Forever Digital Pets in the Petaverse

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our topic is digital pets on the blockchain uh real living pets have a pesky fundamental problem they have a limited lifespan and they have a tendency to die at some point and for anyone who has children that have experienced the loss of a pet there are few things more heartbreaking than seeing them grieve over a loved one but digital pets aren't Immortal either I bet some of our listeners of a certain age had a tamagachi back in the late 90s and early 2000s and religiously took care of it until that one day you forgot and it died or worse you lost the little egg itself and you had to go buy a new one well what if your pets could actually live forever at least in the digital realm with blockchain technology that is now possible and our guest today is on a mission to do just that she wants to give digital pets immortality Our Guest is Susan Cummings she is the founder and CEO of tiny rebel games and Tiny Rebel are a really experienced team of developers with backgrounds at Rockstar Games from back in the day early 2K Games which they built from the ground up and they have

even worked with one of my absolutely favorite quirky British IPS Wallace and grommet tiny rubel's aim is to design an open standard for web3 digital companions that can be with you wherever you want to take them any blockchain any art style unlimited dimensions in short they are building the peterse and so to tell us all about the world of the peterse I'm excited to bring on the show Susan Cummings Susan welcome to the Pod thank you Nico you've definitely done your homework well thank you okay well with that intro out of the way let's get right into it and we always like to start with our guest backgrounds especially ones uh who have an incredible background like yours so why don't you tell us more about who you are and where you come from sure so I've been in video games for half my life now about 25 26 years um I go back to the earliest days of of take two interactive um when I made some introductions that led to the actual founding of Rockstar Games I was involved in the first Grand Theft Auto um whilst there my my husband

uh was on the Rockstar Games team and was one of the producers on Grand Theft Auto this would have been by city I'm sorry San Andreas and uh GTA 4 right around the time we left and uh I started 2K Games and 2K sports with other Executives at take two so I was had the Good Fortune to sign things like Bioshock and Borderlands and buy the civilization IP and the foraa studio um we had a couple hundred million dollars to expand what take two was you know and and is today so that was a very exciting period for us uh Lee and I started tiny rebel games about 15 years ago right after our son was born early in New York uh after about six months of being home parents and taking time off we decided to start a company and we looked down at our screaming child and came up with the name tiny Rebel which is also a beer company uh my uh my family also started the tiny Rebel Brewery which is a sister company of ours that's also based in uh in Wales like us um so tiny Rebel has done a number of things over the years

um since we set it up uh we did a game called Doctor Who Legacy which was one of the sort of most loved Doctor Who games that people wish would come back that we we shut down but about three million people played that uh that was an early free to-play uh Puzzle Battle game in the style of puzzle and dragons and uh following that we did a game called Dr Infinity as a follow on to it and then like you mentioned we did the Wallace and grommet project which was uh a wonderful time we we finished that work a couple years ago uh we'd won a major government grant in the UK they give you money to do creative things which is wild as an as an American coming over here uh we won a multi-million pound grant that we LED um bid for and got to play with ardman and a couple of other um development Studios to build AR experiences um on the iPhone and Android and that led to well some ground with the big fix up and W andr fix up the city which I think is some of the coolest AR that's ever come out on mobile phones it was pure R&D we had no

marketing money most people have never played it but uh it was a wonderful experience and is really where our knowledge of of AR comes from and um so since that we've been considered leaders in the space uh we worked closely with Qualcomm on Snapdragon spaces uh we've worked with meta on their AR strategy uh we've been close with apple uh who love the work that we've done in ldar and uh and led to to pede uh which we started developing a few years ago all right there's a lot to unpack there and a lot of amazing experiences amazing IP that you've worked old uh well well yeah both I guess um yeah I love that the UK gives uh government grants to do cool things I'm from Finland originally and Finland has a very similar approach every single gaming company founder or Entertainment Company founder in Finland will will say like the government DEC is this group they they fund projects and it's a real shame that the US doesn't do that um I feel like there would be a lot more amazing innovation in entertainment and gaming um and creative things if if if

that was there um true it's a nice thing about being a a big fish in a small pond you know I've always lived in in in areas of Technology where no one needed you you know I was in San Francisco I was in LA I was in New York and but now in like Wales I have direct contact with the Welsh government you know and ministers and I'm able to influence you know creative policy and things like that and and that's really exciting and I'm gratified by that uh ability to do that and yeah by the UK government taking creative industry seriously I think it's really really yeah 100% And I mean if you look at supercell and Finland just use my own experience from the Finish gaming industry I mean they're proud to stay in Finland not relocate to low tax regions and they're proud they proudly say every year we are happy to pay the billions they pay in finished taxes um because they have the Finnish government and the system there to to thank so anyway let's not make this into a political show gaming gaming podcast let's not talk about government policy uh around entertainment though it would be nice to to see more support there um so let's

talk about uh the metaverse and the peterse in particular so we've we've all heard a lot about metaverses um in recent years and there are many competing Visions for what the metaverse or metaverses are going to be metaverse ey maybe plural um and I even learned while I was researching this episode that there is a terse Believe It or Not which is the metaverse for Tamagotchis and the Tamagotchi still are apparently very much around so tell me what is the peterse that you are building and and how does it differ from all these other metaverse eye that are out there it's a great question I mean I I see what we're building as being the the next logical progression of the digital pet tamagachi is the kind of Grandfather of all of this right 85 million people played tamagachi at least I'm sure it's well and above that but the number I found was 85 million and um you know it was a very simple game back in the day super rudimentary in terms of art style you know and and everyone as a child you know had this I think um but you know

the the pets die as as as you pointed out earlier and um it was a it was a very solo experience that you had on your own and it was confined to that piece of hardware and then the next Generation would be Nintendo and it's interestingly these inflection points happen every decade or so so nendo came out about a decade after the first tamagachi and uh in this case it was a pretty or more robust gaming experience but it was still confined to one game you can only play with Nintendo in in the Nintendo Game and when Nintendo moves on from that game or from that Hardware your pet's trapped um and again it was still a very solo experience there was no multiplayer you know Nintendo back then and then about 10 years later Roblox showed with adop me and pet Simulator X that digital pets are indeed Evergreen made it a multiplayer experience that's all largely based around trading systems very interesting to web 3 is that if you look at what kids are doing on Roblox they're trading they're trading based on scarcity which is really interesting in and of itself so the next generation of

the digital pet is about untethering that pet is about the idea that your pet should be able to go where you want it to go you should you know have the keys have the control over your digital pet every time one of these digital pets shut down there's petitions uh to bring it back and I you know this this is something you've you've invested time and and and uh emotionally bonded with and now it's not yours and you ultimately realize it's not yours and so that's really important um and that's why you know so much of the foundation was project was about the idea of an heirloom an artifact something that could be passed down generationally um as a as as something that that's yours um and so uh that's a big part of of what the pede is the other the other thing is that um especially when you think about cats you know which is where we started um pets have lives of their own right and the point of these digital pet games is very much you're taking care of them you know they're they're yours they're like an appendage of yours they're beholden to you um we've built this a little bit differently

uh because we don't think of pets as being something you own we think of them as something that's a part of your life that you share your life with and so our pets have um have a simulation of autonomy and uh so we built um technology on top of uh machine learning that allows your pet to make decisions for themselves and so if you come back days later you're going to find out what your pets's been up to in real time what their diary entry basically says they've been doing and their stats change based on what they're doing and so that's the other big you know Evolution here um is is um is giving these these Pats a feeling of of sentience it's obviously fake sentience but in this this feeling of sensient yeah I love the idea of having a a personality of their own I was looking into this in fact the the game that I'm working on blockstars we have a very similar concept part of the reason I wanted to talk to you is because this this concept resonated with me which is the idea that uh block stars of musicians on the blockchain they all have individual personalities every single one of them is unique again that's what blockchain enables in in many ways unique digital um assets and ownership um and we modeled all of our

musicians uh personalities on the Myers Briggs model um and then broke that down further into like subcategories and so there's like tens of thousands of different kinds of personalities that they can have so I love the idea that these pets are unique they're their own thing they're not something you own they're not something that's attached to the side of you and you like you know they only exist as you exist they exist for themselves and so how does that make interacting with digital pets different the fact that these pets have a personality I mean all the tamag goas were essentially the same right like you just you looked after it you did the thing and then if you forgot to do it it died right very simple but very powerful right because it's something that you are looking after and it needs you or it dies and I think that's part of the reason why it resonated with so many people we love the idea of being able to emotionally bond with things you know it's it's interesting the physical pet industry is a $200 billion doll industry um and my theory here is that it's one of the only things that the whole world can agree on it doesn't matter your your politics your gender your geography anything we all have dogs and cats um

and other types of cats and I think that's really fascinating and I think that that's why um digital pets are so Evergreen and you know in particular because I think it helps us to connect to technology we understand pets um and where it hasn't worked it's often been because it's been about a you know a madeup creature we understand dogs and cats I think that that's really important um so you know and the other thing is going back to what you were saying is that those pets were combined to one game you can only play with Tom in a tomagotchi hardware in a tomagotchi game you can only play with nintend dog in the nintend dog game you can only play with my Talking Tom in the My Talking Tom game this brings up interoperability and so what we built at pede is a is fundamentally a tech stack it's a it's a pet system we call it our pet stack and the idea is that we spent the last several years refining this building uh the model the blend shapes uh the rig the animation and AI systems and the

ability to bring them into different types of unity experiences where you could reuse those assets and so we have a whole bunch of different ways you can use your pet it's not about one game there's a game that we're Alpha Testing right now but you can also bring them onto your video calls I probably should have brought onto this this stream today um you can bring them onto your Twitch stream you can bring them onto your YouTube stream your your followers uh your subscribers can play with your pet on stream um you can bring them into VR you can bring them on to choose your own adventure stories in text and but it's all the same pet and that I think is a first of its kind and that means in the future when we open source access to that Tech anybody who's building a game that wants to add a pet system can simply take arts and it's another way of taking care of your pet we're going to talk about all the different technology pieces that that uh uh that you're working with but you know blockchain obviously is one of the things that you highlight uh in your white paper what is it about blockchain technology that you think is is really critical here what does that enable that you don't think

could be done otherwise uh in creating these unique digital pets that have a have a life of their own and hopefully live for years and years and years to come it's a years and years to come look I um blockchain has always been about something very specific to me um blockchain at its core is a database it's not about the nft nonsense it's not about floor price and selling and minting out and all this nonsense that has become the one and only use case of blockchain in games and it's funny when I uh set out to raise money for what we were doing a couple years ago before we closed our seat round I had a fund tell me that they thought I'd come up with the first non-tradable token why would anyone want to sell their pets they didn't think there was an addressable Market there and that really bothered me because I don't think that that's what blockchain's usage is about I I don't think it's about buying something purely to sell it and flipping it the problem is as game developers we want to build community and 10,000 people's not not a big enough Community for anybody in the

game industry to take it seriously and when you sell it you're just passing that membership to someone else which if anything is just a burden because now we have to educate a new user about the community and so it has to be something bigger than that and so for me as a purist the blockchain usage is simply that Providence that who do you trust your data with if you're going to throw all your love and time into a pet you're going to trust me you know do we trust you know Twitter with our data do we trust Facebook with our data it should be yours and so that really is purely the only use case within peders is is that Simplicity and it's really over the course of the last year made me think our rethink our relationship with the blockchain uh initially we said we're going to sell scarce nfts on on ethereum and um and give you things to do I think we were one of the first projects to actually launch with utility which is really exciting but what we found is a space that's like kind of destroying itself you know and but because of a bunch of

bad there's a bunch of great players you know a lot of us are trying to do really good things and there's the bad players um who have sort of Trapped us into these Norms of of minting out and floor price and open SE and all this stuff and what we realized was everything that we believe and want to do can happen upfront or it can happen later and so we' really soften our approach to it whereas once upon a time we said buy an nft come do stuff now it's like you know what if you want to hear about blockchain I'm not going to say a word about it this has nothing to do with it you you you adopt a digital pet anybody could do it any child can do it and later is when we'll reintroduce it so right now there's there's no blockchain required and I don't think there ever will be I think it's a sort of thing that if you understand the value if you've emotionally bonded with something you're going to want the control of that to be yours and you see it every time a digital pet project shuts down and people are outraged we want to be able to step in and say you know what it does

suck so here's your chance to Mint it um and so I think that this could be a project that helps to educate um and I think that that's really important I think that you can lead people to water or you can drown them in it and I think that web three gaming is trying to drown people in something that they really don't want right now um and I think that that's okay I don't think that that negates the the Purity and great things about blockchain I think it just means that we have to sof our approach and educate y yeah no no um preaching to the choir there I totally totally hear you um now you don't want people to necessarily even think about blockchain and I completely agree with that that notion but at some point as you say they make the emotional connection to their pet they're like okay I want this pet to live forever I'm gonna mint it right on some blockchain and at that point you do have to know something about blockchain um and you also have to deal with the problems that minting on a blockchain you have to choose a

blockchain at that point presumably um that comes with all the problems of interoperability which you've already alluded to so let's jump to that yes right now because uh just a couple of weeks I think last episode or a couple weeks ago we had game seven on this podcast here and they did this comprehensive state of web 3 report uh where they took a 30,000 foot View and I recommend all of our listeners go go and check it out uh and they highlighted a stat that absolutely blew my mind um and they had catalog at least 200 different blockchains uh and more coming all the time and a lot of them are focused on gaming and you know digital lastet ownership and and so that can't scale obviously not all of those blockchains will survive in fact most of them will be gone you know in 12 24 36 months and so how do you ensure that if one of your pet owners mints on one of these blockchains that is doomed to to die itself the pet would die at the same time how do you make sure that that pet lives on forever and can go from blockchain to blockchain really easy easily without it being a huge burden um

on the user having to to do it and it's a great question so our white paper talks about something that we call cloning uh because we we faced this very question back when we um started the project and we were trying to decide what blockchain to Mint on and we as game developers know that there are lots of options in terms of engines in terms of blockchains and we needed to be to have be a step remov from that the other problem with blockchain is that they're they're largely immutable that's you know kind of the point you don't have to worry about someone changing your stuff that doesn't really work for game development if you have an RPG character you want to level up your character you want to collect stuff that's where a lot of the value comes from in an RPG MMO character is the stuff that you've collected and how you L it up so we needed that too so what we said and it's funny enough back when I thought this was potentially a negative was that we would store that data a blueprint of your pet in a web two cense on Firebase that's the source of truth right that's readable in with human eyes um a

blueprint think of it like the lud nft project you know it's a it's a it's a a fat tabby cat you know with blue eyes etc etc etc and all this information in the text file um and that's web two and that's where all of our pets start life now by the way right is these new pets they're all Web Two the web three part comes in where we say we're going to M that on the blockchain and that's where it points to and so now you don't have to worry about that Firebase data going away because we can mint it on the blockchain but what we also realized was there was nothing stopping us from making a copy of that on salana on polygon on you know where wherever you wanted to use it it's not the real nft it's a non-tradable copy of your nft that points to the same place but it means you can simultaneously use it across blockchains because as we talk about in the white paper there are too many blockchains right now they're they're going to be new ones as well 20 years from now if I want my grandkids to be able to use this pet I need to accommodate for a new blockchain and so that's where cloning comes in is the

idea that you there there's a source of Truth with an nft that points to it and then we can use it across other chains as well that also means that the art style can change so and you see that in our in our project right now we don't always use the same art style for your pet um the app has one art style the nron our AR app has a completely different art style so what that means is in the future as Fidelity moves on like if you try to like boot up Nintendo right now it looks like it was made 20 years ago and that makes it hard to really get back into things for some people we can upgrade the art stop same data same information just a prettier higher Fidelity art style so yeah that was always what this was about and then and you know this year the Epiphany moment was you know what it doesn't have to happen first that that minting part could happen at any point no it makes it makes total sense I completely understand that um I I do want to play kind of Devil's Advocate or poke at this a little bit because uh you know when

you have a real life pet you know that is a real life pet and yes I guess you can in theory clone your pet right you can clone dogs and cats and there are famous people who who do that they have the one pet that they keep for Generations because they just keep cloning it um from you know you know when they die like they clone the next one so so I'm not the real life analogy does exist but it's a little more strained I think in the Royal World think of it as a passport I I think the problem with cloning is we're not talking about a copy that goes off and has its own set of memories and experiences it's the same pet it's a passport to use it on other blockchains it's it's one pet if if you have a hat you can use that hat anywhere that pet has been cloned to if they level up that experience is a shared source of Truth across all blockchain so think of it more like that think of it more like a hologram of your pet as opposed to a clone of your pet perhaps that yeah no no I I do understand the the concept I'm just I'm going to poke it it a little bit more here though because you know I do think the idea of having a digital

pet or digital companion is that they are unique and if you can clone I understand what you're saying from a technical perspective but from a user perspective uh you are still cloning it and if you're upgrading the art style which again I understand the need for doing that 20 years down the line um it feels a little like it feels like it it would be the different pet so I just that a little bit more and sure yeah the copies aren't tradable and if you sell your pet they go away with them so they they really aren't they're not they they aren't their own pet they can't be passed to somebody else you can't say someone else has the salana version of your cat and you have the ethereum version of it it's really literally the permission to use your pet in other places and it's the same pet and it's because of the blockchain that it's on so it's akin to um here's a good example if you had a video game on on the PlayStation and you ported it onto the Xbox and onto Nintendo systems and imagine if all three consoles could agree to a shared save file so it didn't didn't matter whether you were on Sony or Xbox or Nintendo you're still playing

the same game that's that's what this is that's not going to happen because that's centralized Sony and Microsoft Nintendo but in a decentralized world we can we can actually let you take your stuff with you wherever you want to go regardless of what blockchain it is but it's still the same pet okay it's it's the same personality will it might look different right that looking different doesn't matter on the blockchain that could be anywhere so you know right now I could bring my pet into two different games and I could see them in two completely different art Styles um that's all it's not it's not a different pad it's just a lens that you're looking through think of the Take on Me video you know back in the day from aha it's really just a different filter it's a filter if you will um because and there's a really important reason for this not all games have the same art style so because we made this as technology that we wanted to open source the the tech stack itself we knew that not every game would be comfortable with the same art style some games are anime some games are Tech some games are 2D some games are 3D etc etc that's doesn't matter so someone could take our API and

they could create an anime game and they could interpret our pets in an anime art style that's super important that ability to take it there otherwise you're only going to be limited to very generic games that are happy with one art style for everything which just doesn't fit yeah yeah no I understand um okay well shifting gears a little bit so the thing that really really got me interested and excited is this idea that you could play uh or you could kind of pass on the same pet literally your pet could Outlast the the human right as as opposed to vice versa which is typically what happens and the idea that you'd have generations of the same family playing with the same pet um and I'm going to actually quote something from your white paper which is the kind of for me the money quote if you will or at least the most intriguing quote um so it's here it is is so how transformative would it be for grandchildren to be able to play with the same family pet their grandparents used to play with when they were children how meaningful would it be to have a pet that retains its memories of its time with each owner and whose thoughts and personality form one continuous unbroken chain and that's a

you know that that's kind of a thought exercise that I don't think many of us have ever gone on uh but it really intrigued me and I want to hear a little bit more from you unpack this what does it mean to be able to pass on a pet that actually has its own personality forms memories of its time with its previous owners and then passes those on to the Future Generations really fascinating thought exercise that's why AR uh and and to elri and VR will always be so important to us as a company you know we we imagine a future where your physical pet uh sadly passes away as we've discussed they always do and you could have an insurance policy that someone arrives at your door that day with your AR glasses and your pet ready to go you know it becomes a bit Black Mirror in a very achievable sense and this isn't far future this is something if the AR glasses would catch up they're not quite there yet you know we'll see how it goes with apple and The Vision Pro um that future is possible right now so imagine you know this digital pet that as I'm

talking to you um has a personality it has certain food that it likes because that's the food that I've been training it to to like and I've always put down for it it knows where I put the food because I always put the food in the same place so it learns that it's there in the other room that same pet is off playing with my kid um because he's you know playful and understands how to path around the house and it becomes essentially a real pet but uh in the future yeah my kids my grandkids Etc they have that same pet and imagine you know if they want to change the food that that pet eats and they could retrain them to enjoy something else um I think it's really compelling I think that in many ways I don't think it'll replace the physical pet but on the other hand there are so many people who can't have physical pets there are people who are are elderly or allergies or you know small children who aren't ready who need to be trained you know on in how to take care of a pet and and understand what that responsibility is um and so I think that the digital pet will become a viable alternative to a physical pet as these glasses reach um ubiquity yeah

I mean you know it's companionship right you actually use the term digital companion quite a lot almost interchangeably with digital pet and I think that's where this kicks in which is it's not just a pet to to play with and keep you company or to to you know like amuse you so to speak but it is actually truly about companionship um whether you you're lonely or what you know if if something has a memory if something has a lived experience whether you know digital through software code that is really a lot more interesting than just something that is an oseb if you will you know just like just a play thing that doesn't really have a a personality so I want to pick at this personality piece um and the idea that that a digital companion let's call it a companion for now uh will have a learned memory how would that manifest itself from generation to generation from you know father to son to you know grandson how how does that actually work in in the real world how does it manifest itself so we have this um these AI systems that we've put in place that um

uh form a diary you know if you will of your pets you go into the app and you see what they've been up to that information gets saved into the metadata right now five days of that get saved into it but long term that's something that could be ongoing that data of what your pet's been up to to the point that 10 years from now you could look back to see what the you know the chronicles of uh of your pet's life but all that information can get added to the metadata which can also be updated so it can include their behavioral characteristics their personality characteristics how those characteristics have changed as they've leveled up the currency that they've collected you know from you know participating in games with you um the accessories that they've collected are in the metadata so all of this is listed out as as data and so once again going back to being able to change the art style that means in the future in a game 20 years from now on a different blockchain in a different art style those accessories are still relevant they can still wear the same hat that it had 25 years ago from some other game how does the uh the behavior of the pet change in relation to the human that that's kind of what I'm trying to get at here it's it's not much the technical

side of things I understand the technical side of things uh that and that's that's very clean and I you know I totally get how that works but what what does it do differently what does the pet do differently as it relates to this these changing characteristics that are being stored over years and years and years and years so right now in the core game your pet gains experience what we're going to be introducing next year are choices that you can make based on those experiences that can affect their characteristics um the AI system in my mind are that if a pet is agile for example it should be able to get onto a surface that a less agile pet shouldn't be able to and you can have trainers that would allow a pet to get more and more agile so today it doesn't exist yet but it's just it's absolutely something that's achievable and and not difficult to create it doesn't matter which way do we stretch first with this project but that's always been the idea is it yeah because you could go in a lot of different directions here like you could have you know it has it has a memory and it actually doesn't like you like some you know if you've been mean to it it might be that it doesn't doesn't like you right and and it and it

shuns you and it goes away or so an extreme ex extreme example you know there's the the physical characteristics like agility that that's an easy enough thing to understand from any old RPG right it's like okay fine I can get to that cave now that I couldn't get to before because I'm now trained up to be more agile that's that's simple enough but I think it's more the emotional side of things the mental side of things and the behavioral side of things that is really fascinating and that's really what dragged me into this particular area and really wanted to have on the show is because the idea of interacting with 20 years of it's like you know going on a think about it from a human perspective you go on a date right for the first time you don't know anything about that person um and if it works out you're attracted great there's a spark but then 20 years on you're married you've been living together right and there other things are are interesting to you that weren't necessarily the thing that actually attracted to you in the first place and so it's like the relationship has matured and evolved over time uh in a way that uh I think is difficult

to do through AI but I think is is is doable and that's really why where I'm probing here Susan I I love the idea that if my my grandkid doesn't pay as much attention to the cat as it's used to from it right you know it's parent or so forth that that should have impact and that's honestly the point of the open source nature of what we want to do with our our P system is I want people to be able to build trainers I want people to able to push different directions with this and have it update the metadata I think that's why open source is so important there's there's what we can do as one team and there's what the community can do long term with what we buil yeah because if it takes off I mean the idea of of a community outsourced um uh brain almost you know digital companion brain that evolves to have many more synapses than you can you as an individual developer can actually ever accomplished is utterly fascinating um and uh definitely very very intriguing okay not to mention the digal cloning I like the idea of being able to capture what your pet looks like so that

it's actually your pet not just any pet capturing the audio of the pet so that it sounds like your pet so I think that there one of the places we want to push in the future to make that future of you know your pet dies possible is being able to let you recreate your exact pet as opposed to you know one that you create in our editor yeah yeah absolutely okay so I'm gonna switch gears here and I'm going to talk about another tech that I know is extremely important to you and very near and dear to your heart and that's AR augmented reality um you definitely come across as an evangelist for AR I know and you alluded to this already you're partnered with Qualcomm on their Snapdragon spaces initiative to accelerate an AR future so talk to us about what is AR to you what does it mean how important is it uh for this project uh and actually why you tell us about what what is snapdragon spaces because I think that's clearly a starting place for for you yeah so Qualcomm uh have it's it's really they're they're they're a really interesting company they create technology that ends up helping to evangelize things like virtual reality

and augmented reality so they've created um a chipset to be used in AR glasses and um so it's not it's not theirs it's a you know it's a generic platform that then others like Lenovo um have used to create glasses and so they came to us uh on the back of our work on Wallace and grommet wanting us to to to play with their new toys and we're going to be doing a demo next year that's going to show off you know what that means what pede feels like when it's actually on AR glasses as opposed to your phone the problem with ar right now is most of it's phone based and no matter how many different ways we all try to convince the mass Market that AR is so magical you should be willing to hold your phone like this it's exhausting and you know nian keeps you know pounding up against that wall about this until we have glasses AR isn't going to work but what's really cool is is you know meta with a quest 3 has launched launched mix reality which is going to help Apple you know have announced they incredibly expensive glasses which you know obviously won't be a mouse Market but it's a big step in that direction and I

think it's going to inspire other people to continue to push the technology forward and bring the cost down but you know what I love about AR is it's us looking up and around us of the world again you know the problem with mobile phones is we're like this looking down at our phones VR completely shuts us off from the world but AR is a layer on the world around us and I think that's really magical um and so that's what gets me excited about it is the fact that it doesn't take us out of the real world which I don't think we need taking out of the real world right now I think we need to all be a part of the real world and improving it so um so I'm a big big AR fan yeah uh as an I I've never been ask anybody uh VR I've never really I it's going to be a niche use case and it might make some people some money but you know the idea of like locking yourself away putting this big thing on your head no matter how comfortable you make it and no matter how non- nausey and deucing you can make it um that's the that that's the problem there is that you are being taken away from the world um and not uh able to you know

interact with with what's around you um but uh AR allows you to be part of the world and you know see things uh differently but still recognizably right and I think that's what the interesting thing here is and so in in relation to digital pets digital companions how do you see that working um so give me a use case uh you know I come into the pede I put on my AR glasses um what do I see what do I do how do I interact with this pet uh what is my relationship with it in the real world as augmented by ar your relationship with your pet in your air glasses is as close as we can possibly get to real physical pet ownership it's your pet behaving the way a real pet would so while I'm sitting here my digital pet could come to me to P me to remind me that it's time for them to be fed they could expect to be fed During certain times of day they can play with other members of the household you know they can um it that that's as close as it gets and that's what's so exciting about it and I think that AR is

really where we start to understand virtual companionship because they're they're fitting there you know inherently into our world and I think that that's what's really magic that's as close as we get to realism so I want to prob a little bit more on this this uh AR and the behavior that you see from from the pet um is it a case of just looking around and the Pet's doing its own thing it's got a mind of its own it's wandering around um and it jumps onto the the table or you know it runs out of the door and you know you're observing this right or is it a more hands-on experience where you're not just observing you're actually you're you're guiding you're uh making it do things so to speak you're doing the inputs and then the pet is is responding or is it a bit of both I think it's a bit of both I think within the home setting I imagine it's a bit more I don't say ambient because you're going to have haptics you're going to be able to pet the cat I think it's going be really interesting to see um what that companion ship again brings to people who can't have a physical pet but in the outside world because remember

part of what's it's going to take to get to ubiquity with ar glasses being able to leave your house with them and have them on um and so I imagine a bunch of ways that these digital pets become a part of our life you know we're all used to Google Maps and using you know the arrows to get to a restaurant imagine if your pet can naturally walk you to the restaurant um imagine if you're going running and you're digital pet knows how fast you should be able to run and can can spur you on or you can you know can use it as a ghosting mechanism to to know how fast you should be running so I think there are lots of interesting ways they can take part in our world part of the origination of this um project was the notion of his Arc materials if you read Philip hullman's book the idea that we all have this spiritual pet that's an extension of us and so I imagine that my cat and play with your dog and someone else's dragon and and that just becomes a part of our Lives as we're walking around that just becomes something and expected is it you have this this digital companion uh so where are you at at the moment with experimenting with this with this stuff I I I know that you're working on a lot of different things and obviously it's a very ambitious Vision that you have here what

what is the current status of the pedus what is the current what can you currently do uh with these pets so we just started Alpha Testing our core game which is think of this as the Hub of the experience you you come in you can read the diary and find out what your pet's up to you can play mini games to take care of them this is this is our Nintendo Dogs game uh you can collect accessories um we're going to be expanding the number of rooms that you can accessorize think of it as Nintendo need Animal Crossing um and so that that's a hub of this but meanwhile you can also see your pet in AR you can also bring them into VR you can bring them onto your video calls with all the accessories that they've collected and then you can bring them as a streamer on Twitch or YouTube and let your audience interact what's coming is a bunch of things it's uh the ability for your pet to go on much much bigger Adventures than you can now not just around your neighborhood but imagine them going off around the world and collecting things for you that's coming early next year um we are going to be adding uh trading systems more robust trading systems for

people with their accessories we have two big brands that we're signing deals with so we're going to be introducing different types of pets within the pede um above and beyond uh the cats and um yeah beyond that just more robust features uh for what you can what you can do um within that experience yeah and uh you've youve rais some funding to do this um can you tell us more about the status that you're you're there in terms of uh you know being Iz and and uh working on the question on everyone's Minds right now yeah um yes we closed our seed round at the start of last year uh led by fabric Ventures and Anam mocha is another of our uh bigger investors and oneup Ventures which was started by Ed freeze the CR Xbox um so we have we have some great investors on board with us who are super supportive and you know understood our vision from the beginning you know this notion of a of a sort of open- sourced interoperable digital pet so I think what got everyone excited about about us and you know they continue to be really supportive yeah I mean it's a really it's it's a huge

vision and you to that point you know you're talking about AR audacious yeah a little audacious yeah and you even have that in your in your in your white paper which I love by the way um uh so you know you've got AR you've got blockchain technology web3 stuff you want apis for other developers you want to open source a lot of these things um there's Hardware components here that's a lot to take on um what what is it going to take for this audacious Vision to become a reality want to fast forward you know five years 10 years whatever amount of time you want to fast forward what has what has to happen for this to really become a thing this really becomes a way for humans to interact with digital companions in a way that is very different much more compelling than what it has been in the past uh I don't actually think it's that far off you know keep in mind we're taking a very Mass Market approach to this so we're not asking anyone to buy an nft and so I think from a digital pet standpoint there have been lots and lots and lots of use cases to point to not just the ones that we've mentioned but so many other digital pet games like like Pooh

for example you might remember from the early days of mobile games these things have done millions and millions and millions of of of installs and so there is definitely a path here to us getting this in the hands of the mass market and getting them playing with a digital pet that they can you know take with them between experiences uh the brand deals that we're doing are because we want this to become a household name and you know that's that's very difficult to do in the state of mobile gaming especially right now and so so the brand Integrations that we're going to be doing over the course of of just even just the next year I think are going to be massive to us being able to get um get to you know people to the mass Market understanding that there's a there's a peterse digital pet um beyond that I think that to get to the real meat of this the idea of a digital pet you know within your life it's the AR glasses I think are going to be really important um to that that feeling like a substitute you know for a physical pet um and so I don't think that that's five to 10 years off I I don't think it's it's the the hardware that's available

now or in the near term but I think it's probably in the next three to five years that we're going to start to see at least a hardcore using AR glasses not not everyone but the same way we started with you know SmartWatches and phones and everything else we're going to start with the you know the The Taste the trend setters and taste makers and then we'll we'll go out from there but yeah I think brands are going to be really important branded the option of this and you know look this for a brand the reason why Browns are excited about what we're doing is this is a you know the metaverses for the most part don't exist yet right they're we're building them and it's going to take time until there's stuff to do there and there's a user base and everything else we're not asking anyone to do anything like that we're saying look we've built this Tech suite and you can immediately do all this stuff with with your thing that's really appealing to a brand you know why wouldn't Garfield for example instead of instead of a generic cat want to be a part of that so I think we've got a really exciting compelling use case that we've built that doesn't doesn't feel

like web 3 you know that that leaves that as something that can be adopted when the Market's ready for it yeah and how much of this is you pede you tiny Robble games you the consumer product versus uh you know a backend for a a world developers and Brands integrating with your technology but they know nothing about tiny Rubble games they know nothing about your products um is it what's the balance there how do you obviously you got to do the I mean it's the classic right you got to do the the proof of concept first yourself right which you you've done or you're doing and then you integrate what you've done with you know Brands and what have you but how much of it this is you pushing consumer product yourselves versus being a backend or essentially an ecosystem of tools uh for other developers and Brands that's a great question look the the API is something that we're going to be working uh to refine early next year so that we can start to get the first products that or another place you can take care of every pet you know my pet's hungry wouldn't it be great if I could go into Minecraft to feed my pet or Roblox or sandbox or you know wherever

um to feed feed your pet so that's something that's G be really important to us and that's where we talk about open source is yeah I would you know we often talk about having a DA in the future about the pedop society because you know there there are so many different types of pets that you could have out there imagine if someone was just obsessed with ferrets and wanted to make f p ferrets that work the same way our they should be able to do that you know that's still a big vision of ours is the idea that that should be able to happen and so that's where I think it'll be really important I don't ever want to be a SAS company you know we're a game company we've been making games for 25 years and so I think content and consumer products will always be really important to us but it doesn't mean we can't hand off the keys to somebody else to be able to do things as well especially because I don't ever want to be an agency or work for higher companies so it's important to us that we can get to that step that we can hand it off and say you go see what you want to build you know what you don't like any of the content that we created go build something new if you really wanted you know a Pokemon botler go make make it the tech here's the full Tech stack go and so I think that that's really

exciting and you know there's only so much we're a 25 person team there's only so much that we can do at any given time we obviously have to pick and choose and um so I think it's really important I think to to get to a a broader product offering yeah yeah absolutely and uh business model uh always curious to hear how how you plan to to monetize right now I believe it's all uh free and you're just it's more of a proof of concept thing um what kind of expected Revenue models um on this in our purchases and subscriptions um especially where it comes to the brand deals that we're doing um you know we we've told folks who bought an nft you know we did sell some ethereum nfts they'll never pay for anything and I I stand by that they they bought a lifetime subscription to what we're doing but we will be introducing uh Mass Market subscriptions and I AP opportunities and ultimately like I said the ability to to upgrade and and and pay to minted uh on a blockchain I think will be important as well so traditional you know game monetization eventually yeah yeah okay all right uh well I have to say audacious Vision um that's why I

literally reached out to you and said hey I want to have you on the show because this is so interesting so intriguing yeah and so fascinating and so I'm really grateful uh for you for coming on the show I think this is actually a great place to end because it's just a really uh interesting fascinating thought-provoking uh proposition that you would have a a pet that lives for Generations uh in the same family and evolves over time in a way that it remembers those experiences and passes those on to father from father to son to you know grandson so said been nft is Nico imagine imagine if had been nfts if that had existed back then you'd have 26 million people with them and if you had access to their Tech stack why wouldn't you build new games for nintendog um so yeah 100% 100% yeah I you know I do think there's a really interest interesting uh things happening here but we see a lot A lot has to go right you know blockchain Tech is still relatively new there's 200 ecosystems out there interoperability for real is an issue it's not you know like yes

there are solutions but it's still an issue a has to get Mass market adoption it sounds like for the full vision that you have to to be realized um so you know a lot of things have to have to align um but I hope they do because I think this is a really compelling vision and I'm excited uh for what you guys are building so Susan thank you so much for coming on the Pod today I have really really enjoyed our conversation thank you Nico it's pleasure and a big thank you to all of our listeners we'll be back next week with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web 3 and the metaverse and now the peterse it's we we keep adding to this uh until next time friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send questions guest recommendations and comments to me my email is nn. if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a festar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast nov. or or find us on Twitter and Linkedin plus if you want to learn more about what navic has to offer make sure to

check out our website www. nvic.org dovic thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode