, which is Microsoft's sort of consumer VR world, it's not the professional HoloLens one, it's the consumer accessible one. And there you don't have legs. Used to have legs, and you don't have legs in there anymore. We can give you legs actually as an extra, but that you can do all sorts of stuff. And it can be hyper realistic. It can be. I mean, it can be super immersive. But the avatars themselves, a little bit cartoony still. The one we're doing mostly, which is spatial chat, we use Topia as a platform for that. The space itself we can do completely photorealistically. A lot of the time we use sketches because actually it's not about being photorealistic, it's about giving people a sense of place and, you know, the things I talked about before, giving them some indication of where to move, that kind of thing. The avatars. And we get asked this all the time, can I customize my avatar? You cannot customize your avatar in there at all. So they are androgynous. They are little characters, which all of our German clients call them gummy bears, whereas the Brits call them jelly babies. But it should give you some idea of what they look like. But they come in a selection of colors, but you can't do anything else. It's really easy to spend 15 minutes choosing what color your mustache is in VR. And we don't want that. What we want is people to talk to each other. And that's very much what we're geared to. And, you know, we can play with it a little bit and we can have hats and that kind of stuff if we want to, but actually we really, really push back and say, don't worry about the avatar and people really quickly forget about what it is because the fun interacting in the space and meeting people you've not met before and having conversations you haven't had for a while and just really having that human interaction again. Nice.

Very good. So in terms of identity, then, how do you think the metaverse will change identity?

Yeah, that's a great question as well. And a lot of the consulting work I've done has been with fintechs, so there's a load of stuff that goes on in fintechs around how you actually generate identity for someone. Um, I suspect what we're going to have in the future, and this is just suspicion, is people are going to have multiple identities. Um, so you might have a primary identity that you use in certain spaces. And that sounds initially a little weird, but actually a lot of people have different identities. So your work Persona when you go into the office might be quite different to the Persona you have when you come home and spend time with the kids, and might be quite different to the one that you have with the friends you went to a college with. So I suspect we'll see that starting to happen in the metaverse as well. And people will be able to switch between those. And some people will have a couple and some people will have a dozen, and you can choose to put your Friday night party hat on and go out and, you know, be a different version of Mark.

So, yeah, it is pretty cool.

Yeah.

But then of course, there are also some ethical challenges related to that into the metaverse, as well as dangers to the metaverse. What are your ideas around that?

Yeah, so I think there needs to be. And some kind of blockchain solution is probably the way forward, some way to positively identify somebody. Right. And relate that back to a real person. Further out, there's all sorts of questions about actually can we upload consciousness and all that kind of thing, and that all becomes a lot more complicated. That's probably a subject for another book, but yeah, I don't think that's so far away either. But yeah, I think ultimately we all need to have, as we do online at the moment, some way of certifying your identity. And it's almost certainly going to be some kind of blockchain, and I suspect there's something down the line which is a self sovereign identity, NFT type solution to do that, that you can positively identify yourself when you need to. Right.

Yeah. And then what are some of the.

Dangers of the metaverse, extensions of the danger of, of the current web 2.0. So is it possible to do cyberbullying online in the metaverse? I've not heard of an example. I'm sure it could be pretty mean.

Yeah, we need to example of harassment already in the metaverse. So a woman who was grouped in the metaverse by a character in the metaverse as well, and that to her, that felt real.

You know, it would 100% feel real because it's very intimate, right?

Yeah.

And because it's very immersive, it's very real. So, yeah, I mean, you know, that will happen. And I think the dangerous point is over the next 18 months to two years, because whenever you have something new, all the thought goes into the cool stuff first and it doesn't go into the protection. So I know there is some work starting to be done on actually how do we start to protect that. We've had an issue. There's a community I'm in for building a space on a particular platform, and there is, which it seems to be the curse of every iteration of not just the Internet, but any technology. There is somebody who comes in and decides to expose himself. And there's lots of questions about how do you deal with that? And the answers are, you know, very strictly and as much as we can to try and prevent that happening. There was a really interesting debate in that community about do you go straight off and ban the guy instantly, or do you treat him as somebody who needs some psychological help and talk to him? And, you know, there were two very distinct camps in that. And it turned out the second one was the one that made the difference, actually. It was the let's talk to this guy, let's find out what's driving him, and let's, you know, talk him into not doing this.

Yeah.

Then also putting in place a mechanism that is very consistent across the community to deal with it when it happens. So he gets that consistent message. But, you know, I would go along with the line that somebody like that needs some psychological help. So, yeah, you can get those things. Is there anything unique about the metaverse? I think once we start to get into identity and wealth tied up into elements of the metaverse, criminals will always follow the money. Um, that could potentially be absolutely devastating. But again, I think, you know, that's an extension of what happens in the real world. There are some fantastic people around who specialize in all kinds of online fin crime, and they will turn their attention to the metaverse. I just don't think they're there. But, yeah, I do. I do think it was part of the Meta announcement that Mark Zuckerberg made that actually they will have a focus on that. They've been investing a lot of money and I hope that that is.

You would hope so.

It's done earlier than it was done with Facebook.

So how does the future of the metaverse look like?

So the first word that springs to mind is just fun. I think the ability to really experience things that are just genuinely can inspire awe. I don't know if you saw Jean Michel Jarre's virtual concert that he did on New Year's Eve. So it was fantastic. You can find some of it online on YouTube and you're not going to get the 3D world right because it was in full headset VR basically. He did a gig in Notre Dame in Paris and it was fantastic music. But you've got the entirety of Notre Dame Cathedral. It was all. I think they use mataport to map it around you. So you're in the cathedral, you've got the sound coming at you and there's a light show which is going through you to, you know, the Godfather of techno doing this. And that was just a phenomenal experience.

So I have to experience it.

Yeah, you know, you have to see if you can find it. You know, I watched it live. My wife put my headset on and watched it and my mother in law popped the headset on and watched it and it was quite hard to get the headset back off her because she was having such a good time. And that experience at home, sitting in the front room, it's as good as any gig I've ever been to. Yeah, absolutely phenomenal. Really. That's amazing.

That's cool.

Really cool stuff. We can do an experience. I've met some great people that I would never meet otherwise, literally all around the world. So, you know, my typical week is, you know, we've got clients in Sydney and Melbourne and Perth and we're talking to quite often. We do a lot of work for some guys in Singapore. I would normally on a Thursday night be talking actually to some guys in California in about half an hour's time. But it's Thanksgiving so they're all stuffed with turkey, sitting around watching tv. But you know, it's great. I have these fantastic days of talking to people around the world.

Yeah, I agree. I love doing it as well. How do you think that the Metaverse will change the future of work in relation to also the Enterprise Metaverse?

So we're seeing that already that one of the big criticisms that came out of Remote Working last year. So for a lot of companies have never done remote work before. You know, I've been a management consultant for most of my career, so I've spent most of my life as a remote worker. It never seemed odd to me. But there are a set of interactions that you normally have in an office environment which are geared around spontaneity and around serendipity and around just bumping into someone or just having a conversation. And you can't do that on a zoom Skype teams type platform. Just what you can do in the Metaverse is you can do that so you can drop in and out. So I'm actually a big fan of being in the office and spending time and meeting people, but not every day. So we have, I've got some former colleagues of mine, they work for one of the big four accountancy firms and they have already sold the office that they used to be in because they've already moved to a part time working environment. So they are only expected to be in the office a couple of days of the week at most. And that's a big office in central London. That would have cost them a hell of a lot of money. So all of a sudden the corporation has freed up some money that they would have to pay. But what they still want to do is to have that interaction because it's a people business, right? So any kind of consultancy type work is about apprenticeship, it's about learning from other people and you can start to do that in the Metaverse. The use case that we're really seeing is the easiest one to get going is induction, onboarding, assessment centers, those kind of things where you have quite a short term engagement. It's easier to convince people of a short term assignment. People really jump at the power of that and it's, it's really great to see HR leading the charge on that. So we're having some really, really great conversations with HR people about how you can use these virtual tools and virtual environments to start to build networks amongst people joining these firms. We did a big event last year. No, it was earlier this year, kind of lost track of time. A company had got a lot of graduate recruits to join them last September and for six months, because of various lockdowns, hardly any of those people had ever physically been to the building. So we recreated the building. As you go in, there's a roundabout with the tail of a whale made from recycled materials, a sort of iconic thing. And there's a couple of cafes in the building that nobody had been in for Months. But we recreated cafes, we recreated the back of the building and the garden. So they had a party where all of those people came in who'd never been to the office. So that when they did come into the office a month later, some of it felt familiar. And they got to speak to people as somebody very junior. So somebody junior on a zoom call, they were almost always just listening, never talking on the Zoom call. So all of a sudden, they got to talk to each other. So when they came in to the office a month later, they actually knew somebody. They actually knew their way around. They actually knew where the cafe was. And when we even went to the. We did a little after party, which was kind of like hidden in a secret corner, but we told everybody, so they find it, and you could jump on that, and it jumped you into another world, which was the local pub that they all go to, the Coach and Horses. So that all of a sudden, these people knew about the Coach and Horses, because those are the things that happen in offices, right?

Yeah.

That's amazing.

That's really, really cool.

Really surprisingly powerful, as I can imagine.

Yeah.

And that wraps up the conversation with Paul Hamilton. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is the importance of the rich and vibrant metaverse economy and the role communities will play in achieving that. I couldn't agree more, which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss the prerequisites for a metaverse economy that can stand the test of time. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the metaverse.