 My name is Dave Treat. I lead Accenture's Metaverse Business globally. It is something that has emerged over time. So we, I founded our blockchain business back in 2015. A couple years later, we recognized that actually the whole notion of the tokenization of identity money and objects as kind of the killer use cases in the blockchain space were dying for the experiences layer side of things. And so a couple years later, folded in our augmented reality and virtual reality practices. And now lo and behold, we roll forward a few years later and we have a word for that. So I'm going to talk through the experiences we've had so far. Thanks Tracy. And where we're headed and I'm going to try to do some more show than tell. Have some fun and let's make this interactive. So no need to wait for questions until the end. Let's talk about all the way through and please feel free to guide me to go faster or slower. So I won't spend a lot of time here, but the natural progression of the digital world that we've been living in, moving from the internet of data and connecting all of our networks, you know, network of data, adding internet of people and the rise of social media, adding the internet of things. And really now what we're adding is the whole notion of place and ownership. We have the honor of having Sir Tim Berners-Lee launch our tech vision 18 months ago, where we set this business in motion. And of course, Sir Tim has been very articulate about the way the internet has developed. It's been missing this value layer and certainly the whole notion of place. So that identity, value, and place construct has been missing is how it's been developing. And that's really what's now being added. So when we use the word metaverse, which is getting beaten up soundly in the media right now, but I would argue against a very narrow definition of virtual worlds and avatars, we're using the word continuum and thinking very expansively about it. And so we're really thinking about it in, we're really thinking about it as this, this overlap between the notion of spatial experience that's unlocked by augmented reality and virtual reality, having us break free from the flat plane of class and the notion of that compute in our digital world is something that's only experienced through a laptop, now more and more a cell phone that we carry around, and that why would we have just at a fundamental level our digital world, which is so unconstrained, why would we constrain it just to a flat plane of glass? Why wouldn't compute be a spatial experience that's overlaid on the world around us or enable us to go anyplace in the world combined then with, as I said, those killer use cases from a blockchain perspective of the whole notion of the tokenization of identity, money and objects in a very similar manner, the whole notion of why is it that in the digital world we would be constrained to when we want to have service from a service provider or retailer authority, we have to onboard ourselves to them, give them all of our information, they hold it, sell it, resell it, you know, when in the physical world, you know, that's all very natural and comfortable that I use this wallet to carry around, you know, my, you know, aspects of my identity, my financial credit worthiness, we actually use a separate device to carry around my central bank liabilities, but that whole notion of we don't have that in the digital world, we've been constrained to this construct of in order to get service, we have to give all of our data away, and so this notion of being able to use the power of combining these two things to create a whole new really unconstrained set of experiences that don't lock us into the flat pane, plane of glass that enable us to bring our identity, money and objects with us from place to place to place, and that this is really breaking long held orthodoxies. When I was a kid growing up, if I wanted to speak with someone who was not within shouting distance, I had to go to the courted wall on the phone in my kitchen and then get yelled at my parents for the length of the phone call because it was very expensive. It was, you know, moments later or fast forward till now, any one of us can call anyone anywhere anytime at almost zero marginal additional cost. When I wanted to get money, and I, when I was, you know, when I was a kid, I had to go to a bank teller, I had to have cash pushed across a sale or, you know, early days of ATMs, I had to go to a place to get money. Now, of course, you know, through a variety of whether you know central bank digital currencies that are on their way or current stablecoin constructs or, you know, the cryptocurrency space, my ability to pay or exchange money with any one of you anywhere anytime, you know, in any place at any distance fully enabled. So the steady progression of technology, one way to think about it is we've been breaking down these points of friction and barrier steadily to give us anything we want, anywhere with anyone anytime we can go any place right now through headsets and platforms or looking through our phones. We could bring others to us here and we could interact and collaborate. And so, you know, when you take that mindset of the suite of technologies that create that capability, really that's what we're calling metaverse and the, you know, the amazing journey that's ahead of us to be able to capitalize on all of that new capability and all of the complexity of how to do it in a way that's safe and responsible. And I caught the last few minutes of the previous panel, you know, real questions around how to do it right. And, you know, I'll jump straight to the punchline at the end of this, right. It will require us gathering as communities to be able to really identify what is that foundation layer that should be open source that should be based on common standards where we can align the valuable use of this technology to our community values, whatever size, you know, local or large or global, whatever defines that community. So, like I said, I want to do more show than tell. I would get there faster. Market opportunities staggering. Actually, when you look at the, you know, it kind of edit from multiple different facets. Right now, we've just tracked and a lot through our own client base, more than 50% of the global Fortune 100 are engaged in aspects of this continuum of experiences. The, you know, if you take the whole NFT space, the whole notion of the tokenization of objects, I'll talk about that more depth and so what's, you know, where the real focus is, but there's real money being spent on this notion of a digital object that we bring with us ideally from place to place to place. Transactions, you know, purchasing my single largest spend on my two teenage boys last holiday season, and I know again will be this holiday season, is they want money to buy skins on Fortnite. They want money to buy things in their gaming world. It is second nature to the next generation that digital only objects have utility value and they, you know, and they're willing to buy and pay for them. It may, you know, it may feel silly for, you know, to me, they feel it. It's very important to them. So the next generation is coming up with all of this just being natural. There is some eye-watering figures that are out there and these are actually some of the lower end of that eye-watering figures. You know, city's number is that when you think about this continuum metaverse capabilities, it's a $13 trillion economy by 2030. That is a staggering pace at which this is all going to advance over the coming years if that were to play out. Even at the low end, the $800 billion I think is Gardner's number, right? Doesn't matter. We're off by order of magnitude. It is clearly a big space, not withstanding the media beat up in the trough of disillusionment we're in right now against this very narrow definition. So we want to expand that definition and we want to really help people understand how pervasive the impact is going to be. And so I'm going to do this fast and get into some actual examples. But from a customer experience perspective, the whole notion of immersive experiences to change the nature of how businesses relate to their customers, I will show you an example of it that we just launched in Singapore in a retail shopping mall. But that whole notion of immersive try-on, immersive does it fit in my room? That whole notion of, well, will the couch fit in the living room? Those things that we're now seeing more and more commonplace, the value pool there is just for, as an example, the retail industry. If you can materially reduce the return rates, which the early data proves that you really can, if I am able to try it on something as close as possible to my actual body, I'm more likely only to buy it because I really wanted it. I only will buy it because it has a good chance of fitting. It's the color I wanted. If I can reduce the return rate, the average cost of a good to be returned is 50 bucks. It's a real value pool to the retail industry. They're fired up about it. And so you're seeing a lot of engagement from the big fashion houses and the like around what is an immersive shopping? What will it drive? From a product perspective, every product company on the planet that's our client, we're in a conversation with to say, does your product have a valid heads-up display that would extend the utility or service or love or the purchase of the next version of your product? We're all used to the heads-up display in our car. It tells us to go faster, slower, left, right. The whole notion of a heads-up display is around for a very long time. But even if it's experienced through a cell phone, that ability to have that overlay of that heads-up display even experienced through seeing objects through a cell phone. And then as we move towards wearables, that notion of every product company need to think through what is that valid, useful, valuable heads-up display is key. And then the whole notion, I really regret doing this on my iPad, and then the whole notion of digitally native products. Obviously, per my example on the previous slide, the amount of money that's going into NFTs and digital objects, again, it's a real thing. And there's some really valid digitally native products. And there's some really spectacularly bad ones. So the whole notion of conversation with a beauty company that we're working with, and there was an early notion of, well, let's create a digital twin of lipstick. Well, digital twin of lipstick is not interesting. What would you actually do with that? It has no actual utility. However, what that company actually sells is beauty. And how we show up in a Metaverse location in a VR experience to a person that we take into our Metaverse places, there is a comment or an insight around, oh, you chose that outfit, or I chose this. We all are used to getting up every day and putting on the outfit that matches the course of our day, who we're going to be with, the weather, et cetera. That whole notion of how we show up will translate exactly into the digital world. That beauty company can sell the visage for your avatar. That matches me better. You've captured who I am. That whole notion of selling beauty, not selling the digital twin of lipstick is a serious thing. That then comes with it of, how do you make these products? A digital object, when done right, let's not say if, when done right, needs to move with me from digital place to place to place and experience. We need the standards for that. We need the infrastructure and the platforms that have that portability, that interoperability to be able to enable that. That's a different supply chain. That's a different custody structure. How do you prove ownership? How do you transfer ownership? How can you manage the intellectual property rights of the usage of it? We're seeing that early, very awkward, clunky version of it in the NFT space, where companies are doing things like, I'm going to make 10 sneakers and go down the route of the scarcity valuation model, grab a headline, do something that actually, if they were to step back, when they're stepping back to think about it, actually what they want is their brand showing up everywhere and everyone engaging with the brand, and so making a fungible version of the sneaker, producing it at hundreds of millions of copies, having it show up on all of our feet for the avatars that we, where that's enabled, having their brand everywhere and being able to prove that it's authentic is the valuable part of that tokenization, not the scarcity of value. Payments infrastructure is being modernized and overhauled to that as a whole separate talk. I won't go into that. From an employee experience perspective, we are our own best credential in this space. We've built our own metaverse places for employee onboarding. We are 725,000 people right now. We've onboarded 180,000 people now through our metaverse based experiences, our before and after measurements of the engagement, the learning, the retention of knowledge, the networking and the relationship building has been staggering, right? We are our global HR lead, fully committed. This is the only way we do onboarding now as a global organization to be able to drive that consistency and that networking. We designed it in a way that can be experienced valuably in two dimensions or three, headset or not, and we're getting great data around it. The whole notion of the employee experience, we're just at the beginning of that. Again, I think I'll show a couple examples. The last one I'll say is building upon the multi-decade, really productive use of digital twins in an industrial setting. The industrial digital twin of an operation or manufacturing plant, tremendously valid and useful, now making that collaborative and immersive massively powerful. I'll show you an example. I've already done more tell than I meant to. Let's show some videos. This is, if I can get it to play. We'll see if this plays in a second. It might be loading. I guess we're skipping the volume entry capture. I'll come back to that with my phone. This is a video of something that we just did with LendLease in Singapore for Chinese New Year. This was, you're the rabbit. What you're seeing here is an activation in the mall where LendLease went to 50 of their tenants and said, we're going to run this activation in the mall. We're going to ask those in the mall to basically scan a QR code, download an app, and then search for these augmented reality-based bunnies and tickets and offers in the mall. So I think this is the next generation of Pokemon Go, but now tied directly to retail, tied directly to commerce. Some tremendous results. It was wildly popular. Actually drove a change in foot traffic, drove engagement with the brands, drove additional sales. It was wildly powerful. I'm not able to show, but can loosely reference. We just did this for one of the big theme parks for their super fans. Same result, the whole notion of a brand using tokenization and an augmented reality experience overlaid on the physical environment to change behaviors, drive engagement, drive additional commerce, wildly powerful. And we're just at the beginning of it. That notion of then being able to carry one's identity from brand to brand to brand and experience experience to experience core to how this plays out and rather dystopian if it stays in its current siloed infrastructure. So again, another huge topic for this community around our whole patterns and focus of digital identity. I'd love to go back one. Let me try to see if I can get this video to run. Volumetric video. I may seriously regret this. Let's try this one more time. All right. It's loading. Let's see if this loads. We have a whole set of volumetric video capture rigs. We did an experience with the NFL where we took Kaleche Usameli from the Boston Ravens. A fan won the chance to actually plant. Actually, maybe I'll switch to my phone. Let me do that. A chance to actually... Oh, did it go? This is... I'll come back to that one. This is... All right. I'm going to let that load here and I'm going to switch to my phone. All right. So this is... Not Kaleche, but this is me. So this is a one-minute volumetric video recording of me that you saw. It took me a second to pull up and now let's just plant me. Where did I plant myself? I planted myself here. I can't turn the volume up loud enough, but I contemplated having this version of me do the opening of this talk instead of me. But you can see this is a high fidelity volumetric video capture. My ability to place me anywhere. Transpose that in your mind to... I'm standing in the DIY shop. I'm standing in Home Depot or Lowe's. I'm contemplating whether I have the skills to actually... Sorry, I have to get myself to shut up here. Stop, Dave. Okay. I'm contemplating whether or not I actually want to buy that power tool or not. Do I have the skills to use it? I scan a QR code standing that aisle and Bob Vila pops up and says, you can do it. Here's exactly how it works. I get the thing home and I can't find where to change the oil on the generator I bought. I can't find the plug and I scan a code on the side of the generator and Bob says, no, no, it's right here. That ability to have that overlay of high quality information on our physical world, again, links together not just the augmented reality aspect of it, but the relationship of me with the brands, the personalization, the customization. The thing about Kaleche, if I could get it to show, I'll have you imagine it, just like I planted myself there and Kaleche was able to see through the phone and have a live conversation with the fan. So the fan was able to plant him in that fidelity, so he's just standing in his living room and have a two-way conversation. The whole notion of volumetric video customer support is maybe a high-end, really high-touch, high-innovation, high-tech way that customer service may get evolved. Take a hotel chain. Staffing the front desk is a relatively pricey proposition. It's very, very lumpy as to when they actually have to do real work during a day, during check-in and checkout times. Expensive to staff. We, for years, could have just made that an iPad, not like this, but an effective iPad and a video conversation, but that's not really a high-touch, good customer service dynamic. But what if it was like I just dropped myself in a live two-way interaction, now suddenly you could have a high-touch, more human-like interaction in real time, anywhere, any place. So all of these things were just at the first implementations of. This is, from a virtual reality perspective, work we've been doing at the World Economic Forum. I can't show the video. We're not allowed to yet, but just as an image, we've created a campus for Professor Schwab in the World Economic Forum to be able to host dialogue between global stakeholders around key topics. And we did that. We showed this in January. We had the first multilateral session where the power of being able to have the conversation within the context of the content was actually quite useful. The utility of what you can do in these environments is going to improve over time, so forget whiteboards and sticky notes. Being able to be with a group of people immersed in data and interacting with that data in a fully customizable virtual place, wildly powerful. The other way that this wildly powerful is for training simulations. So one of the things we've done for a government setting is be able to take a hyper-realistic, not animated, but hyper-realistic environment for social worker training. So being able to do something you actually can't do in the physical world of put a social worker into a setting where there is violence, guns, drugs, child abuse, just to think of it the worst possible setting within which to run a training simulation, being able to do that in a fully virtual space because you can do it again and again and again and you can practice and get feedback and you can rerun the same scenarios, something you couldn't even possibly do with actors in the real world and something that paper and, you know, flat interactions have never been really great for. So there's a, you know, horses for courses between virtual reality and augmented reality and then, and then, you know, the constructs of how our identity money and objects stream through it, all super important conversations about how this plays out. Come on. I broke it. Sorry. Let's see if I can do one more. All right. That's not coming back. I was going to show an integration that we just did with NVIDIA and Microsoft Teams. So NVIDIA has developed their omniverse platform that is the most high fidelity, most heavy weight virtual reality platform, you know, that's out there. It has a physics engine built into it that, you know, that allows you to be able to define the physical characteristics of the objects in the virtual environment so that you can model and do the scenario analysis of if you dropped it, would it break or bounce? If you pushed it, would it bend or not? How will light reflect off of it? And part of what we showed, let's try to have to restart this. Part of what we demonstrated was the global collaboration capability within that by integrating it with Teams live sharing. So we were able to demonstrate how you could get multiple people together, all working off of different tool sets within the omniverse platform to design an environment. We're starting to do this for our own offices. I'm going to help me here. Nope. All right. Well, I'm going to quit trying. So that demo just showed that the power of being able to have global collaboration between multiple parties on multiple platforms to be able to actually work and change a physical environment in a tremendous high fidelity. So we think about the world between the whole notion of, as you've seen, a set of customer experiences of enterprise experiences and industrial experiences, the range of this changes the nature between a brand or customer. It changes the nature of the products that we buy and interact with. It changes the nature of how we run our enterprises, how we collaborate and work. The pervasive change that this continuum of capabilities will drive is just staggering. To that end, the end of the presentation was really about the responsible aspect of how we do that and the effectiveness and a bit of a call to action and why this community is so important in that in order to do this right, this can't be an individually siloed set of experiences that almost all metaverse places are today in a virtual reality perspective and really in an augmented reality perspective. And the power of, if we can get it right, being able to port and bring with us our identity, money and objects from place to place to place, all against which then the values that we have as a community need to be defined around behaviors of safety and inclusion and then the obvious around security and IP rights and the like. And so we have a huge focus on this, this part of why we participate in the suite of Linux projects involved in helping to drive parts of this as well as other global communities. So just open call to all of us work together to be able to think through what could we do better and get right about now that in a similar manner we would have done if we convened before the rise of the social media phase and how maybe how it would have played out differently had we had enough dialogue. So I was hoping to show you in a more elegant fashion the range of things that are currently underway and inspire to say, look, this is deeply powerful and to try to invoke those conversations. So let's make this interactive now. Nobody interrupted me, which is regrettable. So what questions or topics could we explore together for the next 10 minutes? Please. Yeah, so the question was for those participating remotely, the question was did we buy headsets? We did, about 60,000. So we bought 60,000 headsets. We're now contemplating the next waves of purchase and we're anticipating just a bit of a complexity here. That was obviously pricey, but we thought valuable. We learned a ton from it. We had this incredible proliferation of people. We opened up the platform that we were using to let people build their own spaces and there was a Cambrian explosion of creativity that happened. So that was wonderful. But it is an interesting concept to say if you view the headsets as an incremental cost and at the price point that they're selling right now to have the good ones, that's pricey. Until we get to the second, second, third generation of them, when it's a choice of how much work can you do in headset and does the headset replace the laptop, I think you then get into a totally different mindset around it. And I do think that's largely where we're headed. So that's very disturbing for some folks who haven't been comfortable on the headsets yet. For me, I put these on every morning when I wake up and I don't take them off until I go to bed. The faster we progress towards something that is just this comfortable and integrated to wear, the thought of me not having to wrestle with, this is the easy one out since these challenges, right? I've got a brick of a laptop that I lug around if compute can really be anywhere and the headset, the future wearable replaces the laptop. It's actually a pretty good capital cost trade. But yes, we bought 60,000 headsets and we made sure that it worked in a lovable way in two dimensions as well. So this is interesting and informative, but you're here presenting at the Linux Foundation Summit, right? Where do you specifically see open source playing a role for you? Why are you here at this summit? It's a great question. And again, regrettable that I had so much trouble with the slides. But so I was one of the founding board members of Hyperledger and continue to sit on that board. I also am now a founding board member of the Open Wallet Foundation. We participate in Trust Over IP. We have participated in Diff and Finos. If you look at the open source foundation and the standards required to unlock and enable the way these experiences should go with that portability and avoiding the lock-in of the silos that we're stuck in now, open source is the answer of being able to build that foundation and then obviously the standards that go along with it. So as an example, so literally I've got a team that we dedicate to the Linux open source community. Tracy heads it up. We've now contributed over 7 million lines of code to the various Hyperledger projects. We are particularly focused on interoperability with Hyperledger Cacti, DevOps with Bevel, and now launching the Open Wallet Foundation set of projects in particular to help drive that whole fundamental building block set of engines for really good wallet infrastructure that underpins it all. Anyone feeling slightly down about the beat-up that Metaverse is taking right now? Did the definition help a little bit? We're searching for language. When we're in client conversations and we explain and we say, look, this is about not just VR, that AR is important, and the identity money and object side immediately resonates and it immediately depressurizes it, but we're sensitive to, you know, it's a tough go in the media at the moment. Fair enough, yeah. Please. I guess for me the thing that stuck out about what you shared was the experience in the mall, which didn't give me warm fuzzies. I was like, uh-oh. We're having serious problems today with how young people in particular are engaging with social media. If you look at Jonathan Haidt's research, like, we have a whole social conversation to have about that and fixing it because young people are showing up in college with no basic skills of how to navigate the world. It's like semi-adults and they're not having sex with each other. Like, there's some weird stuff happening that is as a result of social media that social science researchers are tracking. That just makes me go like, oh, what are we going to do with that stuff that's messed up? It could also be really cool. Like, I'm looking at it also being like, okay, could we also train the AI things to help us know the plants in our ecosystems and help us watch the, like, it could be good, but if we're only driving consumer value at the mall, I get really freaked out. I do too. And hence, you know, we have a team just dedicated to the responsible aspects of it. I guess part of what gives me hope, and particularly in this community, is that if it's left to individual commercial, you know, thinking and innovation, then yes, I think we'll end up with a lot of noise and I think many of the dangers you're highlighting will proliferate. If it will be difficult for it to play out that way though, because at scale, the whole notion of a wallet per thing, an app per thing, a, you know, if we have that Cambrian explosion of stuff that maybe we get frustrated with, the power of being able to have an open source basis for wallet infrastructure where you can start to encode within it those community values and policies and capabilities and be able to, as a parent, right now, my ability to, you know, with my three teenage kids, you know, figure out the settings between Snapchat, Instagram, you know, signal, you know, WhatsApp, like the, it is untenable for me to be able to be an effective parent because I've got to think about it app by app, context by context. If we actually created a construct where this, you know, there was not one wallet to rule them all, that would be bad. But if we had a open source foundation for the wallet infrastructure that could be encoded with a set of policies and rules and guide to the nature of how could our kids or ourselves, you know, responsibly apply and be responsibly interacted with and provided services from others because in order to use your identity money and objects, you have to, it will happen through that wallet infrastructure. That gives me hope that that consolidation from a tech perspective gives us a place to have those conversations and to encode those values. But if we don't, if we don't get that going, it will be individual commercial interests because that this is the manifest, you know, this is, this is the cookie wars have led us to, got to find a new way. And we have to make sure that that new way is responsible in one way or another. Yes. Yes. I'm trying to think about that. Yeah. We do. Yeah. I'm sorry. You're tapping into a perpetual frustration I have of, you know, it's hard to keep a website up to date. But yes, we get a lot of this content is already on it. And it's a good kick for me to make sure that we get, we get more of it out there. So yes, with a think of a way to do that. Excellent. Well, thanks for your time. I'm happy to continue conversations the hallway.