As promised, here's the full video of my recent metaverse fireside chat with metaverse analyst/VC Matthew Ball and The Washington Post's Gene Park in Sine Wave Entertainment's Breakroom. While we chat, Sine Wave founders Rohan Freeman and Adam Frisby (the large bunny) dynamically edited the world's Unity-based environment, which is why an actual bonfire and assorted random objects and effects suddenly appear around us.
Here's the time codes for all the key topics we discuss:
2:35 -- Was there a personal experience for you which led to an “ah ha” moment that inspired your thinking on the Metaverse? (Answered by both Matthew and Gene.)
7:55 -- We discuss the elephant in the virtual room, on why Zuckerberg is reportedly changing Facebook's name to be more metaverse-like -- is it just a cynical PR move, or is it genuine? Matthew then goes into his sense of where Facebook is currently positioned in the wider ecosystem, while I discusses how Facebook brought on the founding CTO of Second Life nearly a decade ago, and he subsequently helped put together the Oculus acquisition.
14:00 -- Social graphs and the metaverse; is social media as we know it coming to an end? And how can its next generation be built to serve the metaverse? Matt discusses that in relation to Epic Games and Tim Sweeney's tweets about its own ambitions around the Metaverse, and the evolution of identity on the Internet.
19:00 -- Is there a metaverse age cliff (as I put it)? The platforms we generally describe as metaverse-like are extremely popular with pre-teens and teens, then usage seems to rapidly drop off once people age out of their 20s.
24:55 -- Interoperability and regulation. How does Matthew see regulation happening? Is he optimistic that we'll create shared open standards?
Coming up: ROBLOX and "scrip" (as documented in this video by Quentin Smith), the Metaverse and NFTs, and a guest appearance by Philip Rosedale:
28:10 -- I’m sure you saw the expose on ROBLOX last Summer, detailing just how difficult it is for creators to make any real money from the platform, to the point where Robux seem comparable to the infamous scrip of the early industrial days. And most of the creators are kids! How big a problem is this for ROBLOX down the road?
33:40 -- Do you see smaller companies being able to contribute to the Metaverse, or will the Internet giants build the next Internet?
38:35 -- Adam Frisby, CTO of Sine Wave: When will we reach a point where most Internet users have access to the Metavese?
40:10 -- Second Life and High Fidelity founder Philip Rosedale on the challenge of consumers being comfortable with accepting avatars as a barrier to the Metaverse. Matthew and Gene comments on the comfort of using avatars versus Zoom. ("Gosh I certainly prefer this as opposed to going on a Zoom call".)
44:25 -- The Metaverse and blockchain/NFTs in relation to interoperability.
Thanks again to Matthew and Gene for their gracious time and great comments/questions, and follow Breakroom on Twitter and on LinkedIn for announcements of other events.
Disclosure: Sine Wave is a sponsoring media partner to New World Notes.
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