About the guest:
Kirill Tokarev is the Business Head at 80.lv, an industry-leading platform for game developers, digital artists, animators, video game enthusiasts, CGI and VFX specialists.
As someone who works closely with digital / 3D creators, what are the most exciting trends youāve observed in the field?
I would highlight two trends. First, the democratization of tools. If you look 10ā20 years back, developing games used to be extremely challenging. You had to know programming, there were very few tools that you could use. With the introduction of new tools, and especially game engines, things started to brighten up. This resulted in a lot of āfresh bloodā going into game development. People are starting to experiment more with games, building more projects. And these same people are drawn to the metaverse because of the second parallel trend ā the creator economy. In the modern video games industry, a developer is like a āhired gunā building the same game over time; or a one-off contractor that creates a character for one game and then moves to another gig. With the creator economy, the balance is going to shift and weāre going to see more and more creators building stuff that they can monetize on inside the metaverse. Itās going to open a lot of new opportunities for creators. That in turn will push more and more people to explore this field, in a similar way to what happened with video and smartphones.
So, the metaverse is putting into question what being a creator means?
I think there is no one definition of what a creator is. I see two ways of looking at it. When we think of a modern-day creator itās someone with a smartphone, creating videos or other kinds of content. I think this is going to change with the introduction of the metaverse, because from videos weāll move towards more interactive, storytelling-based, interactive environments.
Today, creators are navigating the existing world. With the mass adoption of the metaverse, weāll see more people actually shaping the reality around us.
And this could be done in a variety of different ways. Currently, itās through video game engines such as Unreal or Unity, where you can create vast areas and populate them, kind of build your own little kingdom. Or it could be tools like Blender, where you can create your own characters, animate them. So, there are more and more layers that are coming into the definition of what a creator is. And I feel like weāre going to see a lot of changing this in the upcoming years.
Will we then just āescapeā into these newly shaped realities?
I think weāll still be very present in the physical world of course, going for groceries, enjoying walks in a park and so on. But the metaverse is going to complement it in a way, especially when it comes to work. I donāt see why in this physical reality anyone would go on commutes anymore.
Why spend hours of your life in transport when you can work from the comfort of your home, with a cool immersive workspace at your disposal?
It will be much easier to pull off in the metaverse because, while at home, you will be able to be part of a different environment thanks to VR goggle or whatever ā a little virtual space where it feels like your colleagues are actually around you. It will get so much easier to do your work faster, and then go back to your families.
That makes me think of Facebookās (Metaās) recent announcement. Do you think this vision is something they can actually fulfil? If so, how long could it take them?
I think that what Facebook is doing is very brave. Thereās definitely a lot of development that needs to happen. It may seem like the future that they pain is light years away. But if you think realistically, and you look at whatever we already have today in video games, with consoles, and even on mobile, it is not that far. For me, the problem is not so much with the technological side of things, but more with psychology and how we think of and adopt tech. When mass consumers transitioned from PCs to smartphones, it was an easier move. Whereas with VR, and to some extent AR, I think there might be more getting used to it, which is why VR hasnāt truly taken off yet. Maybe itās about figuring out another way to deliver information and/or visualize content. Thatās where real development must happen.
Are you concerned about that the Big Tech currently seems to be leading the way into the metaverse?
In the ideal world, the kind of environment that the metaverse is, whatever that is, should be open source. There shouldnāt be a way where one company controls it all. In fact, if you look at the history of the internet, you can see that it doesnāt really work. A free system is always a free system. Given the wild adoption of blockchain technologies that is happening right now, it seems only logical to assume that people will not accept being limited to using some single platform. At the same time, we do see mobile devices run on the same operating systems and there is very little understanding of how we can get out of it. But I think, as Jurassic Park proved to us, life will always find a way (laughs). Iām sure users will try to understand how to use the new environment to their advantage and build something out of it.
There is a grave misconception that you can tell people how to live. It doesnāt really work, especially in virtual environments, where there is so little control.
Whenever gamers enter the virtual world, they break all the rules. They test the systems to understand how to break them. And I think this is what kind of happened with the metaverse in its initial stages. The vision that Facebook described ā although it might look very glossy and interesting ā itās not going to work that way.
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About the series: š 1 Min in the Metaverse š is a LinkedIn original that aims to explore the metaverse through the eyes of those building it! Each interview comes with a 1-min sneak peek of key ideas as well as a full version long read.
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