 Hello, I'm Ryan Jebetsky. I'm the founder of Spectre Studios. We are an urban design, architecture, and game development studio based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I began my career in New York City. I have a master's in urban planning, and I worked for the New York City Department of Transportation in the bike and pedestrian planning group. So I got to be there at a time when we're installing about 50 miles of bike lanes each year. And I got to work on really cool projects, like the closure of Times Square to automobile traffic, and the creation of these really great public plazas and amazing public space. I left the DOT to found social bicycles, which later became jump bikes. And we released dockless bikes and later electric bikes and scooters in cities all over the world until we were acquired by Uber in 2018, where we were able to scale up internationally and integrate our bikes into their app. Through that process, I really learned through both experiences how hard it is to change existing cities, particularly when they look like this, as is the case in the United States, where you have low density single family homes. You have strip malls. You have office parks surrounded by parking and nothing else. And then even when you have downtown towers, often at the street level, you're just confronted by parking garages. These are spaces that are fundamentally built for cars. And we tried to bring bikes to a lot of those places. Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando, Tampa, Los Angeles, Houston. And it's really, really hard to adapt and introduce new transportation when the land use is so broken. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what would I do if I could build from scratch? What would be the ideal city? What kind of things am I interested in? I spent 20 years thinking about this. And I think it begins with mid-rise mixed-use density. So two to seven-story buildings, residences up above, shops and restaurants on the ground floor, streets that are narrow and really, really great for pedestrians of all ages. Streets like what you'll see here in Amsterdam, which are not only great for pedestrians, but great for bicyclists. That you can actually use it as a primary form of transportation. And it's not just weekend warriors wearing spandex and helmets, that it's really a viable form of transportation for children, for women, and for the elderly. And I love this urban form and I really am inspired by those types of cities, but I also like the introduction of some towers. I don't think like a skyline dominated by towers, but it is a very magical experience where you're walking through a mid-rise neighborhood, you turn a corner and you catch a glimpse of a tower out in the distance. And it gives a sense of scale and ambition that I think adds a lot of value to a city. And the last thing I think about is how do you integrate green space into a city? Not just large parks, but little neighborhood pocket parks, greenways, or something like the High Line in New York City where you're actually given an elevated perspective, you're on the second level, you're weaving in and out of interesting buildings, you're catching views of skyscrapers. So these are the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head for a very long time as I visited different places and was really looking for a place to experiment. And so the idea behind Spectra is a virtual, using virtual reality to test urban design ideas. And we used it to build a concept city that we explored a lot of these types of urban form. And the goal was to actually build a real physical city of a million people. So not just like a small town or a village, but a true city-scale project which will take decades and decades to achieve, but you can actually simulate and test it virtually first. And then importantly, not just creating a top-down vision for that city, but allowing the bottoms-up formation of the city. So really thinking about it block by block and allowing groups of 100 to 200 people to form blocks and then in virtual space, move those blocks around the city. And so that while you're still in the virtual world, you can move things around, you can change it and you can test different ideas. And so we wanted to come up with an architecture that matches that philosophy, that you could have smaller groups of people, 100 to 200 people, take over a block and customize it. So we came up with a simple design concept. It's just an A building and a B building that clip together like Legos. They have a shared interior courtyard that can be customized. It has a ground level that can be changed and customized. It has rooftop gardens, but you have all the building blocks of a great city and one simple, repeatable concept. And the idea is that each block, each group of 100 to 200 people can choose what their courtyard and what their L1 looks like. And so this is the idea of like a sports block where you have basketball court, swimming, climbing wall, but you could also imagine concepts that are organized around young children or food or music or whatever the interest of those blocks are. And so that the residents can choose how much to treat it as amenity space versus commercial and rentable space. And you get a really wide diversity of building types, even using a simple template, by making subtle changes. For an example here, if you drop a corner building unit, now the interior courtyard spills out onto the street. So as you're walking block after block, even if it's sort of a templated city, it feels really different and interesting as you explore it. And you'll also notice here at the street level, there's no cars. The idea is that you can actually build a tunnel network if you're doing it from the very beginning by connecting the basements of all these buildings. So if you're trying to build a tunnel in an existing city, in San Francisco, I think they're about to spend eight billion dollars on a one-mile tunnel. But if you're doing it when you're laying the infrastructure from the beginning, you just connect the basements with small underground tunnels between the streets. And it's much easier to build that out and so you can have your logistics movement, your packages, all of that happening in an autonomous network underground. And finally, having some of these elevated viewpoints, like the High Line, where the courtyard level is connected across each block. And so you can actually explore the entire city in more of like a garden or a parkway, a greenway type of environment. So if the streets are too busy with bicycles and scooters, you could actually kind of escape to a more park-like environment. And so all of these ideas are wrapped up into a kit of parts. So the idea is we release this under a Creative Commons license. Anybody could take these ideas, bring it into their own game environments or do their own urban design experimentation, ideally feedback to this. And we can create a concept city of all of these different components, move it around, get feedback on the idea, and then eventually find a piece of land and build. So since we launched publicly in January, we've hosted over 20 workshops in the virtual city. This is a workshop that we hosted in partnership with the German Research University that has a large European grant to do research in the virtual city. We've hosted some on agriculture, some on bike transportation, a variety of different workshops to get feedback on the concept. And whenever I show up at a conference or event or even just a bar, I break out the laptop and get people to be immersed in the virtual world. Now, I've been thinking about, how do we go beyond just hosting events in the virtual space and how do we introduce some game elements? And so we've come up with a game that we're gonna be releasing next year called Yimbi-Nimbi War. The idea is that everybody here is gonna come across Nimbis when you try to build your project, but not in my backyard people. And so they are possessed by these demons, these bad ideas, and you have to vanquish them and shoot them down and liberate the people. And so... And so just introduce a little bit of light gameplay to get people idea how hard it is to build a city and the things that we have to overcome. Lastly, I'm really excited by the stuff we're doing in the digital world, but I want to undertake a physical project much like we've seen today from Cabinet and Neighborhood and Nomad and all these folks. So we've purchased an 80-acre piece of land in Puerto Rico. We want to turn it into a working organic farm and a hospitality concept for group travel. So something that would be a perfect venue to host these 50 to 100-person meetups and micro-conferences. So it's got a co-working space, a gym, child care facilities, a podcast recording studio. So we've designed these two buildings and put it through the same process of designing virtually, applying it to a piece of land and trying to build a community around that. And so, yeah, we're trying to make a really, the best place for large groups to come together and hang out. It's got these two common buildings, these sort of shared buildings with all the programming. And then we're designing these Balinese-style villas with six bedrooms. So you can actually stay here. At least four of these on the property. So that's 24 bedrooms. So we're at a really good size for hosting these events of like 50 to 100 people. And so that's a, it's one, it's practicing this virtual, the physical process. And two, it's thinking about how do we create this engine of bringing groups of 50, 100, 200 people together that can become the seeds for a city of the future that we might build. And so that's it. So this is a timeline of a little bit about what we've accomplished so far. We plan to, again, release the first game in the first half of next year and submit the designs and site plan for the entitlements and start building the physical site, ideally being construction in early 2025. So thank you so much. And yeah.