 Hi everybody, good to see you all. So listen, we've done a lot of discussions at this forum, and it's all been captured online. So rather than regurgitate and repeat ourselves on things we've already shared, we wanted to make this discussion incremental to those other discussions. So we did the keynote at the GSS, it's a 20 minute keynote, it was sharing where the metaverse is headed in terms of being applied to under resourced and underserved communities and schools. We've done work with the sixth largest school district in the United States on helping them transform education and learning, a school that was low income and under resourced. And we also work with young people from low income communities to up skill them into this as a profession. So my colleagues here are 19 and 20 year olds, the majority from South Central Los Angeles and they all have in the last year have gotten into a professional career of designing websites in virtual reality as metaverse environments, immersive and experiential meta environments. We're not going to go through that all again because we did the keynote. Our website which is www.sdgmetaverseprize.org will have that whole video, so you'll see that out there. Or you can go to exponentialdestiny.org and you'll see that video. We also did a Facebook live interview where we did a demo and did a lot of things. That will also be on the website. For this discussion, it's going to get a little bit not into the basic understanding of the metaverse as much as try to get incrementally into some other topics and we wanted to ask if any of you had any questions in general and we're just going to do an open Q&A rather than doing the formal presentation because you can watch those online. And they're really informative so it's worth hearing what the group says and what is happening in the space. Does anyone have a question they might want to start off with? Yeah. Are you going to answer the question or are they going to answer? Well, everyone's going to answer. Everyone's going to answer. They're the rock stars here, not me. So yeah, I will let them respond first. What's the question? Where do you think the technology would be in, say, five years down the road? So where does metaverse look in five years? So to answer that question, I'm going to turn it over to them to answer because there's a few answers to that question. I will say this. Just so everyone understands what we're referring to in terms of the metaverse, in case you haven't been level set on what the metaverse is. The way I would describe it is because there's a little bit of floating definitions around there, especially since Facebook changed their name to meta. The easiest way to think about it is immersive and experiential environments that you usually access via a virtual reality headset, although you can access it on your mobile phone or on a desktop. But mostly it's through immersive and interactive experiences that are spaces that you develop, i.e. websites that you can walk into. And when you're in there, they're social, which means you'll see other people walking in there as well. And those different places get connected just like the worldwide web got connected where you can portal, literally they're called portals, where you can walk into a different environment from one environment and that is going to be a concept called the metaverse that's going to grow over time. So that's what we mean by a metaverse. That's the definition of it. Now, you can see the metaverse using augmented reality, which is glasses that you can see through the real world, but I see digital overlays on the real world. So the metaverse can come out onto the physical world. It's the web. It used to be called spatial web. It's coming out onto the physical world, augmented reality. Or you can have completely immersive where you don't see any real reality. You're completely immersed in a digital space. Nothing is actually real. It's all digitally fabricated, but it's like you're there and it's like it's live. If you haven't tried many of you, how many of you tried virtual reality? Almost everybody. How many of you tried virtual reality in the last eight months? Nobody, one person. That's a typical statistic. Things hit a major inflection point in the last year. The thing finally grew up. It's ready for prime time. Partly COVID accelerated it because it made a demand in the marketplace because people had Zoom fatigue. So you saw a lot of venture capitalist money going into platforms that let you build things that never existed before and the price came down. And the hardware, most importantly, the hardware came out where for a $300 headset, you get something that five years ago didn't exist. And if it did exist, it cost you $50,000 or $10,000 to have that type of hardware with accelerometer and all that tech in it. So in that context, the question is, we know where it is today, but headsets, 4K resolution in each eye, pretty advanced stuff. You can see the demo over here, but why don't I turn it over to my team. I'll start with Marco and you guys can each give your perspective on, because we talk about this a lot, where it's going to be. And there's some interesting things. There's hardware, software, and just use cases. Thank you, Marcus. Marco Vargas, probably born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. I exited to be here at the ITU. So the future of the metaverse. I think I'll share the metaverse and its related technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality, or what you call exponential technologies. And exponential technologies are very unique because they're fast changing. There's a lot of innovation taking place. And what that means is that the cost of these technologies are constantly decreasing. And so that's something that as a hardware and the software becomes more democratized, more easily available, the cost will continue to decrease. So that's something that I will comment on in the next five years. As you can expect, the cost of these technologies will continue to decrease, as well as accessibility. And I understand that one component to accessibility is also internet connection. We're here at the ITU, which represents a lot of countries throughout the world. And connectivity is still an issue. There's a lot of really interesting exponential technologies also taking place around increasing accessibility throughout the world. Projects like Starlink, Google Lunar, and then also the increase in availability of 5G, so that way experiences can be a lot more experiential and specifically more advanced. Like for example right now, the quality of experiences has, even in the last few months, improved so much just because 5G has been rolled out and the hardware is more compatible with the new 5G technology. But those are some comments that I will make. I'm not sure if anyone else would like to comment on where the metaverse is going in the next five years. Hello everyone, my name is Juan Felix, also born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. Something about me is that I'm working for a global consumer product company as their head of VR. So a use case or where I see the metaverse via virtual reality going in the next five years is I see if not every company, then most companies will own space or have a space in the metaverse, will have their website designed in the metaverse, will have a space in the metaverse where they will be able to interact with client stakeholders or they will have their, you know, they will showcase their business in the metaverse. So I'm already a use case of that new economy there, so I believe that a lot more companies will start going and building spaces inside the metaverse like with some of the platforms we use. To further on Juan's point, right now there's very few companies you'll see that have a metaverse space. We've done 30 companies in the last year. Things are really starting to explode now. Why are there only, why are there not a lot? Because a year ago was way too expensive and the technology didn't work that well. So the inflection point happened and businesses are starting to realize that I worked with Fortune 500 companies at the board of directors level getting into these environments and that demand just existed in the last 18 months because the headsets finally came down to price. They didn't make you nauseated anymore. The quality went up and you had environments that you could build and create things. So Juan's point is 100% within five years, just like every company or business has a website, every company, every business, every organization, most individuals will have a metaverse space. An immersive and experiential environment that you go into that they've created that feels very lifelike that just is any type of aspect or permutation they want to create to express their brand or service. That's great Juan. Pablo, how about you go? Maybe talk about, yeah, he's our tech, he's our chief technology officer. Thank you, Marcus. So my name is Pablo Gonzalez and to cover briefly on the hardware, the metaverse. So in a couple of years, the market is going to be completely different in terms of what's available in virtual reality and augmented reality. You know, we're seeing a lot of innovation in terms of, like, I have the feedback suits, and in the sense of in the field of like auditory and sensory, you know, compatible devices, right? So for now, steps being made into auxiliary devices that bring us down into the metaverse that leverage pheromones and oils to add, you know, all five senses into the metaverse. During the keynote presentation, I did mention, for example, a glove that uses magnetic waves to recreate sense, the sense of feel in the metaverse to just bring a more to a true life feeling. So again, to recap the hardware side, the market is going to be completely different as we think to innovate in the sense of, well, the five senses. Hello, everyone. I'm Samantha Aguilar Araujo. I am currently a student in college, so I am majoring in art education. And something I've noticed is that it's a really traditional curriculum. So the way I see the metaverse kind of tying in with art is being a form of expression and creativity. So I have already experienced this because I do some experimenting on my own by trying to look for new applications or softwares that where I can create art or just try to merge art and education inside the metaverse. And I think it's going to just blow up even farther because it's still in the developing phases that I've seen in some of the softwares. And I'm excited to see where it goes because I do think so much art and so much potential can come out of the metaverse. I'll share with you something very interesting. In these environments, you can film something. Let me put it this way. You and I could go into this environment. I could take any avatar and make it as my face. I could take Queen Elizabeth and make myself Queen Elizabeth. So I'd look like her just off of a photo off the internet. That's how you create your avatar with an AI that takes the photo and turns it into you. But you can do that with any photo off the internet. I can make a whole play around the Queen of England. I could take a photo of a century's back. And I could bring an artifacts and objects into that environment to make it feel like that scene. I could do that in the next hour we could create that environment. That's how quickly you can produce now. I could even have Pablo take his new iPhone and take a LiDAR and scan some sculpture here in the... Or go to England and scan an actual sculpture and then bring that into the metaverse. We've done that. These are basic products on your phone and stuff. I could go create the environment. That's an interesting thing. Once I create that environment to Sam's point, if we were theater majors, we could actually make a play with all the characters in the play and the environments that we work in let you record the theater and then play those recordings back and even put recordings within recordings. So we could make a scene of Queen Elizabeth doing something, whatever queens do back in the day. And we could record that. But then we could also record and play her with rain and thunder and lightning and we could also record her with a horse coming by. So you puppeteer all these objects doing all these things with animation and you record within recordings, within recordings. It's almost like doing advanced PowerPoint animation. And then all of you could go enjoy that play and rather than watching that play from your seats, you could walk around the whole play as it's playing out and you could watch it from any point of view in the audience. That's not five years. We could do that as a project tomorrow. But now you understand the potential. I think it's going to be highly adopted by theater and art and culture, but you can record that. That's desktop. You could do that not only today, but the cost to do that would be insignificant, almost free, the software to do that and to get those graphics. Kevin. Thank you, Marcus. So I want to talk a little bit about the headset that we use. So five years ago, the headset actually had to be connected to a computer to use the device. Now it's a standard on Oculus Quest 2 headset, a lightweight portable device. And there's other headsets out there that are also portable and lightweight. You no longer need a computer to connect them to. So in five years, just like a phone used to be a really big computer and now it could carry all this technology in my pocket, I know the headset will be contact lenses. You'll have all that power, all those capabilities within contact lenses that you'll carry around with you all day. And Marcus actually got to try some of those contact lenses, right Marcus? Yeah, there's a startup called Mojo Vision. You probably saw them in the press within the last year. Their contact lenses that give you augmented reality, obviously they're very rudimentary, but that's where this tech is going to go. I've got the Facebook, you guys saw the other day I pulled out the Facebook Ray-Ban glasses. I actually have them in my, I should have brought them on stage, but I have the Facebook Ray-Ban glasses that you can buy for $300, which are the first generation smart glasses that are designed, you buy them at a Ray-Ban store, they're designer glasses and they have high definition on them. They're not augmented reality yet, but the next generation will be, and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has said that his Apple iPhone, the Apple glasses that are coming out, Apple Glass, the CEO of Apple said that that will replace the iPhone and that product supposed to be out either next year or the year after. Apple has also announced that they're coming out with an 8K resolution probably this year to compete against the Oculus 8K. That's 400% higher than the 4K that I have in each eye, right, when you're using, when you're going by that. And already it's a high resolution, so it's going to be indistinguishable. That's how fast things are moving. So I think, you know, I make the joke that if you have kids today, you know, we all like to think about the things that we say to our dad, like dad, when, you know, dad says, when I was younger, mom says, when I was younger, I had to do this or I had to do that, right? It was so much different than what our kids experience today. Your kids are going to say to you, you're going to have to say to your kids, yeah, I used to have to, when I went to a restaurant or I went and looked at something, I used to have to pull out a phone, go to this app called Yelp, look at what my friends thought, look at the menu, look at the reviews and then put my phone back in my pocket and your kid's going to understand, like, I don't understand, dad, what do you mean? That's, you pulled out a phone to do that, like you didn't just look at something and then it popped up the menu and it popped up what your friends thought, you actually had to pull out a device. It's going to be that type of thing. Why don't we conclude with, with Zach here. Hello, my name is Zach Rieschengels and I just want to kind of add onto what Marcus said about how it's already easy to create in these platforms, because I imagine in five years, I'm the chief platform officer at X-Men's at Disney, working with a lot of these platforms, as soon we'll have a lot of integrations such as AI, where you'll be able to be in these platforms and talk things into existence, with AI being able to search and bring in objects for you and find what you want, and it's going to really be like making theater inside of these platforms, kind of like if you imagine PowerPoint, for example, five years ago has improved a lot, that's exactly how these platforms are, it's like creating on PowerPoint to, you know, teach and communicate with people, it's only going to get more accessible, integrate with more technologies, and be a lot quicker and easier to create. There's one other thing that I hope happens in five years, this is why exponential destiny exists. I hope in five years, even though Accenture, which I'm a big fan of Accenture, I used to be a partner at Deloitte Consulting, I was an executive at Bay and I worked at Ernst & Young. I'm a big fan of management consulting firms, I think they're probably a little overpriced for this model, you don't have to spend that type of resource. My goal, I should say our goal, is that in five years, if any of you want to build your metaverse space, you're not going to hire a big consulting firm to do it, you're going to come to a non-profit like ours or another one like ours, and you're going to employ resources that got automated out of their jobs through AI and robotics, because it's a non-coding technical ability to do this, Samantha the art major can do it, and so our passion is let's get people into this business, let's build consultants and advisors just like their consultants and advisors that now have a professional career, because it's a tangible skill that you don't have to have a hugely technical skill to be proficient and an expert in it. So my goal is, I'd even like to shame big Fortune 500 companies and say, you know how you put AI and robotics to replace all your workers that you didn't hire back because of COVID? You have a social responsibility to take those workers that are now unemployed because of AI and robotics, and you have no excuse not to reskill them into being your designers of this metaverse for you, to be that resource for you, you know, and then you can be self-sufficient. So that's our goal is that in five years, the workforce is a way to reach, is essentially a way to lift people out of poverty, because you can do this from anywhere in the world, you can be advising a company anywhere else in the world, so as long as ITU helps us get, you know, internet access to the world, that's going to give people the capability to go in these environments and create the next generation websites for any company. So that's our goal. Good question, long answer. Yes, a follow-up. What's it going to look like in 10 years? Let's go. I'm not an engineer, just a user, but if the blockchain is going to be in the world, then how would you, why not use it to, let's say, give a platform to scientists, to historians, in any field in order to counteract all kinds of conspiracy theories which are playing around. So I can't give back to the internet and to that technology. It's, for me, it's an initial goal which was to really give access to facts to everyone and not make use of those facts or deal with all kinds of fake news and what not. Well, let me answer your question. I don't even know if the camera picks up the question, so I'll repeat it real quickly, and maybe I'll rephrase it a little bit too. And this is actually a great follow-up question, because we haven't talked about decentralized architectures in blockchain, and a lot of decentralized architectures is what's pushing the metaverse. What does that mean? That means rather than some centralized company like Facebook who created meta, being the owner, just like the early owner of social media, being the predominant centralized owner and gatekeeper of social media, there's a big push, particularly for my community, to make the metaverse a decentralized based model built on blockchain architecture. Blockchain architecture is pretty archaic today. It's like DOS back in the day. You can't do a lot with it yet. But as it evolves, and new techniques come out like DFINITY and Ethereum 2, Approve of Work, The Proof of Stake, these other models come out, hopefully within five years, decentralized architectures will scale. What does that mean? That means the metaverse, when we create the metaverse, it won't be owned by a centralized source. It'll be a utility that we're all using publicly, and no one's a gatekeeper on it, just like no one can turn off crypto. These environments, which has pros and cons, by the way, because there could be illicit activity, nefarious actors as well. The thing that's going to be interesting, and this is really getting to the philosophy of what's going to happen here, you're going to start to have cryptocurrency in those decentralized architectures, because it's a natural fit. That's going to be the currency. And NFTs, the only reason NFTs are popular right now is because the reason you buy that NFT for $25 million at Christie's Auction House is because when you all come to my house in five years in the metaverse, you're going to think I must be someone important because I got that NFT on my wall just like having a van go on the wall. That's the only reason these NFTs are making any money right now is because they're objects that you will be able to say, I have the original, it's the Mona Lisa that's on my, that's why they're popular. People are projecting that in the metaverse in five years. It'll be status symbols just like in the real world. If we're as pathetic into commercial status symbolism as we are today, yes, it probably will be. Hopefully we can grow out of that though. But there will be new digital whole economies in the metaverse where people will live, play and work and governments will be formed there or new forms of government will be formed there. And it will be a very interesting time for society because people will start to realize in this environment it's where they do like to spend most of their time. Is that a hard leap of faith to think, no, how much time are young people spending on their phones and digital, how many spot time do we spend on the internet and digital devices all day? You will walk around this environment and it will be normal for us to be productive, take art, culture, et cetera. Again, I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing. There's isolationism, there's escapism, there's addiction that will come out of this. But just like any technology, AI, any invention, fire, there's pros and cons, right? So they'll have the same thing. But it will be interesting because crypto, NFT, decentralized architectures, blockchain are all and integrated and artificial intelligence too are all integrated. It will be a whole new economy going on there. So I think time wise we're probably, I'm about to get the hook, I think. We can cut the camera and answer more questions. But if you go to www.exponentialdestiny.org or www.sdgmetaverseprize.org because we did launch a global prize with the UN ITU this week for students that want to get into this. And we have prize money that we're giving to teams for creating the best environment. It's a non-profit initiative so they keep your own intellectual property and we even will help you afford a headset if you need it. Go to those websites, you'll see this video, but you'll also see the two videos that precede this which are ones where we gave a little bit more general overview before we got into this type of detail. Okay, thank you.