 So how was the sessions coming so far? It's all good? Yeah, I allowed Shubhra's session on talking about the potential of immersive metaverse. And as you see, from the static.com era, we've been moving to the interactive sessions. And then right now, we're talking about the immersive digital experience of metaverse. So that evolution and the projection for the next decade, if you're talking about 2030, it's almost $13 trillion. So let's talk about how do you feel about the readiness for the next stage of metaverse? Shall we start with, oh, we don't have a mic here? And would you like to introduce yourself, Mukund first? My name is Mukundan. I'm the principal solution architect for digital twins and omniverse from NVIDIA. So I've been working in this space for a little over 14 years. And that's a bit about me. Yes, please. Hi, I'm Shivang Desai, the co-founder and CEO at BigThings. And we're an artificial intelligence company focused on fashion and retail, particularly around immersive experiences for the consumer. Hi, my name is Anand. I'm the founder of RxSeries and the CEO of Metalap Technologies. We are into building blockchain games, especially towards the mobile end of the spectrum. Namaskaram, everyone. I'm Pankaj Raut. I'm co-founder of Arsenal Lens. We at Arsenal Lens make our own augmented and virtual reality hardware, plus we have a platform for learning and development within the metaverse space. Awesome. So if you're looking at right now today, we have 400 million users. If you're talking about GenC and GenAlpha, they are living in metaverse, right? So what do you feel, like, how is your organization being ready for that? So again, the word metaverse was coined way back, and it came into practice probably two years back. But if you look at the maturity of each technologies, which is being categorized as metaverse, starting with AR and VR, it's been there for a little over a decade. It's gone through the various curves of learning, places where it has made a massive impact, especially in the learning space and also in auditing spaces where AR has made a big impact. And there have been some places where it has not been made an impact. Now, while the technology is maturing, there is also the hardware, which is in parallel also maturing. Absolutely. Again, the next big thing, what I would like to add upon us, there's a limitation when it comes to hardware, because there is only so much horse power that can fit within the hardware. Let's say a virtual reality headset, it's based on a CPU-based, and you can only throw 50,000 polygons at it. But now what we are talking about is cloud rendering, which means I can throw 50 billion polygons, and still I can make it run in an Android device, like an Oculus Quest 2. Correct. Seamlessly. I can have a natural language conversation with a game avatar, which doesn't have a person behind it. And all of this is happening because of the power of AI. Correct. So AI is going hand in hand with immersive tech. So what has been happening so far is world building space, and then on top of it, you have a human-led interaction. Now it's completely transformed into an AI-driven interaction. Yes. That's a bit of a wonder to ask. Yeah, to complete this immersive experience today here, like Mike, the CEO of 3DM, who was supposed to join us, but he couldn't come. So he should have brought him as a hologram here. And so that would have been a good experience. What about you? So how do you feel like what we are preparing for this experience of 400 million users today on the Metaverse? I feel there's a lot of people out there that want to use this. But they're confused about which channels to take. Gaming right now is one of the biggest ones as an entrant for people to start using it. But as it filters out into other industries, we work in retail, and we see a lot of people beginning to adopt. But there's still a lot of uncertainty around it. And this is where we need to start bringing down those barriers that are causing the uncertainty. Particularly on the last panel, there was a panelist speaking about data and ownership of that data. And people need to get comfortable with the ownership of their data being in their own control. And as this happens, and as the masses get educated about this, we will begin to see this mass adoption of 400 million people actually fully immersed and engaged in the Metaverse. Absolutely, yeah. Data ownership and self-sovereign ideas are the thing to come to evolve. What about you, Anand, the gaming king? I agree with Mukund. Metaverse is a fairly new world, which has been floating around for the last maybe three years post-COVID. But as individual pieces of technologies, these have been there for the last eight years. From the day Oculus, or even before Oculus was brought over by Facebook, there was a company called Oculus. And they were already into this. So why Metaverse suddenly is everywhere is because probably of COVID-1. And number two, because of the ownership which you can have on the digital things which are in the web, and the decentralization, of course. So the numbers which you're talking about, the trillions of numbers, is mostly geared towards the ownership on the transactions which happens through that by selling and transacting. And yeah, the use cases are 100, 200, 300. But last year was mostly about digital arts, 2000, 2001, 2002 fairly, was about anything NFTs were selling. Now people are asking questions on why should I buy this NFT? On and above, it's looking great. It's a good art and all that. And as I'm a part of a community, but why should I buy this? What does it give me? More than it being a collectible. So the use cases have to address all the companies and the projects have to address that. And then I think we are on the route to reaching those numbers which are being filtered around. Yes. When we started Arsenalence, we had only one simple vision that we want to create impact on society using technology as a medium. So after that was like AR, VR, metaverse, everything came in. It's very good to have them for marketing and for a password to get traction. But the real impact is what should be calculated and that is where we have been focusing on. At Arsenalence where we have deployed it is in Karnataka itself where in 18,000 individuals come onto the platform and learn vocational skills such as pre-painting and welding. So these people are people that have come from very, very tough background. People who have just seven pass, eight pass, having a really bad home situation, no one is earning at their home. How can we use technology to help them become really, really proficient? So proficient that they can take part into world skill competitions, make them qualified so much. Secondly is help them learn fast, learn accurately and get jobs faster. So that is where I think the technology should move. Although we should use all these words for marketing which will help build attraction. But this is where I think one of the biggest use cases lies is skilling, the learning and development within the metaverse space. That's right, yeah. So as we were preparing for the metaverse fashion week, with my upcoming brand Envied Future, so the question I had when I was working with Akshay and 3DM was like, will my avatar, which is in one metaverse, like will it work on the other metaverses, right? Because we are talking about a multi-verse or an omniverse at this point. So I think the main thing which is coming up is interoperability. So what does your take on like, how do we enhance the interoperability between verses? So again, in the current scenario, right? Most of these M platforms or metaverse platforms, they work in a walled garden setup, which means they don't want to share the user data with anybody else. Correct. But now if you see there are already some great players who are trying to bifrigrate the entire ecosystem, where you create one avatar and you can use that as the avatar for shopping in Flipkart or you can use the same avatar to go and visit a hospital clinic in a world. But this is again a large move and this requires open-mindedness from all customers, right? So there needs to be exceptions from the... When you say customers, did you mean the metaverses or the people? The companies, the companies, right? So it's about exposing the client data. It's more like the thought. They're not exposing the data. It's more likely the common avatar, which is going to come across the ecosystem. Correct. But it is the company who has to go and sign off saying it's okay to let another avatar ecosystem onto my brand. Correct. A quick example here is NVIDIA as a company. We are building an avatar cloud engine, which is completely interoperable. Yes. And the motive here is to completely decentralize the avatar ecosystem itself. With one avatar, I can represent a complete virtual version of myself. It can look exactly like me. Yes. With the right dimensions. So I can use that avatar to go and shop online. I don't need to again go and supply my shoulder size or my waist size or any of it. It will be an exact replica of myself. Absolutely, yeah. If I would want to attend a conference, I can go and dress myself as a formal suite, and then I can go and attend. And if it's for a party, I can go and look the hipway. Right. And all of this is feasible if we could all bring it all under one umbrella and then build on top of it. Absolutely. So I see Mike there. Mike, we were expecting you on a hologram to be in this Bangalore conference space. We cannot hear you, Mike. One, two, can you hear me well? Yes, yes. So I was saying we were expecting you as a hologram here. Mentally, I'm there as a hologram. Physically, we're not there yet as a humanity, but we're gonna get there. Yes. As a promoting person in BDA. Yes. And their strategy ahead. So Mike, we're talking about interoperability and when there's multi-verses, how do we promote more interoperability between the avatars moving around between versus and all that? So would you like to add something to that? First of all, a pleasure to be here. I would have love to be there physically, but everything that's happening in the world just makes it impossible right now. But it's exciting to be there and be able to share my 50 people advice with this great panel. Now I'm gonna be a bit more open-minded in my response in this question. I'm not really a huge advocate of interoperability. I'm a bigger advocate of omniparability. And what I mean by that is that I do not think and I don't feel that is correct or has a prudent business strategy to talking about having one avatar and taking it everywhere. I am however, and I am more bullish in the fact that there's gonna be a multiple different avatars or digital twins that can omniooperate and across different worlds, across different channels. And what I mean by that is that blockchain is just gonna allow you to gather same utility or same form of data into different worlds, into different digital twins across different channels, not necessarily having to using the same asset, but at least transferring the same kind of data ownership and data information across the different worlds. And I think that is a much bigger bet and a much more realistic bet into trying to consolidate basically the experiences across multiple environments and being able to create a much more realistic notion of giving a user the same providence, the same power across different experiences rather than just trying to solve this question of interoperability of taking one asset everywhere because in reality, it's not gonna work and you have to have a lot of good faith, a lot of parties working together with a common cause, which is not usually the case and there's a lot of competition as much as we like to try and be romantic about it. So we should always be rethinking from a different perspective. Agree, agree. What about you? What do you feel about the interoperability? So one is that, thank you for describing our business model, hyper realistic avatars that have your shoulder size, your looks and then you can try it on a shopping. Now we do hyper realistic avatars but so does Mike and so does ready player, now Mike does different kinds of avatars. Ready Player Me does different kinds of avatars. There are stylized avatars, realistic avatars. When you come down to the technology, they all behave very differently. Yes, at the core they move, they animate but beyond that, the avatars that you use for shopping are a lot more complex because they're designed to take your body shapes. But whereas the avatars that you use for gaming, you may not want to see yourself as a hyper realistic avatar in games and we actually see that a lot. People want to play as stylized avatars of themselves and they want to go wild in games. So this is where the difference is. Interoperability as a concept, as a singular concept may not actually work out in the way that, much the way that Mike was also talking about but we can see omnioperability and that is also what we believe is going to happen where you have different systems and different companies that supply it but across the same use cases. So you have the metaverses, you've got meta and sandbox and Decentraland and Roblox and Fortnite. All of their avatars look very, very different from each other and all of them perform very differently and the idea with interoperability in this case is to be able to use your own data as a user but fit into the systems that these metaverses have created for themselves so that users are the most comfortable in those environments. So we are talking about interoperability in two segments here. One is interoperability of assets which are your avatars or anything for that matter and two interoperability of NFTs which are your ownership. So we are also talking about decentralization of applications, of social media platforms and whatnot. And games, now the largest scenario is we are selling NFTs, giving NFTs for free, we are selling digital avatars, everyone is doing that. Imagine if I'm asked to buy a NFT to access a platform and then the platform tells me, okay, you pay me this much, you can access our platform, tokens, all that, et cetera, et cetera. Now there is another similar platform which is equally good and they are also telling me, you also need to buy a NFT for you to access our platform. So how does this work out for a customer if there is no interoperability? So, but I think it has to start with NFTs which are ownership in its first case but there are a lot of roadblocks for that, the backend system has to support that but NFTs are basically you're fetching your data, your own data from the ledger, right? So I think interoperability will first start with related businesses who operate on a similar backend. Example, if I am building a game where there is a, I assume it's FPS where the game screen is not going to show the avatar but only the hands and the gun, right? So I can work with similar games because the animation is going to be shooting and I'm not required to show the full avatar because the game is designed such. So I will collaborate with similar games who are building FPS for that matter. I will open up my token ID to them and vice versa and I'll ask them was you integrate or you make my NFTs login through your game, open it for us and I will also do that to you. So I think this is where the interoperability in its base will start and if there is a game which has cars, if a car raises popular games, so again, NFTs are cars, then you can easily pull up your car from, and of course the metadata has to support that because you play and you upgrade your metadata and you sort of create value through that and you sell it in the secondary market. That's the use case at least. That's the pitch which we are presenting to the customer. So then he should be with one NFT, he should be able to log in into multiple games, multiple applications, fashion, whatever it is but the core idea is one NFT and log into at least similar applications so that it has more value for the money which they are spending on the. I agree. I think there will be two ways. One is you have an Android ecosystem and then the OS, iOS. So within meta-verses as well, there will be Android ecosystems wherein it's more intra-operatable with multiple other things, it's more open. While then there are some companies that will have meta-verses, even their assets which are not intra-operatable for multiple reasons in terms of speed, privacy, for whatever reason they would have that as well. So I think going forward we'll have two kinds of companies, some companies which do not consciously go intra-operatable and some companies which do. For us it's better as consumers to have more intra-operatability. For that we can do two things. One is discuss more on forums like this. So within human consciousness we are talking about intra-operatively a lot more. And second is have consortiums which within the US is currently happening wherein there are more consortiums trying to bring the same formats, same APIs, same protocols so that the intra-operatability becomes better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so how many of us consider meta-verses to be a real world? Any of us hand please? No? So yeah, yeah. So if you talk to Gen C's or Gen Alpha's, they're like, are you living in, are you always in the virtual world? Like is it real? So for them like it is real. There is like a very fine difference between a real versus the reality, right? So for them even the meta-verse is the reality for them. So, but if I am spending time on with the Oculus I feel like I cannot be there more than one hour because of that hardware limitations. So what do you feel like in the gadget industry or the hardware industry? So starting with Mike like how do you feel what are the advancements needed in the gadget industry and how do you add more ease, comfort, and realism to the environment? It's an excellent question. And this is actually what's gonna shape and dictate the speed of acceleration adoption in this new internet era. Now the most important thing to denote is the fact that sales or VR headsets are slowing down by a lot even more than what was initially predicted. This could be either because they didn't manage to bring down the price sensitive inflection point that will get consumers much more interested to buy them or because in fact that a lot of people that buy headsets don't tend to spend that much time as you mentioned Hannah within those environments. Also because of different reasons either because of epileptic issues or because there's nothing too exciting that can get them there for too long. Now what is interesting though is that you see the big boys like Apple, like Facebook we were in Davos in January and we were talking with the head of innovations of Meta and he asked us where do you think that Meta is investing more right now? And we're like, I don't know, data, I don't know. I just said a stupid question, answer just to see what he was gonna say. But he told us, well actually on Silicon gel because they know that they cannot build phones, right? Where phones is like the immediate extension of our hands. So they cannot go and compete against Apple but they can go and compete against glasses and lenses. So by building Silicon gels which is ultimately the lightest version of a hardware but you kind of bet on a human right now without causing extra discomfort in their everyday movements and being able to penetrate through the lenses into a mixed reality environment then they straight away go and compete against a whole new world of hardware that can be an extension of your physical lifestyle. And I think with the upcoming World Development Conference from Apple we're also gonna be seeing them unveiling their new lenses and that industry is gonna be a huge unlock of what it's about to follow. So anyone that is now in immersive content generation anyone that is now investing heavily in avatars in mixed reality, they still haven't even reached the tip of the iceberg of what it's about to follow once these things are about to be unveiled in the world and once consumers are gonna be massively in rush to go and buy them. I'm not saying they're gonna replace phones entirely it could be the day that that thing arrives just like mobile devices replace desktop devices eventually. But I strongly think that mixed reality will be the major driver into this new on-rump of the new internet and new consumer behaviors that are gonna lead the way in gaming, in commerce even in socializing. That's a great point. Anybody else would like to add on the hardware? Yes I think the major breakthrough in these metaverse or whatever we want to call it is when we have the digital assets anchored on real world assets like if someone wants to know what this panel is about they should just pop up their phone, look at the wall or whatever the in front of us without the QR code or imagine working through a sort of a shopping mall and just taking up your mobile to look at a particular asset code or a shirt or whatever it is and your digital interpretation comes near to that. So when your information is anchored on the real world and when that is accessible to you in a mobile and that metaverse is being built in companies like Niantic and other companies but I think real commerce will happen and a lot of traction will happen then instead of going to your browser or going to your application to look at what this product is about when you're actually standing there. Agree, agree. Mukund, do you want to add something? Just a couple of points. One is purely, I agree with the form factor. It's pretty big and if you wear it for more than an hour you kind of feel uneasy. So there is a lot of research already happening and bringing it down to as close to a eye spectacle, linear eye spectacles. That's the area where one research is happening and second one is the devices are lacking a lot of horsepower which means when you're going to throw a lot of AI at it especially when you're running a powerful AI inferencing which means the device doesn't have the right hardware. So there are research happening and putting an SOC which is purely for running AI inferences which means even if I am in the like 100 kilometers away from network zones or even I'm deep down in a mine while I'm the workman who is trying to take some decisions so these devices which has an SOC will be able to run the inferences and take the decision for you. And it doesn't need to be connected to the internet. So these are some areas where there is a lot of progress happening as well. One minute each. Okay, I'll keep it quick. One of the things that not been highlighted is touch and feel. So there are five senses that we utilize but within the current scope of things we are only using sight and sound. So we actually are partnering with some companies that are working in haptics which deliver the sensation of touch and feel which is crucial to experiences because even when you're doing skilling or you're working with hard goods it's extremely important what a texture of a surface is and how much pressure you're applying to it. So these are parts that are less addressed right now Even for fashion industry, the texture and feel, yes. It's ultra important because that's a great point. So as a company we make hardware so that's one of the goals to make them lighter, more user-friendly and others. How we are doing that is we are trying to move computing as much into cloud as compared to on the device which helps us reduce a lot more. Just working on the optics part of it. Optics is one thing which takes a lot of space within the device. So once there are more and more innovations within this spectrum, you'll see more and more lightweight as very similar to the glass that you wear today. So you'll be able to see that probably in a couple of years. Absolutely. What a great panel we had. Thank you all so much. And Mike, next time you should be on hologram, work on it right now. So thank you all so much for- I'm expecting big things to be able to deliver that. Yeah. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you, thank you so much.