 So, Metaverse for commerce, I want to understand, you know, how it's a game-changer and, you know, how it, how will it help e-commerce, so, anybody? Mr. Dharain, you, you launched Flipverse, so I want to start with you. Yeah, first of all, I mean, it's great to see the participation here today and I thought the lady who kicked it off with the keynote, right? I think she did a good job in giving everybody a good primer on what it is. So, one of my roles at Flipkart is to hit Flipkart Labs, where we've been working on emerging trends including Web3 and Metaverse. And this past year, we actually launched our very first Metaverse experience. It was live on the platform. It coincided with our big festive sale, the big billion days. I don't know how many of you in the audience have actually experienced the Flipkart Metaverse called the Flipverse. Any show of hands? I wanted to see. Thankfully, I had one panel member say that he did experience it. So, it's good to know that it caught some people's attention. I think it was a great experiment for us. It was a limited time one week type of an experience. We've had about a million people experience it on the platform. So, while the technology is still very nascent, I think there is a lot of interest in this from our customers. We've also had many known brands who participated with us, about 16 brands who are part of our Metaverse experience, including very big brands like Puma, Nivea, and so on, right? So, off to a really good start, but it was just our first attempt at it. And we are looking to learn from it and go from there. Okay, Rajesh, I would like to know your comment. I think it's a natural evolution, right? If you look at the businesses, first they started, phone as a medium of interaction with the other end customers. And if it was optimal enough, we wouldn't have got onto a web interface. The businesses moved from a phone-based support to a web-based kind of a presence. If it was optimal enough, we wouldn't have gone into an app-based commerce. So what I'm trying to drive home the fact is, there are a lot of unaddressed needs. And the under-service needs from a customer perspective, especially today with information explosion. And most of our decisions are based on what others are saying. So you would like to experience everything before the final decision on purchase is made. And to provide that kind of an experience, phone is suboptimal, web is suboptimal, app is suboptimal. So there is a need for something which is more immersive in nature. And that's where the metaverse steps in, right? And also some of the traditional models have been inverted. For example, when I went to school, I was taught about ADAS. So there's an awareness, there's an interest, there's a desire, there's an action, and there's a satisfaction. Now there's an inversion of satisfaction that is going to happen. Even before you do an action, you would like to be satisfied with that particular decision, which means you need to experience. Now, just to post this with aspects like, how do you buy an apartment? By experiencing it, even before you're buying an apartment. How do you want to experience a car in a digital channel? For example, you want to go and buy an EV car. Will you take a gasoline car and go to the showroom to experience the car? It doesn't gel well. So these are some of the areas where there's a good opportunity to bring those immersive experiences and invert the age-old models and give customers an experience so that they don't regret their decision at a later point of time. So it is bound to happen. It's a change, nobody can stop. And anybody wants to be, does not want to be part of this particular change will be left out. And final, what happens is with the immersiveness coming in place, the app commerce is suboptimal from a real estate perspective. So web is going to reclaim that commerce leadership and Metaverse is going to enable that. Those will be my points. Okay, can I disagree with everything he said? Yeah. I totally disagree. No, I'm just joking. I'm just absolutely just everything you said is great. So the way I personally think is the way to make e-commerce successful in Metaverse is going to route via community and the content, right? We at the Good Glam Group, we firmly believe that because let's think about it that in web 2, we tried to bring the retail experience online. But in certain cases or in most cases, we never succeeded. We tried different things. Now the main part, the way offline succeeds because there is a lot of interaction, you go to shop, you meet people, you talk to them, right? Now web 3, especially Metaverse will enable things such a way that you're sitting at home and you're actually going in a mall. You're going in the shop, you're talking to someone. You are trying out things, right? That's where this will make a lot of difference where you talk to people the way you are doing offline as if you are in offline store. And then the conversion will be very high. So that's what I personally feel that's where we all should aim. Now 5G has rolled out very rapidly. Internet speeds are amazing. And this is, I mean, maybe this is the right time for it. All right, so we also have Sharlene with us. Sharlene, welcome. Welcome to this show and this session. So we were discussing how Metaverse is going to be a game changer for e-commerce and how brand can enter Metaverse. So what's your take? If you can, we really want to know your comments on that. To come in from Long Island, New York. You know, it's wonderful to be there with you guys. I really enjoyed the keynote. My experience in developing a Metaverse and working within this space has been, it's been an amazing journey. And I think my focus has been working with retailers to understand how to use this space to fix things that in a lot of cases, I mean, you think about it, somebody has a physical store, they don't really have to do that much rather than do a really good job getting people to talk about them in their neighborhood. A lot of local businesses, they don't do a whole lot of advertising. They just do a really good job at whatever it is that they sell. I built my Metaverse platform to facilitate local retailers. And I've learned that teaching them how to use this space because you're, you know, to your point, you're very right. They never really learned how to sell online. A lot of them never wanted to do it. And now with the Metaverse, you know, coming very quickly to take over commerce, you know, my focus is to make sure that they have the resources so they don't get left behind. And I think the better we can do with teaching retailers and brands how to really give a good experience in the Metaverse, the better adoption will be. Because people will absolutely go there if they can have good experiences and obviously do things that they would normally have to drive to a store to do. All right, Sharlene, we'll come back to you. And Daniel, you were disagreeing with Rajesh. So I would like to. Just to spice it up a little bit so that maybe we can entertain the audience. But no, I agreed with everything you said. So I want to know from you and from Sam, you know, Metaverse, how it's going to help the real estate, you know? How are we going to help real estate? Oh, definitely. I mean, the real estate is where I've been working most of my adult life. And I've actually worked in the real estate, which is in the real world. And now we're bringing this to the rest, the actual real estate to the Metaverse or to digitize space. But just to step back a little bit, I would like to maybe make a comment which I think Irina also mentioned in her speech. It's about where your customer is, right? Who has kids in the room? Hands up, you don't have kids? View of view? And nieces and nephews, where do they spend their time? Are they on playing Roblox or most of the times they're native to that industry? That's where they're going to go and consume or that's where they're going to go and spend their money, whichever it is. That's where they're spending their time already. So the technology in the end to the meet is an end to a need, right? So we're trying to reach our customers and we realize that people want to go online seamlessly, find something that they really want, experience it in an immersive way, to really understand it in the future, perhaps not only see it but smell it from thousands of kilometers away. And then decide whether they want to make a decision, whether they want to be engaged or buy it or not. So we realize that the single-large asset class in the world is real estate is $333 trillion industry. We all live in homes and we all go to social establishments, hospitals, hotels, we are living in one. So by bringing this to the web three, we're enabling a huge transformation. And we're bringing the old money that is, that's where wealth is still sitting with the large institutions. Because they really like to invest in something that is real estate. So we're creating a property decentralized ID for real estate, just like you may have an ID yourself. I don't know if anybody has heard about self-solving identification. Anybody knows that? Okay, if you're in the audience, it's a pretty cool, essentially your own ID, you own it. You don't need an actual authority to give you the ID. You can transfer, you can travel with the world with it and you can give access to some people, some sort of information, zero knowledge proof. You don't have to tell them everything about what you do and then keep a little bit of privacy. We're doing the same for property ID. And by doing that, we're giving every property a virtual wallet, a digital wallet, to enable them to interact with web three. And that's how we're gonna be enabling them to come into the space, sell their homes, buy carpets, or do whatever they would like, tokenize their homes in them. And I'm sure you can speak more about building in the metaverse with land vault, and that's where we meet in between the digital and physical, left to have more conversation on that. Thank you. Yeah, so a bit of context. So my name is Sam Huber. I'm the founder of a company called Land Vault. Land Vault is the largest construction company in the metaverse. We now have a team of 130 people globally building experiences on all the platforms, or sandbox, decentralized, but also standalone experiences in Unity, Unreal, and deploying that for big brands like Mastercard, Heineken, L'Oreal, Red Bull. We were involved in the Fashion Week last year. And it's been really interesting to see the difference and the change from brands. The motivation has changed from brands to get into the metaverse last year, and to get into the metaverse now. Last year, a lot of it was about being first, trying something, winning the headlines, and just being able to say, we've done it. We had projects that we had to turn around in less than a week, which was crazy. And now, obviously, with the current markets, there is generally less hype. But the brands and the partners that are still interested in building are doing it much more strategically. So the projects are bigger, they take longer, but they are a lot more thought through. And a lot of them also have actual KPIs that are attached to them. Before that, it was about, let's do something, let's put it out, let's talk about it. And now a lot of it is about what are the metrics, what are the KPIs? What is the actual business problem that I'm trying to solve through the metaverse? So the metaverse went from just a playground, almost like a marketing exercise, to more of a channel that businesses can leverage to solve their problems. Some of them would use Google Ads, or you might want to use Facebook Ads, or you might want to do outdoor advertising. Well, now the metaverse is just another tool that you can use to increase sales, to increase awareness, to build a community, whatever it is. But it doesn't solve new needs. It's just another tool that you can use to leverage and to actually solve real business problems. So it's been really exciting to see, to establish the metaverse as a true channel beyond the hype, something that actually generates tangible results. Vishal would like to know from you. You launched launching this health metaverse. So how metaverse is transforming the health care sector, if you can throw light on that? So it is interesting to hear the different views of the panelists. But I think one of the core things we are missing is that the metaverse environment cannot be a retail store or just land and stuff. If you look at the most successful platform, it's Fortnite. They are the ones who have millions of people playing. They have concerts, they have events. So fundamentally, you need to have what I call the core loop or core proposition, which is getting people back into your space every day. What we are trying to do is just the way NFTs became digital. You said just an NFT is not enough. You need something in the real world. We are saying the same thing and saying that how can you connect your health data to your digital avatar? Because governments are saying that, hey, I want to launch this metaverse, but I don't want my population to be lazy and everybody becoming obese and unhealthy because they are sitting in their basements. So our whole idea was connecting your health data to your avatar. And in a way, the gamification we are working on is your avatar becomes younger as you become healthier in the real world. So your avatar's physical abilities and some of their virtual abilities are co-connected. And while this co-connection is happening, we are working on to create our virtual health token, which can then be accepted by gyms, hospitals, doctors in the real world. And we will be piling the first implementation of this in UAE because it's a place which is small enough. But the government really wants to look at use cases of metaverse, which is beyond fashion and e-commerce. But they are saying, how can this be a real use case for consumers? So imagine each one of you would have a digital representation, and if you have a high blood pressure, your avatar would also show those signs and you better take care of your health. OK, thank you so much. Arun, I would come to you now. And we saw Bangalore International Airport launching T2, the terminal 2 in metaverse. It was a pilot launch. So wanted to know what prompted the authority to be in the metaverse space to be there and your future plans? Yeah, it's a very interesting question. Actually, in a way, I say that airport represents all of us in the panadists. We call airport as a business of businesses. We are service, we are hospitality, we are infrastructure, we are retail, we are F&B. Wheelistate. T2 catering, there is a large ecosystem. So last year, somewhere this time, we started on looking into metaverse. And also we are in the business of enabling journeys, physical journeys. Physical journeys, physical cargoes, goes through the airport. So what does an airport does in a virtual world? That was a question even we were thinking about. And then we looked up and then say, OK, let's experiment, let's learn. So what we have created is a terminal 2, which got inaugurated recently. We have created that in the metaverse. So we are calling it as blrmetaport.com, or probably there's a QR code if you can flash it, people can actually access it. Right now, it's just an experiential platform. You can log in as an avatar. It has got all standard metaverse features like you can customize avatar, et cetera, et cetera. You can walk through the terminal. The entire domestic passenger flow is now mapped. You could see the T2 without even actually getting into the terminal 2, you could experience it. Right now, it only stops there. But there are a lot of interesting use cases what we foresee. Like the first thing is, we can bring commerce into that. We can bring fun into this, a game can be brought into. Like when we started, when we were thinking about, should this airport in the metaverse should look like real? Is there a necessity? Was also a question we posed. I could also build a circular runway, which you could never see in a real airport. And this runway can become, I don't know, a Ferrari track when I need it. I could create a game. So the opportunities are endless. So we are actually focusing on those use cases, number one, which helps our passengers. And moreover, we want to go out of this photos and acres which we have, which is a physical entity. We want to just break that and go out. So this is a perfect opportunity to go out of the physical boundary what we have and the regulations what we have, which I don't have it in metaverse. For example, I can build an ATC tower and allow only those people who are having my NFT to do a bangi jump from the airport from the ATC. I can never do that, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm just giving an example. As I told you, the runway, right? Can somebody think of giving a runway for a Ferrari track? No, no, no way, it's possible, right? So I can break all those regulations which is there in the virtual world. And importantly, also see how my passengers who are there can get connected. And also non-passengers who are not necessarily flowing through Bangalore airport can still be connected. So these are all the real use cases what we are exploring apart from the enterprise. We are also getting into the NFT very shortly. We are working on an extended reality training for our internal folks, right? These are the things experimenting what we are doing. But we see a lot of potential in the Metaverse for the airport itself. All right, Nareen, so flippers, can we see the full launch of flippers this year? Yeah, I think other folks on the panel made this comment. I think we need to be careful with what we are promising with the technology, right? I think to some extent, I think Web 3, the promises are probably much further ahead than what we are able to deliver. I think entrepreneurs need time to really get that product market fit. And so, but that doesn't mean that we want to be on the sidelines and wait for somebody else to figure this out. We want to get our hands dirty and we want to be here and do it. That was our intention. And we've learned a lot. And I think the reality is it is very expensive to deliver a fully immersive internet today, right? Particularly for a mega-scale hyper-local, you know, horizontal platform like Flipkart. And so if you want to build it at scale, I mean, there are like a lot of innovations that need to come together for that to happen. But the beauty is Web 3 is not starting from zero, right? So there have been other technologies on which we are building it. Most notably, 3D AR, right? And today, if you look at the Flipkart app, 3D and AR is actually a first-party citizen. You will see it across many different categories. It actually adds to the overall experience that customers have. It actually improves conversion rates on the platform, right? And that's the foundation. And eventually, when we build the Metaverse, obviously we want it to be 3D. We want it to be immersive. Nobody likes a 2D Metaverse anywhere, right? So I think that is the journey that we've been on. I feel the team is working on trying to figure out what does the Metaverse at scale look like, right? And before we do that, we also need to show the promise to our brands. Our brands need to realize that there is real impact here. I think in the beginning, a lot of the brands will probably, at least the ones who are on the bleeding edge will experience this and will spend money on it. But eventually, if they click throughs and the ROI is not there, I mean, they'll pull it back, right? And so we owe it to everybody in this room, in this ecosystem, to make sure our experiments are done in such a way that the promised land can be reached, right? And sometimes our PR and our hype sort of, extends past our current visibility. Okay, Shailene, would you like to add something to what was being discussed? Yeah, I think they're all really great points and it's just such a great diverse panel. You have all different perspectives, but one of the things that I've focused on in developing the Omniverse City was really the digital experience because people do really still like to do things in the real world, think about Uber Eats. I mean, I say to everyone, how many times did you have a hamburger delivered to your home six years ago? Nobody ever did that. And now billions of hamburgers are delivered worldwide. If somebody would have said they had a hamburger delivered versus driving through the drive-through, 10 years ago, you probably would have thought there was something wrong with them. And now it's something we do every day just because our lives are so busy. There's so much more required of us. I mean, how many people did 51-hour meetings in a week prior to Zoom? We are doing things more efficiently and in some cases, inefficiently. I really enjoyed producing virtual events in the Metaverse. I feel like that's a great time to learn. We've had up to 1,000 people concurrently. You're talking about resources, concurrent versus people coming on demand is a big thing to focus on. And we are built on Unreal Engine 5. We are using pixel streaming. We were consulted to maybe switch to Unity, and we just made a decision that we wanted to give people hyper-realistic graphics and build dreams. So that was the decision we made. And when you look at the infrastructure that's being built with companies like CoreWeave and Epic, and I mean, they're building so fast. But at the end of the day, 50,000 is about how many GPUs are available, or BTUs are available for concurrent users. So that means that you couldn't have a million people in a pixel streaming Metaverse right now, not even if you wanted to. And I think that that really provides a handicap for larger enterprise-level companies. But for smaller brands that have smaller audiences, I think that experimentation is going to be a lot more realistic, and it's going to be something that I think larger brands learn from. So for the first time ever, the little guy is in a position to really take advantage of something before larger companies can come in and control it. And I think that's really what decentralization is all about. All right. Can I interject something very quick about Web 3 and the principle? And I think one of you mentioned that the biggest Metaverse is today in the gaming industry. Roblox or Fortnite, exactly. So I just want to mention that one of the main differences between Web 2 and Web 3, as rightly mentioned, the largest Metaverse today is Web 2. It's not Web 3 yet. So what is the main difference between Web 2 and Web 3? I don't know if you guys, if anybody knows it, shout it out. What is the main difference to you, to the consumer? Experience? Well, you have that in Web 2. I think that that's one, decentralization. And the second is about data ownership. That's right. It's about the ownership of data that is different. And it's about the ability to invite the consumers, the users of any product, to be part of that ownership. It's about value transfer, and it's about ownership. And I think that's where most of the innovation is gonna come that's gonna change from Web 2 to Web 3. Otherwise, Web 2 so far seems like they're doing better than in terms of engagement with their consumers. So that's where you guys can, your data, for example, about the healthcare. It's about giving security to your clients so that it's not all available to anybody to see whenever I'm having a high pressure. But at the same time, they can use it the way they wanna use it. And hopefully monetize it the way they wanna monetize it. That's the main difference. And that's what we're doing for the real estate industry. Okay, time is running short. So we'll go for a question and answer round. Any questions for our panelists? Just to, again, go back to the question which was creating immersive experiences through metaverse for brands. What it looks like for e-commerce or retail or anything that's more brand-centric. Personally, as a marketer, I feel that, like I think one of the panelists also mentioned that it's not truly about creating another, like, you know, cloned on like another version of a retail store in the metaverse, but rather showcase value. So something that's more value-driven, something that's more, for example, like Apple doesn't say that they sell computers, right? Like, it's more about what a consumer feels when they own an Apple product or let's say Nike. I mean, again, they don't say that we're selling shoes or like, you know, another version of a shoe in the metaverse. So my question is, if we're talking about use cases here and I could see that so many people in the panel, they are working with different projects and helping them go to market in the metaverse. So what kind of, like, you know, two to three innovative use cases that's more value-driven rather than experience-driven at this point, I mean, something that's, that has better chances of adoption in the future or at least like even now, what would those two to three use cases be? Okay, that's a fairly long question. Thanks for the question. So basically, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, what are we trying to do? We are trying to create new models of monetization, right? And the privates of that monetization is either a better customer experience, triggering a new revenue stream or reducing the total cost of ownership. You know, metaverse, the compelling reason for metaverse is like many of them have said, digital experiences, continuum of physical as well as digital and various other things. But eventually at the end of the day, if you look at, if you slot consumers into three different categories, some of auditory in nature, they learn by listening. That's why podcasts and various things have become mainstream. Some of them are visual in nature. They watch and then they learn. But a lot more of them are immersive in nature. They will learn only when you give them an opportunity to do it by themselves. So today we don't have those channels which cater to the third category of people. And they're not a small set of people. They're a large set of people. Yeah, I get the aspect saying that it is millennials, it is digital natives who are born in a digital environment, born physically, but grew up in a digital environment. All that stuff is great, fantastic. But eventually at the end of the day, it translates to how are you going to internalize the information, what is going to lead you to that important decision from a purchase aspect. And that's where metaverse in a short span of time was found to be more optimal compared to the other channels. And that's where if you're able to do something in that particular area, then you can unleash a lot of monetization opportunities.