Transcript
Rene – Hi, welcome to Meta minutes, your bite-sized pieces of the metaverse. My name is Rene from Valorem Reply and today we don't have a guest but we will recap season two, the second season. In fact, like season one very insightful again and I learned a lot from all our amazing guests and I can tell you that it was very insightful and, a lot of great knowledge was shared and I hope you also learned as much as I did and it was a valuable time for you as well. Before we dive into today's recap, let me introduce you to a tradition from my home region. We have handcrafted things made out of wood for Christmas in particular like nutcrackers, you might have seen before or pyramids that are rotating, but also things called Rauchermann, these are little like wooden figures where you can put like some smoking kind of, you know, piece inside of it like a cone basically and since Christmas is pretty soon here, in fact, it's not very long like a month or so I brought something here for you, which is in the shape of a good old desktop computer and as you can see it's, maybe you can see there's a little bit of reflection with my cam right here, but you might be able to see there's smoke coming out on the front of the good old desktop computer here. So there's a lot of action happening there, you can see there's a little smoke, it's very subtle but yeah there you can see it, so it does work. That looks like made out of wood, it's just painted but like in the back you can open it and instead of accessing like a graphics card, you have this little cone thing in here which is again burning and it's made out of herbs and although really you know good smelling things and you burn this basically inside of these things there are many different ones. Typically, it's in the form of a traditional kind of a craftsman but my wife just got me this you know as a smoking desktop computer because like you know we're nerds. I also have some folks here which are like people working at a computer and the smoke will come out of the head and things like this. So, anyhow this is what we try to enjoy during Christmas season. These traditional handcrafted pieces and that's what I brought here today. Anyhow, so let's talk about season two of meta minutes. And the first episodes we started with no one else than Antony Vitillo aka the skarredghost and you might know him from his very famous blog where he is covering all the news and the augmented and virtual reality space and of course all things metaverse as well and he shared a lot of great insights in that episode and really enjoyed talking with him. He's such a funny guy but also has so much knowledge and he even discussed futuristic trends like augmented reality contact lenses he was actually able to try out or at least some early prototypes of those and yeah super insightful. And then I had the pleasure to welcome Sophia Moshasha and we talked about the public policies for the metaverse which is an important topic since right now it's pretty much the wild west out there with certain platforms where you might see things like people getting harassed in these platforms and definitely you can see these issues out there that are actively a problem of course and so we gotta, I think, we gotta have certain regulations and certain policies for the metaverse to make it a safe place for everyone so that these platforms actually have to implement safety measures like everyone is trying to do this but I think it's important if we get some policies and regulations in the European Union but also of course in the US and Korea and Japan and all other places. Again, to make it a safe place for everyone where no one will feel harassed and so that's why I think certain policies and regulations are very much important here. Episode 3 was all about the real-world metaverse or the mirror world and how the physical world can be part of the digital world and for this I talked with Matt Miesnieks, who founded previously also 6D AI which was acquired by Niantic and is now basically their visual positioning system SDK which is really fantastic and with Matt I talked about his new startup called livingcities.xyz and that gives you already a hint what they're trying to do there and it was really fantastic to hear from one of the veterans and visionaries in the augmented reality space since many years. What he's going to build there with his new startup and the team there. Dedipya Laidlaw joined me to talk about synthetic data and generative AI which is definitely a big trend these days. I mean I guess you all have seen some of these pictures that are produced by models like AI models like DALL-E to Stable diffusion, Mid-journey and so on, where you're able to create these very good-looking artificial images just from a text prompt. So, basically, you give a text prompt, describe what you want to get and then these AI Models basically generate images and content from you and we're already seeing on the horizon the next iteration of those where it's not just static images but animations are already coming and then the next iteration after this which we already see some early prototypes is with 3D content. So you basically give it a text prompt and say, hey, I want to have like a you know kind of a desktop computer that is smoking or something like this and then it will give you a 3D model. I mean this is a simple 3D model but you can imagine, could be much more complex and so I'm really looking forward to this because this will also democratize content creation in 3D for a lot of people because this is of course a limiting barrier at the moment when we're talking about metaverse platforms and the content creation that you need very specific expertise and very specific skills there in order to do this. Then in episode 5 of season two, we had Diego Di Tomasso and he joined me to talk about the decentralized real-world metaverse and the metaverse platform they are building which is called Over and they're doing some pretty innovative stuff there I have to say like you can basically buy land plots but not real-world land plots, although like you buy like virtual overlays at real-world land plots. So, you can have certain experiences there at a certain land plot and you buy those via cryptocurrency so it's decentralized and again you can basically buy these virtual land plots in the real world and then you can have a spatial anchored experience there at this specific land plot right because you own it. Of course, you don't physically own the land plot but you own the virtual overlay on top of the and plot and that's really nice and interesting to have a mobile app and a few other things. They're also working on some neural rendering and yeah it was really insightful to talk with him about it. Jesse McCulloch from Microsoft talked with me about various ways to get started with developing metaverse applications and Jesse is also a long-time mixed reality, augmented, virtual reality community hero and so we also chatted of course about the community and I asked him what he thinks has changed during the last couple of years but also in particular to the metaverse and again very insightful conversation again. Then in season 2 episode 7, I was joined by Fabian Quosdorf and we covered the topic of boosting sales through metaversal customer Journey which sounded like a mouthful and a lot of marketing in the end but it was not and Fabian is a really good guy and he shared a lot of insights and we talked about his experiences working on some really impressive mixed reality projects that have true impact for customers like kitchen planning and much more and yeah it was no marketing there, it was really a lot of insights and how you can design such solutions and where you can get a lot of value out of this. Paul Swider talked with me about the future of healthcare and patient care in the metaverse and he showed some pretty impressive examples of how this can help for things like patient telemetry like remote visits but many more things and I think in general it's a super interesting topic and for example recently I saw a talk at the global XR conference where there in this talk there was a study mentioned where they're basically using virtual reality to reduce sedation so they don't have to use pharmaceutical sedation in order to put patients to sleep for certain medical procedures. They can basically use a virtual reality headset, the patients put on and then they can do a procedural like here at the arm and with the other arm you can still play a VR game you know, or really fully distracted from the procedure that is ongoing and they actually showed that 90 percent dont require sedation anymore. Of course for only certain procedures, I guess, but really impressive and again there's a lot of stuff ongoing with VR are as particular with healthcare. But I think there's much more, especially if we think about metaverse’s large communities and so on where we can get a lot of value out of this. So this was the discussion with Paul. And then in episode 9 of season two, I was joined by Zaid Zaim who is not just a fellow mixed reality MVP but he's also has been a refugee from Syria and he has been working on a project to preserve the UNESCO world heritage site in Palmyra and this is really amazing because he used a mixed reality and HoloLens to provide a really nice experience for showcasing this cultural heritage and so we talked about this and we also talked about how you build this, the next steps because they bring it to the metaverse and also how people can get started if they want to build something similar. Again, very motivational and always great to chat with Zaid and so it was really good episode as well. Well and now we're here with the summary of the second season of meta minutes and well I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Like I said, it's a big pleasure and honor for me hosting all the fantastic guests and having some really insightful conversations and well now we're already thinking about season three of course for Meta Minutes and of course we want to hear from you and from you what you want to see in the next episodes and we want to hear your feedback, the good ones but also the bad ones, only then we can grow. So please send over your topics. If you also have a certain guest in mind or you want to be a guest potentially, please reach out- send an email, reach out via various social media channels. I would love to hear all about this and would love to cover as much as we can in season three. Again, thank you so much for joining us for meta minutes, your bite-sized pieces of the metaverse. Please follow us on social, subscribe to our YouTube channel, visit our website to review all the previous episodes from season one and season two. You can find them all there and watch them and of course let us know your feedback and you will also see when we launch season three through all our social media channels. Thank you so much and take care and see you soon in the metaverse.
