Moving Our Lives into the Metaverse with Timmu Tõke – Step into the Metaverse: EP03

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Mark 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 develop to artists to 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 Timu Toku. Temu is the co founder of the well known avatar as a service platform ReadyPlayMe. This cross game avatar platform for the Metaverse gives users an interoperable personal avatar that travels with them across many virtual experiences. Developers use their plug and play avatar creator to to save months from building their own platform and already 2000 companies have integrated with Ready Play Me Naturally. During this interview we discussed the role of avatars in the Metaverse, how identity will change on the immersive Internet, the role of digital fashion, and the importance of interoperability in an open Metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

Maybe you can just start with telling a bit of your background who you are and what you do.

Yeah, totally. So first, happy to be an interviewee. My name is Timo, I'm the founder of ReadyPeremy and ReadyPemi is a cross game outer platform for the Metaverse. So our goal is to make it easy for people to create an outdoor and travel with it across many different virtual worlds and games and so forth. And for developers we're an easy to use avatar tool. So you can integrate Ready for Me outer system into your game and never worry about avatars again. And yeah, we work with more than 700 companies that use our avatars and all the avatars are consistent so you can actually have one identity and use use it across all these different games and worlds and so forth. And in general I think that's very important for building the Metaverse is kind of building this connective layers that make the Metaverse feel more like one big world instead of just kind of a lot of closed, closed experiences. So that's what we do. And before just for a little bit of background as well, I mean we started the company when I was like 20 so I've been making alters for, you know, for my whole life basically. So we started from hardware, so building hardware based scanners, scanning people. Then we before rape me, like three years before rape me, we spent on building outer systems for enterprise customers. So like Tencent, Huawei, htc, Vodafone, Verizon, Wargaming and many others. And that's how we got the experience of building out their systems and really kind of understanding what developers need in an amateur system. And that's why we also have kind of this developer tools first approach. If every developer on the planet uses our avatar system, then that's a way to unify the avatar across all these games. Yeah, that's kind of what we do. And for context, maybe we're like 30 people now, scaling to 70, 80 people. And yeah, mostly based around Europe now building a team in the US and that's where I am.

Very nice. It sounds like an exciting journey that you've been on in the avatar world.

Yeah, it's exciting when you zoom out, but totally it has been very exciting and cool to see the whole space develop from inside the space.

Yeah, I can imagine. So can you share me your thoughts about what is the Metaverse, according to you?

Yeah, the Metaverse is a connected virtual world. I consider it to be mostly kind of 3D world or interactive of different interactive. Mostly 3D spaces that are connected. And there is no one Metaverse, no one single app or game or platform is the Metaverse. It's like Internet, you know, it's the whole thing together. And I think what makes the Metaverse a metaverse eventually is, you know, having a lot of connections between worlds and making easy for people to travel between worlds and kind of building, you know, one big virtual world instead of lots of close experiences. That's how we define it.

Okay, very good. And of course you are building avatars for the Metaverse, I'd say. And then avatars are for me, very much linked to identity. How important is identity but also reputation in the metaverse and how should you organize that?

Yeah, so I mean, identity is important everywhere and it's important in the metaverse as well. So like identity is like how you represent yourself, what you are, what you have. Maybe. So, yeah, I mean, it's vital. And I think, you know, obviously what we are focused on, starting from kind of the visual representation of the avatar is having a unified identity that travels and comes with you across the metaverse. And I think that identity layer needs to exist for, you know, any kind of. That's the most logical thing that needs to exist, you know, in the metaverse in a unified form, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah, it does make sense. But then, so you have this identity and then you use it across platforms, which is portrayed as an avatar. But how do you link your reputation to that? Because I think reputation is important within the metaverse. How can you build as a radically Amy avatar, your reputation and take it across the various spaces?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different levels of reputation and it can mean many different things. What we are, I guess, more focused on or what the visual representation of the avatar is more connected with is the status that comes from the stuff you wear on the avatar, the cool skins and clothing assets you've earned or bought for yourself, NFTs and so forth. And if you make those assets wearable assets that give you status interoperable, then your status and your reputation kind of also becomes more consistent across those worlds. But then there's obviously things that if I act bad or you do something bad in some whatever way, then someone can flag you or things like that. But you know, I haven't put enough energy into that, that specific topic to like really have a, have a strong opinion. So. But in general, I think all these things will be combined into one kind of identity. And what we believe is, is that the visual part of that is the part that users have the strongest kind of emotional connection with. That's why we are focused on that. So if you, if you really only own the visual representation, so to say, and own is a weird thing to say in the context of the metaverse. It's more like an investor talk, I guess. But if you manage to provide people's virtual entities, the visual part, then that's the most persistent part. The Vista is quite easily transferable between services and so forth.

But how can you then transfer your digital assets? And how can I. If we meet in the metaverse and I see your avatar with your, your skins and your, your, your Gucci bag. Yeah, for that matter, you know, how do I know that you know that you have a good reputation? And how do you know it from me as well?

Yeah, I mean, like repetition comes partly from the assets. Like if you have some legendary item in a game, let's say Runescape, you have a party hat or something, then that obviously tells everyone that this person is a pro player or they have great reputation. It just comes from that, you know, or it's like shows like real world wealth or something like that can also be the case. So that's the part that we are focused on. Right. And how people know that something is valuable. You know, obviously you can link, you know, NFTs and assets to things, but generally like how people know that Gucci bags are valuable. You know, same way there are Metaverse brands. They're real world brands that do, you know, spend a majority of revenue in communicating that those things are desirable and valuable. So it's going to be the same in the Metaverse.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So I think you can see sort of advertise will be the usernames and social profiles of the Metaverse. Can you share me what some of the main characteristics of an avatar are or should be?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the avatar can mean many things for sure. Again like what we are focused on is the visual part. It's also the username. How do you present yourself? It can also be a payment method wallet where you store things. Wallet that you pay with can be metadata from different worlds and games you played that can be transferred across worlds. You know, it can be a lot of different things. It can be like a utility your, you know, addresses personal information you want to transfer to some platforms. So yeah, it's all of that together, all that you need to represent yourself in a different world. And that's, yeah, ultimately it can be anything.

So would you say that the avatar is sort of the visual representation of a self sovereign identity?

Yeah, self serving identity is also like, you know, what does that exactly mean? I mean, yeah, yes, like avatars, the visual representation of the avatar. If you ask a random user what is your identity in a game that they say it's the avatar, it's not the, I don't know, whatever metadata they store on a blockchain that they can travel with in between different worlds. So like that's what we believe in and I think that's what people our navigation as well. So like the visual part is the most, most important part and then the other other things are just, you can, you can package them in, you know, with that. But you know, our focus and what I'm thinking about every day is how to first solve the visual outer part. Because this is the best way to build a network. Any kind of self sovereign identity platform service is like really hard for them to get any scale. Like it's not useful until it's adopted by everyone, you know, and then why would anyone adopt it if it doesn't solve anything in their lives today, you know, as a developer? So that's, I mean it's very hard for me to see how this is going to play out and everyone's going to adopt it. Like you look at the Web2World and see how the kind of identity in a way happened there. There was like major platforms that had hundreds of millions or billions of users already and then just like created like sign in with Facebook or whatever. And it's not like quite exactly the same thing obviously, but I think you need to have an existing value or existing major user base to build like an identity network. That's why our tools avatar system, you know, saves developers 6 months, 12 months. It helps them make money with their game. It's useful for any individual developer even without the network. And then by focusing on that and by scaling that part, you know, we will actually build a network that then we can add more identity stuff too. So I think ideas are nice, execution matters more. So like what is the go to market? Yeah, it's like self serving. Identity is great. One thing is idea, the other thing is what is the go to market? How do you get it out there? Right. You can hope that people are just philosophically so aligned with the idea that they just adopted. And like some people will, but this is hardcore part of the market. Most companies are just very practical and just want to do whatever is useful for them to hit their quarterly results or whatever else. And that's just how the world works.

Yeah, yeah. It makes sense that in the end people are very much focused on getting a product into the market. And if there's a tool available that you can just plug and play, I think that's obviously what you're building, if that makes sense. So there are of course different opinions about how avatar should look. We have Facebook, which is very cartoony without a lower body. You have the extremely detailed, high quality digital humans. And then you have ReadyPayMe, which I think is sort of in between. What do you think is how does this pan out in the years to come?

Yeah, so I mean, I think first like people will have different visual representations of their identity, different outlets to use with different kinds of applications. And today you know why Facebook is not making like hyper realistic out there. It's like, you know, the stuff they show in demos, that's like in a lab, you know, have to spend like a day in a scanner that costs like $5 million. And then like there's a team that, you know, makes them like does manual work for a week and then you get something. So it's like we're very, very far from having like a hyper realistic avatar that's actually usable you know, the closest there is is like Metahuman by Epic Games. But this is not an end user facing product or tool. It's a developer tool that developers can use to create awesome out there characters for their games. To get something like that to a consumer level, you know, that's another five years or more. And if that happens and when it happens, then people will use realistic authors more for that's. That's my prediction. I don't know. All right, Nobody does so risk others will be used more for like conferencing, business meetings, kind of like telepresence type applications versus more cartoony avatars, aspirational avatars for gaming, social, all kinds of different things. You know, we started from creating realistic altars way back, you know, in the day when we made build hardware and stuff. So I have a lot of experience seeing people experience their own personal realistic altars. People fucking hate them.

I can tell you it is quite challenging. I have my own avatar. I'm not sure if you've seen it, but it's very rough. I'm currently building a digital human of myself as well just to understand how that would work. And it's a very difficult process to get to that. And obviously having already played media avatar is a lot easier, a lot faster to get started. But it's an interesting that you say that digital human so to say will be used in the business sense and then the non digital human, more cartoony, more where you can be anything is in the other areas being used.

Yeah, that's right. Because people like virtual worlds have endless possibilities, you know, to express yourself, to represent yourself as like what would you go for exactly. Like what you look like in real life. Unless you know, you want to have like conferencing and business meetings. And that stuff makes sense, right? And maybe with a very close people. But anyways, like our approach is to do what's possible today, push the limit as much it's reasonable to do that and then just focus on building usable solutions. So anyone that creates an outdoor with ready for me needs to be simple, it needs to be fast, it needs to be high quality. And that's why I also like Facebook. And a lot of the big companies are going very safe and very cartoony because then it's easy to not mess it up. The more closer you go to realism, the easier it is to mess it up. So basically that's kind of I think how we think about it now.

Yeah, I understand that. So of course your avatar is one part of your identity or the Other one is of course, what you wear and your skins and everything. How important is digital fashion and digital products in the Metaverse?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very important. It's like probably the most important way you actually express your identity, style, character in some ways in the Metaverse. And people will want to do that, obviously. And I had a chat with a guy who was like, have a house 12 year old kid and boy and basically came home and said he has a girlfriend in Fortnite now. So it's like for this guy, virtual fashion is more important now in Fortnite than physical clothes that he goes to school with because he has a girlfriend in Fortnite. So, you know, so that's. That was like. I was like, wow. And I kind of know that obviously, but like, that's interesting, interesting moment. So, yeah, people will think of their virtual identities and virtual representation. Like they think about the real world, you know, representation and having great fashion and things like that is going to be important.

Just stretching it a little bit. So will we end up with a future of like the oasis where, you know, people just live and breathe the Metaverse and, you know, live their entire lives in the Metaverse and not living a life in the normal life?

I don't know. I hope, I hope not. You know, that would be a pretty messed up world. I mean, there's some views on like, basically like places that are good to live in a physical world, like nice big cities, nature and stuff like that. They will live more in the physical world and places that are not very nice to live in, that don't have a lot of space or have pollution, whatever, they will live more in the metaverse or in a virtual world. And that's also kind of a little dystopian. Who knows, let's see. But we kind of live in the virtual world already, you know, like we're in the virtual world now. It's just not a 3D virtual world, it's a 2D call, you know, that's like I live more in the virtual world already and most people do, than they live in the, in real life. It's just like the technology gets better and it's more spatial, then it feels like more like a real world. Yeah, like, let's see, let's see. I hope there are things we can't replicate in the virtual world.

Yeah, let's hope so indeed. But obviously with Reddit, Playme, you have now 700 top 5% you work with. I think it's how can we achieve this Interoperability not only across the 700 platforms that you partner with, but also you can take your asset from Fortnite to GTA to Roblox and vice versa. How can we achieve that as a society, as people working on the Metaverse?

Yeah, I mean there's kind of one view to this which is like we just need this universal file format and then everything works. You know, it's just very hard to see how this that's going to like happen. Right. And how that's going to solve it. Like the file formats are like not the biggest issue. Yeah, I mean obviously our approach to that is like there needs to be some company that kind of focused on that and that's what we do. So our approach is to unified avatars. By giving everyone our avatar system, maybe in the future it's not just outer system, it's like you can just plug into the network without, you know, using our avatar specifically. You know, maybe you can export your own avatars from your game to very premier and make those go to different games. So you know, we are like Rails first and right now we're just doing our routers. But let's see, let's see how it turns out.

Yeah, but so, you know, the file format is one thing, but then you also need to have this, these open spaces, for example, meta or Facebook, they need to be open. At the moment it's not possible to take the assets from Facebook and to bring it to Twitter for that matter. And that's something that I guess would be required in the metaverse.

Oh yeah, absolutely. So like, very true. Like the, the biggest problem in, in interoperability has nothing to do with technology. You know, like if everyone decided now that we're going to make every avatar, every identity, travel between worlds, like that wouldn't be like that complicated technically. It's like the business side of it, the philosophy side of it, people deciding to build open worlds instead of building like close metaverses, what they call a metaverse. So that's the problem. Like every like big majority of, of companies that have the power, resources to build virtual worlds today want to own the metaverse or want to own their part of the metaverse. So everyone's trying to build a closed economy and so forth and that is the biggest blocker. So that needs to change and then the technological solutions can follow. But I think it's not going to change overnight. I think the open metaverse needs to be more practical to build for anyone involved than a closed system post game world. It needs to make More money for companies. You know, it needs to be a better user experience, needs to be something that end users demand. There's, there's some practical business reason that will make people change their mind about it. And I think the, you know, how it can happen is like this small proof of concept of open metaverse that can come from the crypto community or let's see where that just proves to everyone that this is the best way to build things. And it's probably going to be better than having closed worlds, even if just look at the real world economies, countries and so forth. Open economies work better, they make more money, everyone's happier. Well, okay, that's a big statement. Everyone's happier. They're just better businesses. Right. They're better economy. So why would that not happen in the virtual world as well? So I guess there needs to be big enough poc, which is like some level of some number of games and worlds that get connected and enough end users that experience them. And then that proves to the rest of the world that this is the way to go. I don't think it can happen in any other way.

Basically what you say is that the market will take care of this eventually.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe I think that they need to be some early players that build the POC of the open metaverse that are just very, you know, religious and just kind of make it happen. Because otherwise it just can't happen. Because, you know, the big companies are probably not going to be changing their mind overnight and being like, hey, let's just open everything up. You know, they're becoming more closed, not more open. Let's see. Maybe, maybe, I don't know, you know, I don't know. But there definitely need to be some people that are like somewhat impractical short term because they're like philosophically believe in that. And then that can prove other people that this is actually a practical thing and whatnot.

Yeah. So. And then if you then talk about having your identity and we already see in the real world, you know, identity theft happening all the time. We see hackers and scammers and malware on the web 2.0. What's this threat of imposter avatars, you know, people mimicking others to, in the metaverse to rob or damage. We have deep fake sites. Theoretically, it shouldn't be very difficult to make an exact copy of your ready play me avatar and just pretend as if I'm you. How can we prevent that and what are the dangers if we, if we can't Prevent it?

Yeah, I mean, like, yes, but it's already easy today to make anyone's avatar, you know, like, how does it work in games today? You know, there's other things about you in a game, how you're represented besides your visual avatar. You know, have your username, you have, you know, you have your, I don't know, friends list, stuff like that. So I don't know the answer to the question and it's not something I'm like deeply thinking about every day because not a real problem yet. But you know, I can create a Facebook profile with your pictures today. I can do all these things. So, like it's going to be the same there. People are going to try to hack and abuse systems. We'll see how we solve it. We'll see what the problems will be.

I can imagine that can be quite challenging. Yesterday I was talking to Jerry Burke from Outlier Ventures and so he says he has imposters on Twitter all the time saying that he gives out crypto or whatsoever and he's trying to connect with Twitter to get verified and just simply don't respond. So it can cause a lot of damage, these kind of things. Yeah, I don't know, using NFTs to your avatar that showcase that you have been verified with your passport and have the verified tick be a reason to a way to solve this.

Yeah, I mean, totally. So they could, but people are going to scam other people everywhere. They did it like before the Internet. They will do it in the metaverse. You know, there's always ways and there's always fraud happening. But like again, like not the topic I'm, I have, you know, spent enough time thinking to have a strong point of view on, but just thinking about it. Yeah. NFTs obviously could be a way, but there can be many ways. You know, there can be and it also depends how centralized the systems are. Right. If there is a centralized authority in the world, then they can also take care of that by using usernames, I don't know, predicting somehow like the social media platforms are doing today. But again, I'm not an expert on that.

Yeah, no worries. I understand. And so with the metaverse we're moving, you can already see that we move it from direct to consumer to direct to avatar. And you see that retailers are jumping in on this obviously because it's a completely new market selling to avatar instead of the physical products. How do you think it will change the retail industry and how are you enabling this with Readypayme?

Yeah, I mean first, like what does direct to avatar mean? It's like Avatar, like it's still direct to consumer. You're still like consumer. You're buying stuff for the avatar. So it's like, okay, direct to body fashion. So like, okay, but how that changes things and how we enable it, I guess the Metaverse, like the fashion brands are trying to get into the Metaverse because they see the amount of revenue generated there, they see the amount of people engaging in there and so forth. And how we can help is pure fashion Brands like we work with Dior, for example, and New Balance and Trollico and Pokemon, Warner Brothers for the Dune movie outfits and so forth. So they can either go to individual games and manually integrate their assets to each world, or they can just come to ReadyPermy and make one integration with one avatar, create one set of assets that then can be used in hundreds of different worlds. And that's a great tool for them in that sense. Just helps them scale and get to many worlds with one integration. And that's why some consistency over the style across worlds is also helpful because that helps that kind of cross game fashion economy exist as well.

Yeah. Okay. And how do you think? Of course you have retailers moving into the Metaverse, quite a few of the luxury brands that into here already. Generation Alpha and Generation C, they're sort of Metaverse natives. How can brands today and tomorrow create this lasting engagement and loyalty in the Metaverse?

Yeah, and Artifact, by the way, Artifact is doing great job in Metaverse fashion as well anyways. But yeah, I mean, how can they do that? First thing, to figure out how the games and Metaverse world works and how people buy things and how they get in there. And there's a lot of technical kind of, you know, there's a lot of learning they need to do in that. But other than that, I mean, in the end, you buy stuff, virtually buy stuff. Physically the experience is different, but like, ultimately a brand is a brand. You know, you're creating desirability. You want to be portrayed as something you're selling to someone that wants to express themselves in some way. So I mean, I guess there's a lot of things that are similar. Yeah. Did I answer your question?

Sort of, yeah. I think the challenge that I think brands face is how to get a presence in the Metaverse. Of course it states. It's very interesting to say, well, Dior has to be in connect with their customers in Fortnite, but you can see the Metaverse just another channel within the Metaverse. You have different channels. You have Fortnite you have Roblox, you have Minecraft, et cetera. So from that perspective, I think it's for brands, it's a new way of learning of how to. How to use this channel, just as they have to learn how to use social media. And the Twitter required a different approach on Facebook. And I think the same will apply to the Metaverse as well.

Yeah, totally. And I think that the metaverse could be more disruptive for brands than the social media or any other kind of change has before in tech, because the Metaverse economy is gigantic already, and the gaming economy, and it will be even more gigantic. So the revenue opportunities are massive for brands that have already built the brand over decades or hundreds of years. So for them to not leverage their brand in the real world, to make very high margin kind of software revenue in the metaverse will be stupid. Right. But it's hard for them because they don't build tech, they don't know how tech works. They come. They have a steep learning curve. And that's why there's an opportunity for Metaverse native brands to come up as well, like Artifact and many others that are building now and, you know, be a big player in that space. Yeah, we had this, like, crazy 3D trend where like, eventually, like, marble cigarettes had a 3D taste or something, and I feel like, you know, we're soon going to have Metaverse cigarettes as well or something. It's like everybody's telling their metaverse everything's remotely connected with anything virtual is becoming a metaverse these days. So I think that's actually bad for the world because it makes it hard to understand what we're talking about. And just, like, overusing the word and just making it now, it's like a massive buzzword already. So that's like, I don't know, like, what is the metaverse? Where do you use the word? Where do you don't use the word? I guess it's natural, I think, but it's just like seeing the word, you know, nobody knowing what the metaverse is to now, like, everybody using it for everything. It's like, yeah, I don't know. I hope it will kind of quiet down and people will figure out, like, some more proactive ways to speak about it.

Yeah. All right, well, thank you so much, Timu, for your time. I really appreciate it.

Cool, man. Happy to help.

And that wraps up the conversation with temu. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is how important identity and reputation will be in the metaverse. And the role of self soft and identity in it. I couldn't agree more, which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss digital identity at length and why I believe we can expect a Cambridge An Explosion of Identity in the Metaverse. 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.