Why the Metaverse’s Future will not be Decentralized with Robert Rice – Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP19

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Reimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm 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 E book, 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 Robert Rice. Robert is a Metaverse pioneer and he's a passionate innovator and evangelist for advancing the state of the art of interactive and immersive media. He is focused on the fundamental technologies for the convergence of AR&VR, Spatial Intelligence, Social Commerce, AI driven avatars and intelligent agents, virtual goods, the Internet of Things and geolocation, local contextual media which he calls the XR Cloud. Robert coined the term XR in 2014 as an umbrella term for AR, mixed reality and virtual reality as a whole, or the seamless combination of each together. During the interview we discussed how XR will change our society in the coming decade, the centralized versus decentralized Metaverse, and how we move from one metaverse space to another. We also cover the role of digital twins and some of the dangers we can expect in the metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

Maybe you can share a bit about your background and how you are involved in the metaverse. Sure.

So I guess the first bit of inspiration for me was probably Tron, you know, when I was a kid. It was a great movie and really got me hooked on the idea of, you know, being inside of a computer. I just thought that was like crazy cool. Over the years though, I guess I got started in virtual reality probably around 1991, 1992. I was the first employee at the first US based virtual reality arcade game company which was a whole lot of fun. I got a copy of a, a pre release version of 3D Studio and a copy of Deluxe Paint and they were like hey, go figure this out. I'm like great, where's the manuals? And they're like well, we don't have any. I'm like okay. So that's how I got started. It was a bit tough, but it was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot. And then a few years after that, I think around 1995 or so, I moved here to Raleigh, North Carolina to start my first software company. And we were building the world's first real time 3D massively multi user online role playing game. And this is back when, you know, the Pentium had just come out and there was no such thing as hardware acceleration. And I can't tell you how many, you know, companies or venture capitalists thought I was a lunatic. You know, you can't do real time 3D on a PC. People will never, you know, use the Internet for anything more than email. And the idea that, you know, to use my credit card to buy stuff is absolute sheer idiocy. And I'm like, oh, okay. You know, I like to call some of those guys up and like, hey, do you remember back when? And yeah, you're like, yeah, yeah, go away. So I did that for a few years and then, you know, ultimately I did a bit of a consulting and advising for other MMOs that were starting and launching. And then around maybe 2007, 2008 or so, I started looking at augmented reality and you jumped in full force in that. And I started the AR consortium, which was basically me calling up all the CEOs of every other company that was doing AR at the time. And there's like five or six, right? I was like, there's hardly any. And I was like, hey guys, let's do a consortium. And you know, meet up at all the trade shows and, you know, have a beer and talk about ideas and stuff and. And it was, you know, pretty informal, but it was like, you know, the group of us were basically, you know, leading the charge for taking AR technologies out of academic circles and, you know, trying to start companies and start industries, you know, with it. And we were obviously way too early at the time. IPhone was a new device and, you know, people were just, I don't know, very fun times. And a couple more years go by, I did some other things. And then around 2014, I started my current company, Transmira. And I guess I hid away in my basement for a few years. You know, I was off the speaking circuit, I wasn't publishing anything or just kind of laying low, but I spent those years fruitfully. So I basically, you know, went back through all the anime and all the movies and all the sci fi books and everything and really tried wrapping my head around all the amazing use cases that you could do with AR or VR, you know, or the Metaverse and Then kind of worked backwards. This is the thing I want to do. Well, how do I make that happen? What do you need? What technologies need to develop, which ones are kind of already here? And then that ultimately gave a, you know, me a roadmap and then it went out and started a raising funds and getting people on the team and stuff. So as I said, I've been kind of in stealth mode for a number of years now, but about to come out of the shell and, you know, like a lot of the industry insiders know who I am, but most of the public has never heard of me. They will shortly, but yeah, so that's kind of how I got started. I was right place, right time and, you know, I've just invested a great deal of my, my career so far, really again, trying to understand things and think about things and trying to, I guess, solve problems that, you know, most people don't even realize are problems yet. It's just, you know, I've just had the luxury to think about it. So.

Nice. That's very important work as well to be done. So. And you just showed me a document, Omniscape, that that's to do your new company, your new venture.

So that's the name of the platform that we're developing, Omniscape. There's a great deal in there that kind of helps describe how we're approaching the idea of the metaverse, what makes us different and how a lot of the pieces fit together. It's very different from any and everything that everybody else is doing. You know, it's like most of the industry you can break down into a couple of buckets. You've got the AR guys that are generally, you know, oh, ar cl, you know, this or that, or they're doing, you know, virtual try on or, you know, scan a label and see something fun. But it's still very novelty or game, you know, like, like Pokemon or something. And there's not much more to that. People have been talking about much more for at least the last 10 or 15 years, but there's still hardly anything that's changed. Right. And then on the other side of the coin you've got, you know, the VR stuff, which almost in every aspect ultimately kind of boils down to a social VR space, right? You know, Decentraland Sandbox, Second Life, even Crypto, Voxels, you know, vrchat. I mean, the list just goes on. Even Facebook's Horizon, it's all very social driven and very VR. Now, that's not to say there's not a lot of cool educational things that are out there, whatever. But in terms of the metaverse, it tends to be either novelty AR or these kind of constructed 3D virtual social worlds. And, you know, from my perspective, I think that, you know, most of the industry looks at the metaverse, you know, kind of underneath the common lens of. Of a spectrum where you've got AR over here and then VR, you know, over here, and then a variety of little things in the middle. Whereas my perspective is it's really more of a vertical stack that starts with location. You know, who you are, where you are, and what is around you is important. And then you build that from there. So you've got my location data from Iot sensors around me, and then augmented reality and then digital twins, like exact copies of the world that I meant. And then constructed places, right? So I should have a digital twin of my house that looks like my house, but I should also be able to have, you know, a giant 3D flying castle with, you know, dragons coming off the side, whatever, also associated with my house. Cause this is my place, right? So I want to hang out. And again, that's vastly different from what everybody else is thinking. And then two, we try to blend AR and VR together. So things that I do in the real world through the modality of augmented reality should have an effect on any digital twin or virtual reality space that's associated or tied back to where I'm at. Does that kind of make sense so far?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So, but this is, you know, I honestly, other than just a very, very handful of people, most everybody I talk to is still. It just hasn't occurred to them yet, or they're not thinking about it in this way. And I think when you do, if you start with the real world first and use the, you know, your location as a basis, then it suddenly opens up all the really cool opportunities and amazing use cases that we always think and dream about, Right. You know, tourism or retail or sports entertainment or medical or supply chain. You know, the one thing that all of those have in common is you as a person and as an identity and also your location. Now, whether you're experiencing it through AR or VR is secondary to those pieces, but connecting those two together and blending them and of course, going back to location, it's just radically different.

Yeah, that makes total sense to me. And can you, in one sentence, tell me what the metaverse is according to you?

I will give you a short answer in a second, but I want to preface it by saying it's almost easier for me to describe what the metaverse isn't, as opposed to what it is or what it could be.

Right.

But I think for me, it really boils down to the word metaverse itself. It's meta, meaning me all around, encompassing or whatever, and verse, which is, I guess, short for universe. Right. So instead of it just being a virtual world or a universe somewhere else, again, it's cool. If you connect a whole bunch of 3D worlds together, you basically have a bunch of 3D worlds that are connected. It doesn't really feel like a universe, and even if it does, it doesn't feel like a meta universe. So for me, when I talk about Metaverse, I really think it's the combination of all, you know, data and information and augmented reality and virtual reality together. But as it relates to the real world, it's like this invisible sense of space and place and time and content that we're surrounded by because, you know, we've got electronics and data and, you know, stuff flying around all over the place. So the metaverse, for me, is all of that together in a way for us to interact in new ways with each other and with our environment.

Yeah, it's actually a very, very short answer and actually very, very, I think, very concise, because I agree with you. You know, the virtual world is virtual worlds, and it's sort of, you know, you bring the virtual world into the real world to bring the real world into the virtual world, and that's where they cross over. That's sort of where the metaverse Is to be, 100%. So how do you think that VR, AR, and XR will change in the coming decade? What can we expect?

Yeah. So if you had asked me this six months ago, I would have given you a slightly different answer, or even a year or two years ago. But I think that with COVID particularly, you know, that really focused a lot of attention on back to VR. Right. Because, you know, we had the initial VR bump in the early 90s. Everybody was really excited, and it kind of petered off, and then it kind of came back with, you know, Oculus Rift, and everything has been kind of growing. But as AR kind of came out, people began to realize that, hey, wow, VR is cool and awesome, but AR is actually way more powerful and has a much bigger potential to it. Right. I mean, it just. That's just the nature of it. Even when you think about the different types of mass media, you know, radio, print, television, et cetera, et cetera, augmented reality fits the bill for the next one. But virtual reality Doesn't. Right. Which is kind of a very interesting distinction there. So, yeah, Covid really put a lot of people's attention back on VR because it's very social and you can kind of go somewhere and it's way better than doing Zoom. Right? Zoom is cool, but it's boring after a while. And there's a little bit of. It's a little draining because you're constantly forced to look at somebody else in the eye and it's very. You can't take a break. Right. But at least in VR you've got an interesting environment. You can kind of relax a little bit. You can be in your pajamas, you know, all that good stuff. And then, you know, Facebook comes out and they're like, okay, cool, this is awesome. But it's time to kind of shake things up. We're going to plant the flag, which is cool. But the fact that they're also going to change the corporate name to Meta, that was like the big like, oh my God moment for most of the industry that if Facebook is doing this, we really need to pay attention. And then in the process of that, especially in like the finance sector, people began to look at other things like Axie Infinity and Decentraland and all that, where they're very much crypto environments for crypto fanboys. And it's all crypto, crypto, crypto. But they're innovating and establishing and creating new virtual and digital economies. You know, new models like Play to Earn or, you know, yield farming. I mean, there's a lot of really amazing things that are going on. And it's like, you know, holy cow, there are people in the Philippines that were quitting their day jobs to play Axie Infinity because they were making more money than they were doing their work stuff. Right. That is a very eye opening thing to kind of consider. So between Covid and, you know, Facebook's Meta and these other sorts of things, I think it's acted as a massive accelerant to, you know, all these technologies together which people are beginning to collectively call Metaverse. Right. That's the good stuff. So a lot of attention. And of course, you know, some companies like, you know, Google or whatever, they've been investing heavily for years, but now everybody and their brother is jumping on it. That's the good side. The bad side is that everybody and their brother is jumping in on it. So, I mean, like, even in the last month, the number of new startups and ventures and press releases coming out that are just plastered with Metaverse is crazy. I Mean, you know what I think I would say that we've just entered the gold rush stage for Metaverse. We're nowhere near the Metaverse wars yet. That'll come in another five, six, seven years. But right now, it's the gold rush. And so anybody with an idea and label, blockchain and Metaverse is going to get, you know, some funding. But I think that probably 95% of those are not going to go anywhere. They're going to raise a lot of money and they're going to fizzle out after maybe a year, because there's no there there. There's no thought process, there's no roadmap, there's no ip. It's just a rush for money. But the ones that can kind of survive that and make it through the next two or three years, I think that's going to be like the first generation of real Metaverse technology companies. Kind of like the early, you know, early 90s for the web. That's kind of where we're at. And then maybe in three years, maybe four, you'll start seeing some consolidation. There'll be a whole lot of acquisitions where the big boys, like, you know, Facebook and Google and maybe Niantech or Microsoft or whatever, all those. Amazon, even, even some, like, media and brands. So Disney I could see doing this. They're all going to be trying to acquire as much as possible, whether it's technology, you know, teams and expertise or market share. And then that's going to be like, you know, phase two. And by then, I think we'll be not quite mass market, but pretty much just like, you know, it's hard to find somebody today that hasn't experience to VR at least once. I think we'll kind of be there in like, maybe four or five years. It's like, okay, cool, everybody knows what it is. But even then, you know, there's a narrative that's beginning to shape now where people are afraid of Facebook, like, oh, Facebook's already won. Or they got this dystopian vision and it's going to be terrible, and nobody's going to pay attention to the real world anymore. They're all going to be huddled in a corner wearing their VR goggles. And, you know, it's like, guys, no, no, no. This is just like the phone or the telephone or the TV or the radio or the car. You know, it's not going to completely destroy society as we know it. It's just going to be a really useful and interesting thing in certain aspects. Yeah, maybe I'll do my learning there or shopping or whatever, but I'm still going to go to weddings and I'm still going to, you know, hang out with the guys at the bar. You can't get drunk in VR. Well, I take that back. I mean, you could, but it wouldn't be a great experience, right?

No.

So, yeah. So I think there are some fears, but I think normal headed people that have been thinking about this for years have a vested interest in making sure that it's done well and right. I think this concept of a decentralized metaverse is never going to happen. It's not technically practical, or practical even from a development perspective, but I think. Yeah, well, I think it will be distributed though. Because if you think even like the Internet today is not really decentralized, there's still some things about you have, like icann, for example, there has to be an authority somewhere to manage, you know, the domain registrations, right? Or you still have some centralizations in the Internet providers. I mean, there's layers and layers of it, but it is a vastly and heavily distributed system and I think that's what the metaverse is going to end up being. There'll be, you know, half dozen or maybe a dozen major metaverse plays, maybe walled gardens, maybe not. Facebook will certainly be one of them. And there'll be a whole lot of other smaller, medium sized metaverses and then you'll have your individual, you know, virtual worlds and whatnot. There'll be some level of interoperability, but I think that's mostly going to be around identity and not so much content. Identity is, is kind of, I think, really the thing that you're going to carry with you from place to place. And the whole galaxy of all these worlds and metaverse platforms are, you know, collectively the metaverse. Right? You have a metaverse and then you've got the metaverse and these all of the A's together. But like for content, I think people really haven't thought it through. It's like, you know, okay, well let's say all the virtual worlds are interconnected and I can just hop around back and forth. So how do I go from a level, you know, 80 Paladin and World of Warcraft and fly over to, you know, Facebook's horizon? What am I going to be, you know, chopping people in the meeting rooms, you know, with my sword? Or what if I want to take my great big capital ship and Evon online and zip over to World of Warcraft and start bombing cities of, you know, whatever it's just you can't do that without breaking the immersion and the content. And the whole point of having these cool, amazing worlds, there's gotta be some kind of, you know, transition or conversion of the content or even, like, power levels. Right? Is a level X in this game the same as a level Y over in this other game? Right. What's the power structure? So unless there's some kind of API or common thing in the middle that lets you translate between the two, I just don't see it happening. But that's the kind of the. In me.

You have spoken to 70 people before you, and you're the first person who says this, but I tend to agree with you because I think identity, yes, but assets, even if you could transfer your avatar from one space to another, that's already a challenge because Roblox looks different than Fortnite. So do you have to convert, then your avatar automatically? It's possible, but it's challenging technically. But then you need your assets. Can you take your Ferrari and kill everyone in Fortnite from Grand Theft Auto?

Right. Yeah, you're exactly right. But see, this is my point, though. This is one of those things that it just hasn't occurred to people yet. They're so insourceful with some of these other ideas of decentralized, you know, or interoperable or, hey, you know, I want to own everything and be able to take it with me wherever I go. Okay, that's cool. But, you know, what's next? And this is why, like I said earlier, I literally took a couple of years and just lived. Well, not really my basement. It's my office. But, you know, I've spent so much time trying to think things through, but not from a. You know, a different way to look at this is. Well, there's two different ways. You know, I could say, I'm gonna say I'm gonna travel west. Okay, that's cool. All right, so I'm gonna travel west. I have no idea where I'm gonna go or I'm gonna get there. I just know I'm going west. And I think that's how most of the industry is. We're going towards the horizon. But in my case, it's like I want to go to San Francisco, you know, on Main street and Building 342, that's my destination. So how do I get there? And then now I can work backwards and say, hey, I've got five different ways to get there. This one's faster, this one's cheaper. This one's Prettier, with more scenic routes. And I can kind of plan for it, but I still know what my destination is. Right. Or another way to look at this is like a chess game. I'd read a book once years ago, it was about chess and business, and this had a huge influence on me. And the author was basically describing the difference between a really good chess player and a grandmaster. Right. A really good chess player thinks ahead, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 moves and adapts as he plays to ultimately, you know, beat his opponent. But a chess grandmaster determines how he's going to destroy you first and then works backwards. And that's like his goal. He knows what the end game is going to look like, but he still adapts along the way. But he knows where he's going, he knows what it's going to do. And he's like, I'm going to get this guy with this model or this particular route or whatever. So it's just a little philosophical thing, but if I was an investor looking at companies or whatever, these are the types of questions I would ask these guys. What's your roadmap? What's your vision? Three, four, five years out, and how are you going to get there? And if they just talk about, oh, well, we're going to be able to do X, Y and Z, that's not quite enough because it's easy for anybody to. You know what? It's like me saying I'm going to build a teleportation machine and we're all going to be able to teleport around in five years. Well, that's really cool, Robert, but how the hell are you going to build that? Okay, well, I'm going to build it this way. I haven't figured this part or this part out yet, but I know what these parts are that I need to figure out. And that's where you separate, you know, the wheat from the chaff, as it were. So just saying.

Oh, it just really food for thought. I'm glad I'm connecting with you to hear your perspective on this because I think, you know, everyone is so engraved in this. And just before your call, I was speaking to someone, an NFT collector, which is of course also, you know, a big part of the metaverse. And she was really looking at it. Oh, purely only from that angle. And yeah, NFTs have to be scarce, and then otherwise they're not valuable. And which I think is nonsense because NFTs is about ownership of a digital asset. It doesn't have to be scarce.

You were 1,000%. Right. I'm really glad to hear you say this because it's been another thing I've been kind of fighting with. So. Okay, so let me step back a bit. When I talk to guys, particularly investor guys, they're always like, oh, you know, are you going to use blockchain? Blah, blah, blah, cryptocurrency, blah, blah, blah. And my usual response is, well, yeah, obviously. But, you know, we don't talk about it. It's not a feature. We're not a crypto company doing crypto things for crypto, you know, fanboys or whatever. We're using blockchain because it has these, you know, valuable properties and it gives us these capabilities for, you know, security and provenance and tracking and all of that stuff. But we're not going to beat, you know, the mass market over the head with it. You don't need to grab MetaMask and spend, you know, a weekend learning new things, or you're like, no, no, no. It's all going to be behind the scenes. You still get all the benefits, everything. Like literally a tokenized object is kind of almost the atomic unit for everything that we've got. All the virtual goods, all the virtual real estate, you know, the clothing of your character, it's all tokenized. So Basically, they're all NFTs, right? They're all unique. They have an origin point and, you know, have a value and properties. And I think that that's also another important distinction. If you talk to a Metaverse company and the first thing out of their mouth is buy our token, then it's a token sale wrapped in sexy technology. It's not technology that's powered by this other thing, right? And so, yeah, so NFTs for us are like any and all things. And then, yeah, sure, you want to have some that are more rare or more scarce, because that's cool and great for people that want to speculate or invest. But the real value of Blockchain isn't the scarcity or rarity or the store value, as it were. It always boils back down again, the safety, the security, the commerce. So, for one example, you know, we have a. I actually have a pretty wicked patent and virtual goods, which is basically linking any 2D or 3D object in a 3D space or world to something real in the real world, right? So if you imagine, I don't know, walking down the street and finding a 3D Starbucks coffee cup in AR, and you pick it up and go to Starbucks and you can exchange that for real coffee you know that linking between that tokenized NFT3D object of a coffee is equal to an actual real world coffee. That's a big deal. And I don't. Again, this is. I don't think it's occurred to most of the planet yet that this is where commerce is going and this is where metaverse tech is going.

Definitely.

And the idea of an NFT being a tokenized pointer to something else where there's no real connection, you know, if this server goes offline or the artist torches it or whatever, you still own the token. Good for you. You don't own the actual artwork or.

You just spend 69 million for that.

Yeah, you spent $69 million for it. But in our case, if you own the token, you own the asset. It's yours. You have control over it. And if you want to take it off and go somewhere else, you should be able to do that. Getting back to interoperability, but the idea that there's that link, or even the other way around, if I go to the store and buy a pair of fancy Nike shoes, I should also get a unique 3D NFT token that's the same look and example and whatever of the Nikes, and it's going to have a unique number to it. But this token and this 3D object equals my pair of shoes. So now I can wear them in the real world and my avatar can wear them. And then when you expand that out and get away from like, fashion and entertainment and start thinking about, you know, supply chain or sports entertainment or commercial real estate or, you know, medical use cases or even, you know, digital twins. My whole thesis about all of this stuff is it's crossing between virtual and real, digital and analog, AR and VR. You know, it's that bridge. And that's where the meta comes from. Even in our company's name, Transmira. Right. Trans. It's across. It's, you know, it's connecting. And then mirror is awesome root word. You know, it's a. It's a root for miracle and mirage, which I think is super clever. But it's also, you know, depending on your language, I think, you know, like, mirror is Russian for, like, the future. I think future. And then mira in Spanish means to look or to see. So it's like the best root word ever.

Right.

But these are, these are important things for defining what the metaverse is and the philosophy in terms of how to build it, how to bring all these pieces together. So I don't know, I'm getting a little off track. And not really answering your question, but.

No, no, I love it. Just a sidestep. So what's your idea around digital real estate then? Because last week there was all the news about 3.4 million in Sandbox and then 2.4 million in Decentraland, which to me doesn't make sense because it's an artificial scarcity that bollocks because for one thing, as Philip Rosenill, founder of Second Life, said, I can buy a land next to you and put up a Nazi flag, and there you go, you land. So good luck with spending at 3 million. And it's artificial because the metaverse is infin, so why would you limit yourself to grid like pattern? So that's how I look at it. What's your idea?

So there's a couple things. First, it's right idea, wrong implementation. Right. So I think, you know, let me kick back to Second Life. So a lot of people think Second Life was successful and it when it was in its own right, but it did so many things wrong or just it could have been better. And one of the problems that they had was they let people buy virtual real estate, but then once they owned it, that was it, you know, end of story. So the problem they had was over time, you know, as they were building out the Second Life world, early users got in, did stuff, and maybe they left, they got bored, they moved on, you know, so you had this growing number of places that were not being maintained or upkept. And as new users are coming in, they were buying new locations in the outer ridges, Right. So over time, the Second Life world got bigger and bigger and bigger. But as a new user came in, they were farther and farther away from any of the population spots. So you could log in and you could go for like an hour and not see anybody, but you're owning your property. And if they had simply changed that to like a leasing model, where I'm going to buy this location for two years and then I either renew it and maintain it, or it goes back on the market, that would have kept the very vibrant city or world center, as it were. So in our case, you know, for our startup, we are doing the virtual real estate stuff, but we treat locations like domain names. You buy it five bucks, ten bucks, super cheap, and it's yours for two years and then you renew it, you know, after that for a dollar or two dollars or whatever. So this does a couple of things. A, that flat rate like a domain name keeps it cheap and accessible for everybody. So, you know, if you want to Buy it and turn around and sell it to somebody else for 20 grand. More power to you, Right? Just like a domain name. But if you don't upkeep it and you don't do anything with it and you don't renew it, it's ultimately going to go back into the listing for somebody else to pick up. So that helps kind of keep things alive and vibrant. And then because of how we're monetizing stuff, you know, we want a brand or content creator to basically create content and place it somewhere. And, you know, as a content creator, I should be able to create whatever I want for free and share it with my friends. And we're going to let you do that. But if you want to put it on like the public channel where everybody has to see it, you have to pay a couple of bucks and that'll give you like a week or a timer. And when it kicks down to zero, it doesn't get deleted, it just goes back to your private layer. Okay. And then of course, you know, somebody else can come along and say, hey, this is the coolest stuff I've ever seen. I'm going to pay a dollar or five dollars and I'm going to give it more time. Or, this is horrifying. It's offensive. I can't even believe this is allowed. I'm going to pay five bucks and shrink it back to zero, make it go away. So now we've got all of our users are basically turning into a monetized content curation and moderation system, right? So everybody's gonna be throwing around quarters and dollars like all day long. Good content will stay, bad content will go away. But for the guy that happens to own that particular real estate location, we'll do a revenue share back with him. So good content will draw money, we'll draw attention, we'll draw attraction. And then whoever happened to pick a good location and is out there saying, hey, come check out the content here. Look at what's going on at this particular place that I've got. So even though there's still scarcity in the sense of there's only so many locations around the planet Earth, your local high school could suddenly become valuable because that's where a lot of people are doing stuff, right? But it creates a constant flow of activity, it moderates the content, it avoids AR and VR spam. You know, you don't want to log in and just see a whole bunch of unrelated crap all over the place. It just changes the dynamic of things. And I think that's Another area that a lot of these virtual world guys, they haven't thought about. They get so excited about, you know, their coin or. I just sold the eiffel tower for 20 grand. Okay, well, good for you. But now what? It's not a sustainable model. Somebody has to sell that for a higher amount than somebody else. And it's like I'm a regular guy doing a regular 9 to 5 job, you know, Okay, I missed the whole crypto craze. I don't have 30 million to blow on a 2D NFT. That's not going to do anything for me. Right. So just that again, that philosophical difference in how we approach things and also tying it back to the real world. Now, yeah, I can have my floating island or whatever, but I also have my office or my school or my mall. It's a bit of a game changer. So, yeah, we definitely want to allow the virtual real estate stuff for sure. And we've got some other models in there that help protect against things like you. Like your example where you don't want your angry neighbor to grab some plots next to your house and start plotting Nazi flags. That's not going to be allowed right now. You may have a whole bunch of giant 3D rubber ducks in your next door yard just to irritate you. Well, okay, well, fine. Well, he had to pay for that and you could just as easily pay five bucks to make them go away. Right?

So, yeah, fair enough. So if we go back to, you know, when we have, you know, multiple metaverse spaces, how are we going to move from one to another and will it be like opening a new website, will be using portals, you know, meta traversal? How are we going to enable this?

It kind of depends. There's a few different ways and some of it is technical and some of it's just user experience. Right. So from a technical perspective, if it's in a 3D VR sort of space, it's literally just, it's just a simple matter of, you know, am I going to type in a coordinates or type in a name or am I going to open up an interface and zoom around on a map and click somewhere? There's like a dozen different ways to do that and it's instant transferability. Augmented reality, on the other hand, is completely different because you're going to have to walk somewhere else to go somewhere else. Right. That's just the nature of it. And, you know, whether your, your user experience is, you know, I'm going to step into a portal or 3D thing or I'm going to open up a bookmark list and just type in something. Or maybe it's an audio interface. Right. Hey, metaverse, take me home. So I think it's just going to be all of those, depending on which environment you have, which client you're using, which metaverse you're in, what the rules are. And there's also, you know, just like in the real world, they have to walk from point A to point B. There's probably going to be some virtual worlds or metaverses that don't allow teleportation. You know, kind of like in Ready Player One, right? You had to walk with your avatar to get to a particular portal to log in, type an address and go somewhere else. That's like an artificial constraint to kind of manage, you know, traffic and that sort of thing. So, short answer, I don't know, long answer, any of the above, they'll all work out just fine.

How do we find what we're looking for? Because there's. There's no Google in the metaverse yet. Interesting business model potentially. But how do we find whatever we're looking for?

You know what, that's a really good question. So I have to kind of compare that back to the real world to some degree, right? So if I want to find something, you know, back in the old days, you'd ask a neighbor, and then, then you had the Yellow Pages, right? And then you had, you know, like the Yahoo index of links. And then ultimately you had search engines kind of kick in. And so I can pretty much search for anything. So I think that sort of model will still hold itself true over to the metaverse to some degree. The problem with the metaverse stuff that's different from the real world is even if I built out the most amazing 3D, you know, whatever environment, how do you search a space? You have to go in and annotate everything. Everything has to have some type of. Of reference or tagging or, you know, annotation or something to give it. You know, it's like the semantic sort of approach, right? I can't go into, you know, World of Warcraft and search for Mountain. It's not going to know what the hell I'm talking about. But if I said, oh, you know, I'm looking for Mount Mordor or whatever, it's like, okay, cool, it's got a name, so I know where to go. So it's probably going to be, you know, again, some level of text search or voice search, probably more voice. But yeah, that's probably the Easy one. But the tricky part is going to be all about how do you build those worlds and kind of give everything a reference point that's searchable because nobody wants to sit down and say, oh, I got to search for 176 AB77C65. Like, I don't even know what the hell that is. Right. Just same thing. There's going to have to be somebody somewhere like an ICANN that connects. Oh, okay. So, you know, robert.com equals, you know, 127.6.5.423 or something.

So, yeah, that is a challenge in itself to make that happen. I agree. That's very important. So you mentioned digital twins already. How do you see the sort of the enterprise metaverse and digital twins ranging from a machine in a factory to a dark factory to a smart city to a digital twin of Earth. How do you see that connecting and what's the importance there?

Yeah, I would like to point out for any listeners that you and I have never ever talked before. Before I answer this question, I feel like you're just handing me some easy ones. Okay. So I usually try not to pimp my own thing, but it's necessary to answer the question. So again, kind of our approach here is to start with the real world and kind of build up. Right. So generally there's two different definitions for digital twins. One is the simulation model. I want to simulate a car engine or, or surgery or something, and that's a digital twin. And I'm going to go in and do all that simulation stuff. The other digital twin definition is, hey, there's a building in the real world and I've got a 3D copy of it in a virtual space somewhere that's identical. Right. So in our case, and we're actually going to be demoing some, like, really amazing stuff at CES in a couple of weeks, which is going to be crazy. You're going to see it in the press. But we're working on developing city scale digital twins, and we're going to be like launching a hundred cities in the next couple of years. I'm working on some amazing stuff. So. So at the city level, you've got all these buildings, right? But you really kind of have to boil down to it's like room level, then building level, then block, and then city, and then kind of you get bigger, right? So if you go down to the, the room or the building level A, I think sometime in the next, you know, five or ten years, you're going to start seeing a lot of Buildings that have their own kind of metaverse, you know, cloud digital twin server that just handles all the local stuff. Stuff is maybe tied into like building management systems and CCTV and H vac and all that sort of stuff.

Right.

So if you've got a digital twin of a building or you know, a mall or an oil rig or you know, an office space or whatever, it's 3D. And then you start integrating in all the IoT data sources and whatever else you can to give it some life and give it some data visualization. A, there's a huge amount of use cases there for, you know, again, medical, retail, you know, whatever. But from a commercial and enterprise thing, again, getting back to blending AR and VR together, if I can sit in an office and zoom in, you know, through a 3D VR space to an oil rig that's like, you know, 2,000 miles away with my avatar and walk around and then click on each piece of machinery, each tube, each pipe, each, you know, whatever, and get its current status, get its history, get its maintenance records, you know, get information on how to fix the repair it, you know, get all the machine parts. I mean, that's a really powerful thing to be able to do. Uh, and it saved me the whole trip of going out there. And then at the same time you have a, you know, supervisor that's there maybe with a little heads up display or a tablet getting access to the same information. He doesn't have to go back to the office to get a manual. He can do it right there on the spot. And maybe, you know, all his engineers are like, they can leave their little notes, hey, this one's kind of finicky. You have to kick it over here three times and it'll work again. Right. Um, then at the same time, when you think about like safety and stuff, there's a lot of gear in the, the industrial world for like, you know, impact sensors and hard hats and things that can kind of test for stress or dehydration and which is cool. So it's nice to know if, you know, Bob had an impact event to his head. Right? That's important. But nobody knows where Bob is. I've got the data, but I don't have the location. But if that is integrated into a digital twin of a space, somebody that's remote or somebody that's on site can immediately know, hey, Bob got hit in the head and he's behind boiler number three on the second floor. That's where I've got to dispatch a medical and a safety team to that can save Bob's life. And that will also, I would expect, would reduce the insurance costs significantly while reducing risk and also making things way more efficient and streamlined. So this idea of digital twins, you know, all metaverse enabled and integrated and everything else, I think it takes all the enterprise, all the commercial, all the industrial stuff to a whole nother level in terms of, you know, planning and operations and efficiency and streamlining and optimization and safety. And it just goes on and on and on, and we just don't have that yet. I mean, there's small use cases. You know, maybe I've modeled out an oil rig and I can sit in front of my computer and do a simulation, but it's not necessarily populated with real time data. Right. Or it's not integrated with all these other pieces. And it's the integration of all these things together in this lovely vertical stack tied back to the location that suddenly makes all these amazing things possible. So I could just easily do a copy of it in Decentraland, but like, nobody cares, right? It's a fun space. But when you start basing the metaverse on the real world, real world first and then constructive fantasy stuff as opposed to the other way around, then I think that's kind of the winning combination. And that's really where the metaverse is going to end up in five or 10 years. And that's where when people talk about, oh, we're going to be working in the metaverse and it's going to spend so much time, we can make money and do all this stuff, it's not going to be in a social VR world, it's not going to be in a, you know, in a fantasy land. It's going to be in something like a real world digital twin metaverse that other things grow out of and connect to.

Yeah, let's go to the dark side. What kind of ethical challenges do you see happening with the metaverse?

Well, privacy is a big one. Right. So there's a 3D artist that I contracted a couple months ago and then ultimately I gave her a job offers like, hey, I'd love for you to work for us full time because you're amazing. And you know, she was really happy and really excited and like the first couple days we were trying to onboard her and you know, we're talking about, okay, this is how we do this, this is how we do that. And she was a little perplexed that I was like, hey, you know, you work whenever you want, you know, you're in a different time zone. So I really don't care. I'm not going to track your hours or your minutes. Here's what I want you to work on this week. Get it done. I'm going to be happy. And, you know, if you need to take time off to run some errands or, you know, you get sick or whatever, just let us know. It's all good. It's not going to count against you. You know, we're trying to build a nice, friendly and very collaborative collegiate environment that everybody's excited to be at, right? And she was kind of stunned. And I was talking to her, and she started getting, like, really emotional on me. I thought, okay, you know, what did I do? Did I say something wrong? And I defend her. And she started telling me that she had had job for a long time, you know, doing 3D modeling, but they had software on her computer as part of her job that tracked her mouse to make sure she was working. So all day long, nonstop, that mouse had better be moving and she had better be productive or she wasn't going to get paid. And I thought, wow, that is like, super dystopian and, like, horrible. But to answer your question, when you think about the Metaverse, if this is something that I'm going to start spending significant time in, and I don't mean, you know, playing World of Warcraft or some other Call of Duty or whatever, I mean like doing work, meeting people, going to 3D conferences in your. Whatever the nature of these systems, whoever's running the servers or whatever, they're going to know where your avatar is at any given time of the day. They're going to know your whole history, your actions. It's just like when you're on a website somewhere, it's all tracked. So the downside is for somebody in an employment position or government position or any kind of position of authority to abuse that just as much as Facebook and Twitter and some others have really clamped down on free speech. And, you know, what you can say and what you can publish. The potential for Metaverse technologies to really be abused can go far, far beyond that, because, again, most of it boils down to who you are, where you are, and what you're doing to give you those right experiences. And I think that's probably the big dystopian, you know, potential sideways.

And so what are some of the dangers? Because obviously in Web two, we have deep fakes, we have hacker scammers, or you have, what, bullying, whatever. What kind of danger do you see?

Fake identities. And I've been a gamer for Like a billion years, right? I mean, I played text based, you know, online role playing games, like back in the day. One thing that a lot of people like to do in virtual world, specifically in role playing games, is to be somebody else other than who they are, right? And it may be something as simple as a gender swap. I'm going to play a female character because I know guy characters give female characters free stuff all day long, right? That's one way. Another way is, which can be positive or negative, is being able to vicariously experiment with a different personality. I'm an introvert in real life, but when I'm in a, you know, one of these virtual games, I'm the mean, you know, jerk guy that's always, you know, beating up, you know, smaller elves or, you know, whatever it may be. And I get to experience what it is to be an aggressive personality or maybe, you know, again, I'm shy. But in a game world that could be like the leader of a thousand people guild, I mean, that's, there's a whole another social skill set there. But the intermediary of the avatar lets me hide my personality and lets me experience something else. And as empowering as that can be, that can also be twisted very easily. I can come across as a type of person or an age or a political affiliation or whatever, that's not really truly who I am to kind of gain confidence with somebody else and then abuse the system. But a lot of this can be fixed with some identity controls, right? Which makes sense. But then you also still want to maintain people's ability to have a sense of anonymity to protect themselves from the metaverse overlords. But also just because I should be able to be free to say what I want and go what I want and do what I want, right? So the tricky part is this. The challenge is finding a way to balance anonymity and responsibility. And this is where the system should always know who you are and be able to like, go right back to you. You shouldn't be able to have like 50 accounts. You should have one. Maybe it's tied to your phone, right? But that data as your identity, it's yours. You control it and, you know, you're happy. You should be able to associate multiple aliases with that because, you know, maybe I want to have a particular avatar for work and I got another one when it's party time and another one when I want to go play a game, right? And maybe I want to have a different username or, you know, today I'm Hungar the Barbarian, and tomorrow I'm Mr. Rice and I'm wearing an avatar suit. But in either of those cases, as long as the system can know, hey, this guy, this character has been a problem, he's harassing people or whatever. He can't just quit his account and start another one. The system can hold that original identity responsible without exposing the identity. Does that kind of make sense?

Yeah, totally, because that's exactly a startup I was working on before that I'm doing at the moment. We call this anonymous accountability. It's a very, very hard problem to crack. I still think I've conceptually cracked it, but it technically is very, very difficult because you need like all the kinds of zero knowledge proof hard encryption, homomorphic encryption, and that kind of technology.

But there's a super easy way. You just send me your fingerprints and a copy of your driver's license, and I know a guy who will rough you up if you cause me any problems. So problem solved.

There you go. There you go.

So many of us tend to get. Get excited about the coolness, the sexiness, and how fun and engaging it is that we sometimes forget to think about what are the practical applications and how do we make this useful? How do we monetize it? How do we make it easy for other people to make money? How do we make the cool experiences that have value and not just novelty?

Yeah, that's a very good point. So. Well, thank you so much, Robert. I really, really appreciate your insights. It's been absolutely enlightening.

Oh, cool. And thank you, Mark. I really appreciate the opportunity.

All right, well, have a great, great evening and we'll be in touch.

All right, sounds good. All right, cheers.

Thank you. Bye. Bye.

And that wraps up the conversation with Robert Rice. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is that Robert is indeed a metaverse pioneer. He knows so much about this space and how it will impact organizations. What struck me is also that Robert believes that the fully decentralized metaverse will never happen, which I agree with and which is I also discussed in my new book, Step into the Metaverse. So 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.