The Metaverse Reimagined - Fernando Pereira, CEO, XTEND3D

Fernando Pereira from extended in 3D and uh his uh talk is entitled The metaverse reimagined so I guess that's that's playing into some of the uh some of the discussions what's happened with the metaverse over the last year uh overcoming obstacles and seizing opportunities so hello everyone uh thank you so much for being my crowd for today uh I was just chatting with my friend sahi that if it was last year this would probably be probably be super packed with people standing and pushing each other trying to understand what the hell is the metaverse right but today it's not really the case so thank you so much for being my audience I do find it interesting because maybe I

haven't seen the other talks yet but maybe if it was the talk about AI which is the next big thing supposedly and not downplaying it I do use AI I cannot live without AI these days maybe my whole presentation was made by AI who knows but I feel like maybe if it was an AI talk it would be more people but then again I when I looked at LinkedIn and I see you know all these people with that are constantly changing their taglines like this year they are AI experts last year they had metaverse experts the year before they had blockchain experts well you know that's kind of uh they are experts of blank right literally so just changing chasing the the trends and uh anyway we're that's that's not my my thing my thing is gaming I've been a gamer since uh forever basically so today we'll talk a little bit about uh the metaverse um which I at least still believe and

you I guess as well for being here today that also kind of still believe in this Vision that eventually there is a future uh for this kind of platforms um so my name is Fernando um I'm running a new startup called extended we started about a year and a half ago I'll be talking a little bit more about it by the end of the presentation uh I also run a non-profit organization Esports one we just made 21 years old last month and uh it's basically an organization more related with social inclusion projects where we have high performance centers for kids where they can come maybe they can get some psychology support because many of the kids who are addicted to gaming is probably because they are having issues at home and things like that and then I'm also the founder of the largest women empowerment gaming Festival that we run globally it's called the girl gamery sports festival and that's actually more of the reason why they

call me to speak is more on the women empowerment side but here today I'm here for a different reason but yeah basically it's a it's a gaming Festival dedicated for women where we try and create more opportunities not just across the competitive side but also across all positions that supports the Esports industry itself like broadcaster production shoutcaster you know all of the things that support the industry so in this presentation we'll be talking about the metaverse but it's also important to talk a little bit about gaming because gaming was kind of a precursor not well not even a precursor it was there were Origins let's put it this way kind of everything started with gaming right and gaming has the potential of being these Catalyst that will lead whatever the metaverse eventually will become to grow into Mass adoption because gaming are immersive experiences they are interactive they have this social component that people can find friends online they can hang

out with you know all this are key elements to what the metaverse eventually will be shaping to become so not just that but gaming is also always at the Forefront of pushing computer Graphics which is very important right these companies like Nvidia and AMD and so on they are building all these super Advanced chips for gaming so that Gamers can have a more immersive experience more interactive more realistic uh pushing the boundaries of what's possible so I think that these are all things that we kind of have an understanding that the metaverse will be something like that a 3D World you know something that comes from the gaming space itself so talking a little bit about games and by the way who here played World of Warcraft anyone oh cool cool me too for many years so I think that World of Warcraft is

such a good example because so they they blizzard launched this in 2015 2005 sorry and it's a really good experiment right I I love that IBM back in the day had this paper uh where they called it Virtual Worlds real leaders why well if you are performing such complex tasks as leading a 40 men group to do a raid with crazy things you know showering fire here getting out of some some toxic puddle Whatever It Is 40 people working together to do such complex tasks as defeating world of warcraft's Boss um well maybe you got some leadership skills being developed right so it's more likely that those leadership skills will eventually be able to be transferable to your real life so Real World of Warcraft gave us a first impression as a role massive online role-playing game gave us this impression of what it is to have

character creation uh being able to customize your character it was a persistent world that's why it was so addictive you know it's 24 7. so if you're not there you're kind of missing out on making money on the auction house and and so on so it feels like these are also all elements that a potential metaverse would have in the future another good example fortnite right the global success that they had propelled it into becoming a cultural phenomenon not just because they are a cross-platform actually I think it it's probably the best and most um successful case of cross-platform that first appeared because you know developers love closing their games exclusively to PlayStation exclusively to PC and so on and on and when fortnite uh appeared they were already cross-platform and then they grew even to become cross-platform to Mobile so imagine a game that you can play on your

mobile on your console on your computer suddenly you can play with all your friends across different devices so that helped it Propel um to to success and at the same time they popularized virtual music concerts even though inside fortnite you can kind of only communicate using dances and basic emotes but people are still using it as a platform for virtual concerts that are not necessarily just concerts of you know someone standing there and music is playing and they have some animation no they're actually building real experiences you know immersive experiences that are in the world of fantasy where they have Giants walking around or they're floating through some tunnel things like that right and not only that they did collaborations with major franchises like Star Wars Avengers John Wick and Ghostbusters all these things implementing these franchises and eyepiece into the game itself making really really cool experiences so fortnite really good

example of what the metaverse what some features of the metaverse people would want to see so according to Arc invests research the revenue from Virtual Worlds could be approaching 400 billion by 2025 this is basically just showing that yes it is there's an appetite for for these things and it's just constantly uh growing from from where we are or where we were even 20 to 30 years ago so let's talk a little bit about the metaverse as I was saying I'm I'm not surprised that the room is not super packed because now the the kind of hype has has been gone which in my view it's a really really good thing because people who are just here for the fast money the the next thing already left and moved on to the next thing and the real Builders uh kept kept building right because that's that's what it is so I do feel that there's a lack of perceived results that also

contributed to the metaverse not being so successful right now because we've seen all these big companies talking about you know the meta diverse everything that they're pushing is metaverse VR like Facebook and so on and and then you look at the results and the results are not really there uh and Facebook itself has been super criticized with the things that they they outputted the the Spain the Paris experience and all that was terrible um so I think that that lack of perceived value because there's no deliver on promise um has failed but at the same time the metaphor is not something that you can just create right like that because it it needs a behavior shift in users users need to perceive value there has to be a platform that gives them the tool the reason to to be there so it's not not that easy and it's a it's a process that it's going to take time I think even Facebook itself they they said that it's going to take about 10 years or something to build uh what we would call

the metaverse so I'm sure that you're here you all kind of have an idea of what the metaverse is so just running very quickly through through some of the characteristics the 3D persistent world just like uh World of Warcraft each user has an avatar they can go inside run communicate with their friends social environment right it could be so an immersive experience not necessarily but let's see right we are augmented reality and mixed reality there's a there's a potential in that for sure and especially now apple is Double Down doubling down on this apple Vision Pro to see if mixed reality will pick up even more let's see how that goes and yes there's a digital economy associated with it just like World of Warcraft had an auction house but you know money was still kept within blizzard and it was not not transferable between people um unless you go to some shady Black Market websites uh it Powers a creative economy which is very important because user generated

content is what also Powers uh the community that can Propel a game to success um potentially it would have a decentralized ownership many people are actually pushing these forwards very strongly because there are some key elements that we will see about the web 3 that could help to solve some of the issues that metaverses have it's important to have Limitless scalability right if you want to push a world out there that anyone can use anyone can access 24 7 you know it needs to grow and needs to be able to a lot of people must be able to be in the same space together and cross-platform very important just like fortnite did so the metaverse is not really a new thing right at least for me I started my first metaverse company back in 2008. I was building on open seam technology which is kind of this open source version of what second life was was doing and um I think that there since then there has been so many projects that some of them

were super popular and they shut down um but but I think that even though they didn't become the metaverse so per se they kind of paved the way right they they brought each one of them brought certain characteristics that contributed to this vision of what the metaverse will eventually be PlayStation home for example I think it was a super super cool idea where people who are waiting for their matches to load they would be able to have a social Lobby to hang out with their friends so more recently there have been even more projects like Horizon worlds Roblox VR chat super popular on VR of course and the sandbox and the central land all these projects are kind of unifying and contributing to the vision of what the metaverse will eventually become so is the metaverse Dead I mean judging by this room I would say maybe but if we look at the numbers

actually these kind of platforms that assimilate themselves with characteristics to the metaverse like fortnite Minecraft Roblox really good examples they are all thriving and these are statistics that I pulled yesterday for this presentation and for the last 30 days fortnite had 242 million active users Minecraft 164 million Roblox 197 million I mean that doesn't really sound like that to me right it seems like there's still an appetite for this kind of things so to better understand the reasons for people to use the metaverse we kind of need to dive into that so I think that most people what they are looking for is a social space they can hang out with their friends across barriers I could be you know in Dubai my friend could be in Portugal my other friend could be in China and we all of us could be together in the same space having a conversation a social conversation or maybe I could be making new friends in this special in this virtual world so understanding the

motivations before uh for for users sorry the motivations that users would have for using such a platform is very important to try and build something that could become successful and these are all characteristics that online games have had since you know since 50 50k dial modems so it's nothing nothing new this is my most boring slide but it's about the challenges that the metaverse kind of need to adopt uh overcome sorry to be successful the first user adoption because we look at platforms like sandbox and decentraland I think that they are maybe web3 first and game seconds and that's kind of a problem right because as I was saying gaming is the origin of everything it's the catalyst so we cannot ask people to change their behaviors immediately to learn everything that is about creating a virtual wallet you know a D5 wallet and all these things this this is a gradual process and those are features and tools

they're not the main thing the white paper is not the main thing the main thing is the game right so once we have the game we could Implement other features to it but yeah user adoption is a challenging is a challenge having compelling user use cases as well you know there has to be interactive content there has to be tools that people can use to actually do things inside such platforms it has to be super user friendly I mean any kids can just load it up and and start it that's that's a good example of how to build user-friendly experiences there has to be a sustainable economic models Hardware kind of need to be improved as well so that the experiences is better better and all these things like privacy security and interoperability between platforms these are all very important features right and we are still to overcome all of them so talking a little bit about web3 because this is not a web 3 talk but web3 is kind of like um power back to the people because it's

about decentralization of things and it can help to solve some of the issues like security and privacy for example these are just four four possibilities that the web3 can contribute to the metaverse let's say that D5 wallets for example they allow people to have full ownership and full control over their virtual currencies and assets without any intermediary right nfts I would say in the World of Warcraft had an auction house and you could buy and sell items there but you could never get it out you could never really transfer this is all virtual and it's owned by blizzard let's put it this way so nfts allowed the transactional value between users directly and without any intermediary uh the online identity and digital Footprints well if everything is on the blockchain users can own their digital Footprints right so they can be in control of their data and of course smart contracts would allow uh the governance of the metaverse to be decentralized as well so these are all

things that can contribute but they have to be implemented as features as and not as the main main focus which was kind of what was happening last year where so many companies raised crazy amounts of money based on the web tree strategy itself but then they didn't really have a good promise on the gaming side so this one it's a something that I think is very important because why did the hype fade and why is this room not super crazy packed well because metaverse is not something that you can just do like that right this is a process and right now we're still in the emerging State this is Gartner research and um in the emerging metaverse States I think that most people are just trying to do a killer app last year we've seen people launch their products like everything was metaverse I remember there were memes about this online where you're building a social Media Matters you're building a game metaverse you're building a you know whatever it is metaverse that's kind of ridiculous but

it also means that we're not a mature industry yet people are still trying to find their way they're still trying to build it and it's something that takes time on maybe from 2024 next year to 2027 we're going to enter the advanced metaverse stage which where which is where people will start combining different Technologies uh like 3D mapping um I don't I don't know aerial shots um 5G machine learning things and they will implement this into the vision of what the metaverse could become so we'll see more interesting things there and obviously only in the future like 2030 onwards we're gonna start seeing the maturing of the metaverse industry because the the technologies that power the metaverse are also going to become mature themselves so this is an ongoing process there's no real definition of what the metaverse is right now it's kind of like uh let's try and see what how can we shape it to become something that people really actually want to use

so talking about opportunities I do think that there are a lot of opportunities out there I would say that it's kind of like a gold rush but to try and build something that users could jump onto maybe a gold rush that you would not be using like a pickaxe and traditional tools you'll be using super crazy expensive Nvidia graphic cards to do that but I do see a lot of opportunities in Virtual fashion I just met recently with uh Queen modes uh Team they're doing amazing on that Education and Training I met I met a lady from Dubai and another one from Azerbaijan who are building educational metaverse content basically teaching kids to learn like the solar system and other types of Education things inside a game slash metaverse right which is much more compelling and immersive than reading a textbook like we've done for

for decades uh behavioral AI I don't know if many of you saw this this demo that Nvidia launched about NPCs that are powered with AI where you can just walk up to them and talk like ask questions and so on and they are trained within The Narrative of the the game story to reply to you accordingly so that's that's super cool all of these are super super cool areas that have a lot of opportunities for developers that would want and try to pick some of them up so the metaverse is I think definitely not dead yet because it's still uh in an emerging State and still maturing but as we go on digital is taking a big share of Our Lives it is predicted by 2030 the average user will be spending more time online and on screens than offline that's a bit scary right but it's the trend that we have and the only the only

thing that we can do is to build build it in a sustainable and unfriendly way as we can to make it as healthy as possible but it's important also to know that Gamers kind of already spend more than half of their their Time online rather than rather than offline so talking a little bit about what I'm building on the opportunities that I saw uh I built this this new company during the pandemic actually I was super bored at home so I decided to just start and learning how to how to build games because I always love to play them so why not why not build them and uh what we're building is kind of like I would call it the metaverse even though now it's a bit of a cringe word but it's a metaverse of real life events and locations so we're basically creating digital twin versions of real life locations and then popularizing it with content interactive content for virtual tourism experiences for Brands showcases and to host live virtual events so

metaverse tourism is something that I really believe in and kind of gave me the the sense that I had to start my first company based on this back in 2008 I was still studying and I wanted to travel but I couldn't because I was stuck to University things I didn't have enough money to do it and so on so I thought well I love playing games but why don't we just why why there isn't a game that allows me to travel into a world that I know and that I could visit someplace inside the game so that's that's where my my digital twins idea uh came from and I tried to build upon it unfortunately I think it was too much ahead of the curve at that time so we ended up not being commercially viable but now I think that technology has matured a lot uh so it's already possible to do really really amazing experiences so I cannot wait to see how technology matures and what we will see in the years to come events so why events and I'm very focused on Esports as I was saying my

background is mostly on Esports events can happen parallel uh to the real life events right we could have an Esports event happening in a venue but then the experience of watching Esports online right now it's kind of like watching television which is super boring the the kids don't watch television they just watch on-demand content YouTube and so on and the experience of watching Esports is having a screen like TV and then you have a chat box where it's normally flooded with emotions and and spam so that's a problem because because it's not really a social experience so I think that with the metaverse we could create a spatial um Arena like where people could enter they could go with their friends they could communicate with their friends you could hear someone cheering the the team that they support and so on so this would create a really good experience from a Esports viewership perspective and at the same time why the focus on Esports because the gaming the metaverse itself it's

going to have a first wave of adopters right and the metaverse is a 3D World persistent as we've talked about so for sure that the first wave of adopters are going to be Gamers because they are the ones that know how to navigate in this 3D space and do all these crazy things that Gamers do uh on on their games other than that we're looking into doing and building showrooms for Brands where we could replicate like uh full virtual inventories we could train AI representatives to chat with people and if you have a question where can I find this item where is it on stock what shops are there in this country and so on you could probably just do it with your voice and then AI would reply to you so these are just some of the examples looking at a little bit more I'm gonna show this are a little bit of sneak peeks that I I think I've never showed it no I never showed it publicly this is a little bit of what we're building more recognizably but uh because we're here here in Dubai so this is the entrance to Burj Khalifa this is

all real time by the way it's not it's screenshot there are screenshots but they are rendered in Unreal Engine 5 in in real time this is downtown Lisbon so basically we're trying to use a combination of different Technologies like Nerf uh lidar scanning 3D mapping photogrammetry and all these things to build this super realistic worlds that are built as a multiplayer experience so this is just we're just focused on World building right now later on we will focus on the web3 side because I do see a lot of interest and and potential to implement those features but again this is gaming first and metaverse sorry and web3 after as a feature and not as the the main thing um some final thoughts well the metaverse still a work in progress right there's no specific definition it's something that is still evolving with the technology that is going to power it gaming is pioneering the metaverse the massive growth of online gaming will

play this essential role to bring in consumers and shifting them from playing traditional games into using these platforms those are the first wave of pioneer adopters the future is super exciting the metaverse will touch all types of Industry not just gaming itself but also education e-commerce or virtual Commerce and the entertainment industry and now that the hype is gone it's definitely the best time to build things and to explore so I hope that everyone has a bit of a call to action if you want to build something in this space there's full of opportunities so that's that's my call now is the best time to do it thank you that's all do we have time for questions or not really a bit like is there any questions is there one quick let's see let's do one quick one thank you very much Rami kardani head of innovation mondia group um I had a quick question regarding uh

what you just showed uh with the digital twins you mentioned I think the renders look beautiful so I was wondering uh you mentioned you're using Unreal as an engine yes um it does give the most beautiful results but from uh from what I've seen it's one of the most expensive Cloud rendering Solutions so how do you see that scaling out when you're trying to access uh have multiple users access this in an affordable manner so that they're getting that kind of render quality without having to pay a lot of money for it well I think that um if you're you're talking about Cloud server-side rendering or you're talking just about deployments server size well we are not immediately looking at server side but I do think that server side is going to take a big role in the future but as costs go down like you said it's super expensive to have to have instances of server side um uh rendering happening and serving that to each user because imagine you're going to have 1000 users which is a small number right and you have to have a thousand instances serving those

renderings to them it's super expensive right now I think that technology is still not evolved if you look at Google they shut down their their server-side rendering projects right stadium and uh this is something that is constantly evolving I do see that the Focus right now is still on the consumer side doing all the rendering so most likely people will have their super expensive graphic cards doing the rendering but unreal has a big Advantage which is nanites right it breaks down everything in instead of having level of detail which is the furthest away the item is from you the less details it has and real just breaks everything down in little triangles and shows you what you have on your screen so for for the time being I think that the focus is going to be on the consumer side to to render these games lovely excellent thank you very much