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Born from the gaming and Web3 space, the Metaverse draws on elements of both, yet it pushes the boundaries of how people will interact in virtual worlds.
Steeped in social interaction and immersive experiences, the Metaverse is being imagined as a limitless universe, where consumers will design their own virtual personas. That scope will open the door to new digital commerce avenues for brands. The ability to buy, own and port virtual goods across digital worlds will have a seismic impact on virtual communities as well as those companies eager to support them.
Considering how digital commerce will underscore much of the Metaverse is where Raffaella Camera, head of brands for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, and Eric Pulier, the founder of Vatom, Inc spend their time, as they help design the architecture and experiences shaping this new sphere.
In this month’s Signal Conversation, Signal 360’s co-editor John Battelle spoke with Camera and Pulier to help us understand this new world, and how brands can expect to interact with consumers in the Metaverse.
TRANSCRIPT
Kimberly Doebereiner
John Battelle with Recount Media is going to host for us Raffaella Camera with Epic Games, and Eric Pulier from Vatom Inc, who are going to share with us the insights that they have about living and playing in this new, incredible Metaverse that is happening around us, and hopefully answer some questions on what exactly is this?
Where is this going? Who’s using it? When should I use it? Or should I even use it? John, I’m gonna turn it over to you. Thank you so much for being with us.
John Battelle
Thank you. And I think this is a topic that has been on just about everybody’s mind that I’ve talked to over the last few months, spurred in large part by a well known company changing their name to the first syllable of the topic, the metaverse. But not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination and certainly not new to the two guests we have with us who are OG’s, as it might be said, in this space, not just in the metaverse, but in what many consider to be the on ramp to the metaverse, which is both gaming and web three blockchain. So very, very pleased to have Raffaella Camera the head of brands at Epic and the Unreal Engine and Eric Pulier, the founder of Vatom. In a conversation where we start with the question, which I’m going to ask both of you, what is the metaverse? But before we do, I’d like to ask each of you just to give us a very brief description of your work and how it relates to that question of what is the metaverse let’s start with you, Raffaella.
Raffaella Camera
Thank you so much for having us here today. I’m Raffaella Camera based in LA, I am with the Epic Games Unreal Engine as head of brands. So I direct our more strategic partnerships with the consumer brands, global consumer brands, so anything from apparel, fashion, CPG, retail, and everything else, including also the tech consumer ecosystem.
Battelle
Thank you. And Eric?
Eric Pulier
Thanks. I’m Eric Pulier, founder and CEO of Vatom. What we’re focused on is bringing what you might call the Web3 technologies to the other 98%, a lot of hype, a lot of interest, a lot of activity around the use of NFT’s and metaverses in a lot of different scenarios. But if you really look at the ease of use, and the mass accessibility and how it can be applied to business today, it’s a very small niche. We’re focused on widening that from about 2% of the audience to the rest of us.
Battelle
Awesome. Thank you very, very much. And I am just going to ask you, you can tell me you want to do it later. But do you have a short sizzle video that you might want to show us some of the work that you’ve done, Eric?
Pulier
Yeah, there is one that was sent over. If you’ve got that you can fire that up as a few people that and then.
Battelle
Can we pull that and run it real quick?
Video Player
It’s so cool. I really love sort of this interactive platform. And yeah, there’s Claire. Players using a mobile device would look for virtual footballs and share the app with friends for a chance to win branded swag, one of a kind tokens or gift cards.
Battelle
Lots of energy there. So let me return now to the question for both of you. And I’ll start with you, Eric, since we just saw that video. What is the metaverse?
Pulier
Good question. I mean, especially good question, considering that almost everybody in the wake of Facebook now Meta’s announcement and a lot of the discussion around this. Almost every company just in the same time as the early stages of the web is trying to make sense of this and trying to figure out what their Metaverse slash NFT strategy might be and how they’re going to apply it. And yet, there’s a vast set of definitions. So on one set, probably because of how Mark has come forward, it’s like a view of a future state of Ready Player One and everybody lives and plays ping pong with Mark Zuckerberg. That’s not really our view of it. The way that we see it is this notion of the next generation of the internet fulfilling the promise of what the internet was meant to bring to our lives, which is really connecting all of us to one another in a richer and deeper way, and creating a kind of more social long term relationships between brands, creators, and the audience. We’ll get into a little deeper, I think, as we get into this discussion, but we see it as adding people places and things onto the existing internet in a more, I would say, engaged manner.
Battelle
Right? And Raffaella. What about you? How do you define it?
Camera
Yeah, similarly, first off, we don’t think that there can be an exact definition of the metaverse yet as it is being built. However, yes, we do like to think of it as a special version of the internet, a 3D version of the internet, where there is persistency. And where, even more importantly, there is a different sense of interaction, social interaction more amongst people, and also ability to represent yourself and your digital persona in different ways. I think about the current avatars, but think about whatever else is going on in the future. And I would say that, although, for example, on our side, we have been building social platforms that are really rooted in games now for decades. We’re really just at the beginning of scratching the surface of what it really means to carry your digital persona in this digital worlds in this virtual worlds moving from one to the other, and even understanding what’s the connection between the physical and the virtual world and how they affect each other. However, what it is clear instead, is that, and what is already happening are the tools that are needed and used to create these 3D worlds. Those have been around now for more than 25 years. And they all come from gaming. Because because that’s that’s the gaming world had to figure out how to do these things before. And that’s also the reason why you hear gaming and the metaverse often interconnected on one side, because the tools come from that and the other because a lot of these social platforms really are started as gaming platforms. And then they’re moving into that. Our role, for example, and are often thought about as a gaming company. We really define ourselves differently from that. And we think of ourselves as a metaverse ecosystem company. Because yes, on one side, we have the social experiences, Fortnite, Fortnite Creative, Rocket League, 500 million players, 2.7 billion connections between the players. But we also have a tool with Unreal Engine and MetaHuman Creator and Twinmotion and a variety of different ones to create high fidelity experiences. We have five different libraries of 3D assets, high fidelity, that anyone can use millions of them from free to highly discounted. And finally, the API’s to be able to connect and move people across these worlds. All the same technology that we use everyday for Fortnite and Fortnite Creative, that we give away free to download with open source code for anyone to be able to use.
Battelle
Yeah, now he I remember when, you know, people started talking about the metaverse. You know, it really built over the past 12 months. And what my initial response perhaps is, like the initial response of the of the audience, which was okay, I’ve heard this before, right? There have been discussions about VR and AR and immersive worlds. And there have been, you know, breakout companies in the space in the in the early aughts, right. And I remember at Wired Magazine doing big stories on Jaron Lanier and how VR was gonna take over everything. What’s different this time, Eric than last time.
Pulier
You know, here’s what’s different. There’s a maturation of certain technologies and an introduction of others that’s coming together in a way that now you can put a kind of complexity mask on top, and that we can actually deploy it at scale. So an example is when I mentioned people, places and things being now added in a different way. The first thing is that now you can assume your own avatar, your own persona, and and own your own data and move from experience to experience with your own sense of self intact, and how you’re expressing yourself. The next thing, which is equally or even more important, is your stuff. So it was in the past in games, you would basically have in the back of your mind that if the games die, your goods go with it. And now the psychology shifts to true ownership when you’re given something like if you get a hat at Yankee Stadium, that’s your hat, you can get wear to Dodger Stadium, maybe at your own risk, but you can do it. But you know, it’s your stuff and it moves from place to place. This is a fundamentally different psychology. And the last piece, as was just mentioned, is this notion of place, a sense of being somewhere that creates a different type of memory. So you can move from AR which is an overlay on the real world and interacting with things out in concerts or in conferences or in, in in stores and retail environments, and take those same objects and move it back into the virtual world. And when we say virtual world, we don’t mean VR only, where you have to wear goggles, we mean virtual spaces, the 3D web, that is now allowing us to create a different type of memory, because that’s how we evolved is to remember things within 3D space. And and now you add the social element, which is really what I call true social, meaning that when you talk about Instagram and these other social platforms, you’re interacting with information, which then interacts with other people, you don’t really get the sense that you were there with somebody doing something and having that experience. So this is different, you add these elements together, and there’s a different sense of experience
Battelle
That resonates with me. Raffaella, before you add a comment to that, I want to if it’s alright, with you roll the video that I know you’ve brought for the audience to take a look at because I think it it, you know, makes real, some of the comments that Eric just mentioned, particularly there’s some good, you know, overlay and AR and Playspace stuff, so why don’t we roll that video, and then I’ll let you comment on it?
So this, this, I think gives us a little bit of a visual insight into not only experientially what what what we have to look forward to, and it’s already happening for you know, a lot of you know millions of people, but also how brands are starting to get pulled into it. So I feel it, so Raffaella can you can you tell us a little bit about what we just saw and maybe speak to that brand integration?
Camera
Absolutely. And first, I just wanted to make a note on the question before, I think often AR and VR sadly has been identified with the metaverse and that’s not the case AR and VR is just one way of accessing some of the some of the the metaverse basically. So we should not confuse that and think that until the glasses are here or VR is here, we don’t have a metaverse. We’ve been having metaverse-like platforms for a number of years. And we can we can speak to that as Fortnite has been around for a while, andother games before that. I think at the core of it all, if we if you look at what we do there is this idea of social entertainment. We do believe that the difference here is that users and players like to interact with each other, not just in the game, but that you know, they talk to each other sometimes. I know that fathers and sons meet in Fortnite sometimes, for example, when they cannot see each other, and brands are trying to find their way to be part of these large platforms and these large audiences. So to give you a couple of different examples, Balenciaga the first the first video that you saw, what they wanted to do is they wanted to break their fall 2021 collection in a different way. So they partnered with Unreal Engine, and they recreated their models their physical models into digital humans. They also created their clothing, virtually, and then they broke their collection in different ways. First on a YouTube video all created in 3D, a futuristic story that takes place in the future. Then creating some of those garments and taking them virtually into Fortnite where people could use them as skins in perfect detail. And then in Fortnight Creative where we placed a Balanciaga store on Fortnite Island and gamers could go in they could they could actually try on the clothes. And finally those same assets, and this speaks to efficiency that 3D allows you to do, we use those same assets for 3D billboards, where it felt like the you know, the characters were coming out of the physical billboard in four major cities across the world. While those same pieces of clothing wherever available for sale in their stores or online. So really bring in virtual and physical together. If we look at another example, which is Ferrari, Ferrari wanted to recreate their 296 GTB, in perfect detail, which they did. The automotive industry in particular has embraced 3D real time production, because that allows to create almost this one source of truth, digital twins are representations that can be used across them. That same car was used for web configurators, it was used against a virtual backdrop for a an ad that was shot virtually. And finally, it was taken into the game where players could drive it and so tested with all the same exact details across all the different platforms.
Battelle
That’s, that also speaks to the integration of commerce, which I thought, you know, which is certainly one of the things that I know, marketers are really interested in. We’re at a conference about, you know, world without ads. And so how do you create experiences where not only does it not feel, you know, like, you’re being told to buy something, but rather, it’s an experience that the brand adds value into the into the experience into the community itself? And that strikes me that your first example is a good good example of that. Eric, are there others? Or other ideas you have as to how commerce plays into this world?
Pulier
Sure, absolutely. I mean, this notion of world without ads, is not meant to denote I’m sure a world without strong connections between brands and and the end users. It’s a world without annoyance, right? What’s happened with with ads is that noise, they become something that, you know, whatever it says, Click here to win a million dollars. You’re like, No, I don’t want your million dollars. I’m busy with something else. And so you have to really break through this with a different psychology and it’s aligning with the with the end users’ purpose, and respect, respect for their time. This is this is about turning the time to value equation upside down. He asked for somebody’s time to engage in something, what do they get? Now what’s very different about this model for commerce and for connection is you can get something right? The wallet is the most powerful communication mechanism, the digital wallet in metaverse and web3, its most powerful direct communication method since the advent of the internet itself. Because instead of spamming people with emails and and messages and TV commercials, you’re actually giving them something which they can say thank you to. But most importantly, that brief interaction where they now have something they can give it to someone else, if they don’t want it, they might resell it, it can change into something over time, which are the gamification principles which P&G is already experimenting with. And then most importantly, and this is the big one that I think would like, if everyone could step back and really think about this, you now have a first party data connection, a conduit for ongoing communication that you never had before. You know that this individual has taken this, they’ve opted in in ethical and legal manner, to have a communication mechanism that now can be persistent, you no longer have to go through third parties to talk to your own customer. You don’t ask permission from Target or from Facebook slash Meta to do that. You now it’s yours to lose. Shame on you, if you can’t bring that to something of value for both parties. But you have that connection now. And it’s very different. Very powerful.
Camera
I would I would even add, it’s more than more and more towards UGC. I mean, what do you see Roblox doing? What do you see creative doing? You know, sometimes these games, I was hearing the panel before, it’s difficult to be part of that. Of course, if we take Fortnite for example, it’s our book, we tell the story. But next to that, there is an additional book, which for us is Fortnite Creative, where you as a brand, or anyone like yourself can go and create your experience or world and you can determine what works best to interact with your consumers. What we are saying is make sure that there is some form of social entertainment in it social meaning that you can act together with other people and connect with that and entertainment, meaning that it has to be it has to provide some form of fun or interest for them. Otherwise, they’re not going to participate. They’re not forced to participate like ads, force them to just passively react to something.
Pulier
Yeah. And think about the participation mechanism. There was an interesting pilot that P&G did with Tide, where the goal was to get people to sign up for cold washes or to say that they would. And with some basic gamification techniques, over half a million people claimed to have done that. But what I thought was so interesting is of the 35,000 plus people that engaged in this little pilot 10% of them actually came from each other, like they were so into it that they were willing to level up if you will, by bringing their friends in. And that ground up capability. Sometimes UGC is there creating content, some some of it is activity that creates a larger, more vibrant community. And it’s really interesting to see that you have to start to think about this, not just about how do you build a community by declaring it from the top? But how do you give the tools to the base where they can feel a sense of ownership and participation in something that they care about?
Battelle
One of the things that, you know, when I listened to both of you speak, there’s a kind of part of my, of my brain that gets activated that feels like it hasn’t been in a while. And it’s related to the early energy of the first internet, the early energy of Web 2.0 before Web 2.0 consolidated into large companies, you know, like Facebook. And so let me ask the question, that might be the elephant in the room. How do we think about meta slash Facebook, given their sort of extraordinary dominance in the current incarnation of how marketers go to market, you know, on the internet, and their stated ambition to be the dominant metaverse company going forward? Can you you know, what, tell us what you would say about Meta at a cocktail party.
Pulier
So I have some strong opinions on this. I’ll be very succinct. Hopefully, look, I happen to think it’s one of the greatest companies in the world, but that they’ve, they’ve stumbled in terms of certain tone deaf reactions and management of how they’re managing community and content. And so what’s happened is this backlash against that type of centralized control of people’s personal data, and how they keep the the brands and the users away from each other to communicate directly in order to exploit the data in between is giving way to a new model. And it’s an open model, where we started in the web with the promise that anyone can talk to anyone else, and communicate and create that direct kind of peer to peer interaction. And what we’re going to see next is that I believe Meta will be a force and one should work with them. But nobody in their right mind anyway is going to say my, my metaverse strategy is going to be under the thumb of Facebook slash Meta. You will create an interoperability strategy. So your objects can move in and out and your personas, your avatars can move in and out and things that you do there, maybe I’ll get an interesting box of Tide that if it opens up, it turns into something wonderful that I can take out of Meta and bring somewhere else and continue my journey. So I believe interoperability is the next step. And no matter how badly they want to dominate the next phase, that that goal is is over. That’s not going to be the way that things work.
Camera
Yeah, look, we, we’ve been, and we are technology providers to Meta. And we’ve been from day one of the Oculus, Unreal Engine has been used to create the games in VR. And since then, we’re still collaborating and working with them. I would say, looking at the latest articles that I’ve seen, they seem to be taking a hardware first approach. So what’s in VR? What’s in AR? What’s what’s on Oculus? Versus, for example, we’re taking a creator centric approach. It’s like who creates it? And what’s the experience and what is going on? And yes, no one will own the metaverse, it’s never going to be just one company. There are a variety of different companies that are building it. And it is very important to make sure that we all agree that there has to be able to be free movement of people and me myself carrying my own digital persona and not changing that from one to the other, as well as objects or things that we might have bought. We don’t have the standards yet. So it’s important that the companies are all agreeing to participate in the same open standards discussions, and even that they’re open enough to test things out in the open. I know we do. You know, we put things out there and we see how people react to even you know, put our own UI5, Unreal Engine five and Fortnite to prove that it works. So those are important philosophical approaches. And depending on how companies react to them, and if they embrace them or not, it will change a little bit the way that things are going to be.
Battelle
Great. Well, we have time just for one or two audience questions. I have them piped into me. So let me ask you guys for concise answers to the here’s the first question. What skills do marketers need to master in the metaverse? The audience member mentions that it sounds like they might need to get technical.
Pulier
No, you don’t need to get technical. I’ll be very concise and obviously Epic is doing amazing things for non technical users to use their tools. But just quickly on skills. They are not technical. First, it’s about an understanding, it’s a mindset shift and experimenting so that you get better at this. It’s understanding that top down versus bottom up matters, that community is going to matter a lot more in the next generation, the difference between a wallet, which a user owns proprietary apps and closed campaigns, it’s not only Meta that needs to be open and understand the next generation, it’s groups like Procter and Gamble, that need to understand that when you give somebody something, it’s theirs, and they don’t want to have to get stuck in a campaign to find it again. So what’s that openness? And once that mindset, they have to understand. And the last thing is, what’s the in terms of understanding is how would you gather first party data in an ethical and and value-based manner and then leverage that for communal value? I think that’s the real opportunity here for Procter and Gamble. And for all marketers.
Camera
I would say I agree with all that. But I would add that marketers also have to think about making sure that their assets and brand assets are created in 3D, in high fidelity, because if they’re not, by the time that they decided to do an experience somewhere, it will take them a while to create that. So the same way that they had to switch from that they had to have 2D renditions of all the branded assets, they have to do the same thing in 3D, and they have to have them ready.
Battelle
Good answers. We could talk for another half an hour, but I’m getting the high sign that we need to toss it back to the host. So please, audience members join me in thanking Eric and Raffaella for giving us a glimpse into the metaverse, I have a feeling we’ll be doing much more than just glimpsing in in the months and years to come. Thanks very much.
