00:53 • Piers
Hey guys. Welcome back to another episode of Metaverse Musings. Today, I am delighted to introduce you to Mark and Finn who are the co-founders of an exciting new project called Metamundo. Thank you for joining us. Perhaps it would be good if we could kick off with a bit of an overview on each of your respective backgrounds and then how it’s led you towards crypto and what you’re doing now.

01:15 • Mark
Thanks Piers. Really happy to be here. I have a background in architecture, and I have worked in the architecture industry. However, I have never actually practiced in the actual architecture industry. I have been an entrepreneur for the past 12 years. I have always built ventures which empower architects and designers in different ways. 12 years ago, I was part of the founding team of archello.com, which is now one of the largest social networks for architects and designers. Around four years after we started that, I started Crowdy House, which was an e-commerce marketplace for furniture makers. Those are some examples where I used technology to empower architects and designers. Coming full circle, which was one of the reasons why I started to Metamundo, empowering architects and designers even more with the power of blockchain and smart contracts and NFTs; the idea that an architect or designer can contribute to building the metaverse and actually earning royalties in perpetuity, which is what the power of NFTs and smart contracts give.

02:32 • Mark
Also, of course, timestamping your work and proving your copyright. That is kind of my background. I have built many benches in terms of helping architects. Now we are here with Metamundo. Finn and I started this eight months ago. Really looking forward to speaking more about the project.

02:51 • Piers
Absolutely. Finn perhaps you could give us a quick background on yourself.

02:54 • Finn
Happy to. Thanks for having us on, Piers. I studied finance and business at uni. I quickly realized that looking at spreadsheets all day every day is not a fun thing, for me at least. I pivoted my career into tech and innovation which landed me in the startup world. That was about 11 years ago now. First of all, I joined artribbons.com, which was an online marketplace for Nordic fashion and art. After that, I went on to Ilikelocals.com, which was a social network for travelers and locals to connect over their favorite spots in cities. That was kind of where my career in product started. After that, I joined Rockstar Accelerator to help them scale up their acceleration program to support more early-stage entrepreneurs. That is actually where I met Mark. At the time, we invested in a startup, Crowdy House. That was back in 2014. After that, I wanted to be on the other side of the table and ran a startup myself.

03:53 • Finn
I was very fascinated at the time about video, how video could be a very immersive medium for showcasing products in the e-commerce context. I was also quite blown away with the environmental impact that fashion had on the world. With that, I decided to co-found Biddy, which was an online video marketplace for clothing, kind of a Vine-like experience, if you guys remember Vine back in the day. I worked on that for a few years, which was really great, and then had a great offer from Booking.com to join them where I started as a product manager and then grew into a product lead. I was there for five years before leaving to start Metamundo with Mark. I have quite a diverse background in building marketplaces from scratch, but also in the very highly scaled context. That is kind of a background around my professional experience.

04:48 • Finn
I got into crypto I think back in 2016 or 2015 during the last retail cycle. I bought my first Bitcoin and Ethereum on Coinbase and then started going down a lot of rabbit holes during the ICO craze. I bought a lot of shit coins and got burned like most people, but I also started to wrap my head around some of the applications and technology of blockchain and really started to understand the potential and got really excited about it. Fast forward through the bear market, I did not really do too much, just HODL. Early last year, it was when Beeple sold his 5,000 Days for sixty-nine million at auction at Christie’s – that moment really caught my attention. I started to go down the rabbit hole with NFTs and start to think about, “What are the applications here? How can this enable creators?” Mark and I started to think about this, and he has a very interesting background in architecture and interior design, and we’ve both built a lot of marketplaces and have a lot of experience on that front.

05:45 • Finn
It just made sense for us to build a marketplace to enable 3D creators to really start building the metaverse. I think one of the things that Mark and I really noticed when we start thinking about what is the metaverse and how can it be used, is that there was a lot of land, but there was nothing on this land. We would be walking around Decentraland, for example, for minutes on end and we would not encounter any people, any structures, and those structures that we did encounter, they were not overly interactive or overly engaging. That was kind of the first insight for us is that there is a lot of land there, but there is not really anything on it. The second thing was around a lot of the objects in the spaces were pretty basic. They look almost stock, I would argue.

06:33 • Finn
That was obviously a while ago. Things have improved somewhat, but if you look at the Decentraland marketplace, you could only buy wearables that could be used in that marketplace. There was not the ability for collectors to actually take those assets and use them in different places like Crypto Voxels, for example. We thought that was pretty limiting as well. Third, we did some research to kind of understand the landscape and where could we find some cool architectural structures and vehicles and interior items to populate these virtual worlds. We were not able to find anything, and those insights really started to help us formulate what we thought was a huge gap in the market and what we thought could address that. We also spoke with a ton of artists, 3d artists and architects. Mark knows a ton of people with his background, and we reached out to a lot of them.

07:23 • Finn
What we learned is that actually for many of these creators in these industries, they’re quite traditional and quite competitive. It can be very hard to kind of build your brand and make a name. When you first start out, it’s long hours and you don’t make much money. Sometimes you have to kind of compromise your creative integrity. NFTs kind of present a different path for these creators. They have the creative freedom to build and create what they want. They also have more financial freedom as well. Through owning their IP, gaining royalties in perpetuity, that made a lot of sense to us to focus on this bigger problem, to really empower creators, to really shape this metaverse and fill this as what we see as a content gap there today.

08:04 • Mark
Just touching on that, another insight that I had was Mark Zuckerberg coming out and saying, “We are going to hire 10,000 3D creators in Europe to build Meta’s metaverse.” I thought, well, I know this huge network of 3D creators that we can empower to build an open metaverse and allow them to own a little bit of the future of this web that we’re all envisioning. We also saw this requirement for 3D creators and then looked even more into, I think, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games even said, “The biggest barrier now for building games is not the engineering side, but it is actually the content side.” How do we enable these 3D creators to easily build and provide assets for the metaverse and for games?

09:00 • Piers
It is super interesting. Obviously, your background lends itself very nicely into, as you say, building out that army. You guys have a pretty interesting approach to interoperability across these worlds, right? It is something that we have been promised for ages, but realistically, any kind of meaningful standards adoption and like interplay between them is still pretty difficult to do. You guys have a really interesting angle on this. Perhaps you could give an overview of how that is structured technically at a high level.

09:26 • Mark
Sure. We could go into the low level, but just in the high level, we have basically developed our own smart contract architecture based on the MS startup. Digital X was the inspiration. That architecture is basically we would have a parent NFT. We found that most architects/3D creators like to work in their own software with that blender 3ds Max, and they are creating very high polygon count files, and that’s pushing their creativity to the max. That is the highest polygon count they can make. They want to work in that method, but that is also a future-proofed 3D asset for future games. We say to the creator, “Provide us with the best version you have of your 3D asset,” and we actually turned that into the parent NFT, then we convert that original parent file into optimized child files for each metaverse.

10:36 • Mark
At the moment Decentraland, Somnium Space, Crypto Voxels, Spatial, we are creating optimized files for each of these different virtual environments and then many more virtual environments are coming as well. We actually make one NFT out of that bundle/out of that wrapper. So, you have that future-proofed 3D file. For, let us say future high polygon count metaverses such as Wild World and also Nifty Island that’s coming live soon, you will be able to mint more NFTs and add it to the bundle so that you actually have one NFT which can work in multiple environments. This is a unique approach to solving the core interoperability issue. This is our belief in how we should do it for now. There is a lot of talk about standardization of file types, but this is the best solution that we have to solving the futureproofing of these 3D assets.

11:40 • Piers
Absolutely. Finn if you could also touch upon, for those listening that might not be sure, what does the alternative route looks like? You mentioned these standardized file types. We have seen things like VRM for Humanoid avatars. There’s stuff like the Pixar USD and things like that, but maybe you could touch upon what is the alternative approaches are that you guys have opted not to go for.

12:03 • Finn
Could you elaborate? I am not sure I follow.

12:09 • Piers
Yeah. You guys are obviously approaching the interoperability problem with this parent NFT. You have the derivative ones that are optimized and stylized for each world that you have incorporated. If you could give an overview of the other approach to interoperability, which you guys deemed not to be satisfactory and therefore built it in this way in the interim.

12:30 • Finn
If you are talking about existing solutions for collectors and owners to use the assets across these worlds – the alternative is that you are a proficient blender or these modeling softwares like 3DS Max Maya, and you need to actually optimize this file yourself, import it then export it and then try and import it into these environments. That is not an NFT, right? Now it’s just a file that you have optimized yourself and it is not attached to an NFT. There is a lot of manual work there that is required today to take a file and optimize it and use it in multiple worlds. Part of what we are doing is we are automating that. We also have a team of 3D modelists that help with optimizing and fine tuning these things together with the artists. Coming back to what we were talking about before around the standards, there are standards like GLTF…

13:32 • Finn
…and VRM, as you said for Humanoid avatars, but there are still Voxel formats to which are quite problematic in Crypto Voxels. I would say that it is just a lack of workability and there is not a ton of solutions for interoperability today, to be fair. It is just a real hassle. What narratives have you seen, Piers, that you think are quite interesting?

13:59 • Piers
My understanding of it so far is that it is very much limited to the GLTF and the VRM stuff. Obviously folks like Webaverse, I believe Jen, you guys know very well, and is actually an advisor to the project. I think some of the early interoperability work there is pretty interesting. We have seen obviously other little mods and experiments around people doing things, like allowing you to import some of your 3D avatars into things like GTA and things like that. It feels like we are actually a pretty long way away from the vision of meaningful, widespread interoperability across these virtual worlds, even on the open metaverse side.

14:36 • Mark
We have had the summer of 2D with the JPEGs, and JPEG as a file type is interoperable. You can use it across many different environments already, and that is just very different for 3D. There are so many different file types. Each metaverse seems to have its own requirements and its own way of doing things which is the problem that we need to solve. I wish it were as easy as just having a JPEG, but the 3D files are fragmented at the moment.

15:08 • Finn
Yeah, and it is not just file types. I think GLTF has emerged as the standard generally across 3D modeling, but a lot of the engines that the engines that these metaverses are being built on have different specs and can support different types of graphic rendering as well. I do not think we should be converging to a “homogeneous, everything should look the same/feel the same” across the open metaverse, but this disparity and this fragmentation will probably continue to exist for different reasons. Different metaverses have different value propositions. Crypto Voxels is very low fidelity and low poly, yet it is still one of the most immersive and fun environments. These environments will continue to have popularity and engagement. It is just around thinking about where are the things that we can come together on in terms of standardizing, and maybe it’s around the data pipelines or having integrations on how we have our contracts between the APIs where the data flows through. These sorts of things I think are very important and interesting to consider.

16:20 • Piers
Could you touch upon how you guys and monitoring up and coming virtual worlds that you want to integrate and what the process of actual integration looks like for you guys? How much of a lift is it? You mentioned Wild World, Nifty Island and whatnot. As these new projects come online, what does that process look like?

16:40 • Mark
It’s very interesting. We have been really surprised and happily surprised about the success of the CloneX parts, for example, and the movement there is that you can furnish your CloneX with parts. For us, that is immediately a project that we would look to integrate with, for example, because we also have furniture makers, designers, brands, architects, who are looking to mint their 3D NFTs and make them available on Metamundo. Of course, there is a lot of CloneX owners that want to populate and furnish their pods. It is requiring us to have those one-on-one conversations with those projects, but also on our side, we have Unity and unreal devs that are building out STKs and integrations with the leading game engines too.

17:36 • Piers
Yeah, very cool. Makes a lot of sense. Can you guys also touch upon the marketplace component of what you guys are doing? We haven’t really touched upon that yet. Obviously one part of it is building out this parent/child NFT structure to facilitate 3D interoperability across these worlds, and then there is another side of it. Could you touch upon that?

17:56 • Mark
From our conversations with, let us say metaverse landowners and builders, we have found that the consensus amongst the open metaverse is that they want to build quality assets and a quality metaverse. It is our vision as well that with Metamundo and the architects and 3D creators that we work with that you will be able to get quality assets, 3D assets. We will be launching with five select 3D creators, and then we will be scaling that up over time. For us, quality is really important. That has also been a request from the landowners and the builders that we spoke to.

18:43 • Finn
Yeah. Just to add to what Mark said, we are also really quite excited to explore how we can represent these products in a less Web2 way and more Web3 way. What I mean by that is like, how can we make this a really immersive and fun discovery and collecting experience for the collectors where they can interact with these objects and scenes and vehicles and avatars and wearables in three-dimensions. Also how can we connect them with the artists and understand what is the story behind these creations? What is the story behind the creators themselves? That’s one of the key differentiations for us, is where we are taking that route. Some exciting things to come, for sure.

19:25 • Piers
Yeah. Maybe you could give us an overview of where you guys are at. Obviously this is pretty Ethereum-centric to begin with. You are also integrated with some Polygon projects. Could you start by giving us an overview of just that side of things? Then let’s move onto the prospects or any kind of cross-chain interoperability and how you guys are thinking about that longer term.

19:48 • Finn
We want to make it so all collectors can move their assets to different chains. We will explore integrating with bridges where it makes sense. We want to give creatives more options on choosing what type of chains they are minting on. Most of the metaverses that we see today are built on Polygon on Ethereum. We see some emerging on Solana. That is quite an interesting ecosystem for us. We just need to see how the open metaverse evolves, right? Where is the demand for assets? That’s going to dictate our roadmap. Solana is something that we’re definitely looking at very closely, and maybe we’ll look to move into that later on.

20:37 • Mark
We’re starting off with Polygon and the decision to go with Polygon was an easy one. We are not maximalists, but most of the open metaverses are built on Polygon; therefore, we want the assets to be interoperable, so they should be usable in these open metaverses from the start. That is where we are starting, but then we will be exploring more chains in the future.

21:02 • Piers
Cool. Perhaps you could also touch upon some of your early launch partners. I know you have a particular project dropping. I do not know whether you can shed too much light on that yet, but would love an overview of that and some of the early partners that you are working with around launch as well.

21:15 • Mark
Yeah. When Finn and I started out with Metamundo, we started out on understanding how marketplaces work, and it is the common chicken and the egg problem. Which one comes first? Do you go for the buyers or do you go for the sellers? We worked really hard to make sure that our investors, when we raised our seed round, were really the most relevant and best metaverse investors we could find. That includes Animoca Brands, Republic Realm, the founders of Wild World and Nifty Island. It also includes metaverse focused funds, such as Sfermion. All of these guys are really supporting us with our mission. This vision of being this underlying content layer for the metaverse – we are not creating our own metaverse, but rather we want to work with all of the other metaverses. We have recently announced our Genesis NFT, and this is a showcase of our technology.

22:23 • Mark
It will be called the MetaPortal OG 1500. Please check out the website, metamundo.co. With the MetaPortal, you will actually be able to put it on your lands in the metaverse and interact with it. From the start, we’ll be working on making sure that it works in Decentraland, Crypto Voxels, Spatial, and Somnium Space. To the owners of the MetaPortal, it will grant them access to special parts of the metaverse. We are working with select partners to obviously give them this access, but also with launching the MetaPortal and those that want to support this project, which is also part of our vision which is to improve connectivity across the open metaverse…We believe that -actually it’s in the book Snow Crash – a portal that allows you to move between different metaverses, and if the future of our web is going to be 3D, and that is what we believe, we need easy ways to travel between these different places.

23:35 • Mark
MetaPortal is dropping on the 22nd of February, 2022. We actually do have a video on YouTube. I am not too sure if we want to check out during the call, but it looks very epic, I have to say. We have an amazing creative director in house. He has just joined us, and I think he’s done an amazing job with the design. There is some really nice, let’s say Easter eggs in the design, and you’ll see some orbs at the back of the MetaPortal, and we’ll actually reveal more about what these orbs do later after the drop.

24:15 • Piers
Yeah. I will be sure to drop that in the show notes. I am excited for that and looking forward to it. Which worlds is the MetaPortal going to be active in? Maybe you could give some more color around the functionality that comes with that and how it is really showcasing your tech.

24:30 • Finn
As Mark said, it is going to work in Crypto Voxels, Decentraland, Spatial, Somnium Space, and eventually Nifty Island and Wild World too. We are speaking with the guys there as well. What are you going to get is you are going to get an NFT which gives you access to all the versions through one NFT, as Mark kind of described our architecture before. That will be the first actual asset that we mint on our contract, so that will be super exciting as well. That will be airdropped after the drop on the 22nd. We are going to bake in a lot of interactivity and functionality there where you can actually interact with it and it will teleport to a coordinate in a different metaverse, potentially, or the same metaverse that you have installed. Part of the proceeds that we gather from the drop will be used to buy metaverse land to set up spaces for our creators to showcase their upcoming drops and their creations.

25:31 • Finn
That’s going to be super exciting as well. We want to build an OG members lounge for fostering connections between our owners, our community, and our creators as well. We will be hosting a bunch of great events in that space as well. We are also speaking with a lot of metaverses to connect with some exclusive spaces that they have in their respective worlds. It brings more exploration to different corners of the metaverse. It is going to be a constellation of worlds, right? It is not going to be like one rules all, and we want to make sure that people are exploring and discovering, so we’ll have that at top of mind for everything we do.

26:13 • Piers
Cool. Very cool, exciting stuff. I’d like to head into some of the closing questions now and ask you a few personal questions. Starting with you, Finn, what’s one thing that’s become clear to you since you started your crypto journey back in 2015-16 that you wish you’d known before?

26:29 • Finn
Good question. Early on, I speculated a ton, of course. I did not do proper DD on projects and was subject to scams, like most people. Really thinking deeply about the application of what people are thinking on, who is the team behind it, what is their experience, and doing proper research is very important – especially when you are investing as a retail investor. That was definitely a big learning for me. That is one thing that leaped to mind. Since working in the space, I think it just provides you a lot of freedom. You can work decentrally, which is amazing. You can work from anywhere you want in the world; you can contribute in different ways. It is not like a classical employee relationship that you might otherwise have in a corporation. It can be a contribution-type relationship through DAOs and all these sorts of things.

27:30 • Finn
I would just encourage people to, if they want to design their life to have more freedom, to kind of explore opportunities in the Web3 space. Most of your audience of course will already be down that rabbit hole. I do not know if we any Web2 people picking this content up, but if they do, I think Web3 enables a lot more freedom and flexibility with your lifestyle too, which is amazing.

27:51 • Piers
Love to here that. Mark, you have had the benefit of having long to think about the same question. I will ask you the same: what is one thing that you wish you had known when you started your crypto journey?

28:01 • Mark
I just want to say one thing before I answer that: the Ethereum virtual machine is probably one of the best inventions of the century, especially in the 2000s, right? The idea that we can have these distributed, decentralized virtual machines across many different nodes where the blockchain authenticates any transaction – I think if I went back in time, I really wish I had understood far more the power of this because it has taken over everything, right? What I think is ironic is that Vitalik kind of came up with Ethereum from playing World of Warcraft, right? He realized the horrors of centralized company’s databases making decisions on his game, and now we have gone full circle, and the EVM is actually enabling us at Metamundo to allow for interoperable game assets. When you build up this value and now you can move it them between games, and you do not lose that value….

29:20 • Mark
My biggest learning is that I underestimated the power of Ethereum. I obviously was a big fan right from the start, but I definitely underestimated it.

29:30 • Piers
I love to hear that. Obviously you’re spending a lot of time thinking about the actual design and populating these virtual worlds with exciting content and building infrastructure that facilitates that. How do you guys reflect on the direction of travel? People obviously post COVID spending more and more time online – to what extent do you subscribe to this whole idea that we are becoming a predominantly digital species and that people will be spending even more time in an even more immersive manner with the launch of wearables and whatnot? How do you guys reflect on that, almost at a philosophical level?

30:13 • Mark
I have been thinking about this quite a lot. My opinion is the metaverse is a better quality of time spent than it is scrolling through Instagram or Facebook; the never-ending scroll and attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. What I am finding myself when I spend time in the metaverse is it is actually more proactive. It is better quality. I can do things which are more engaging. If I do meet up with friends in the metaverse, it is more sociable. We are actually doing something together rather than just scrolling through what our friends posted yesterday when they were on a beach on holiday. Obviously, COVID accelerates these things. I am quite positive about the fact that as we move from Web2 to Web3, our online social lives are going to get better. Of course, we do not want to be spending too much time.

31:20 • Mark
I have a kid of my own. I do not want him to be spending too much time and myself too, in any digital world, but I do feel like it is going to be a better quality than it has been for the past 10 years.

31:32 • Finn
Coming back to what I was saying before, I think it enables people to connect. I think these use cases for businesses in the metaverse like remote work are very interesting, how you can have these environments for interacting with one another but not needing to be physically in the same room, but then also being able to do brainstorms and stuff that traditionally has been more effective when you do it in person. The metaverse lends itself more to these types of interactions which is super exciting. I am really excited to see how it can facilitate more engaging in a bit of work from different parts of the world. I think social connection is a very important element of the metaverse. I am really excited to see how that manifests and how people can come together from all around the world and how they can express themselves.

32:31 • Finn
I think that’s really cool as well, which you can’t do so easily necessarily in the offline world. There is a balance between everything, right? I do not know if we would want to upload ourselves to the metaverse and have our consciousness living there for the rest of our years and beyond. 100-200 years down the track, maybe that’s the case. Maybe that’s what happens. I think Neuralink is super interesting what Elon Musk is doing with that. I think personally, I find phone screens to be a very inefficient interface. We still use mouses and keyboards. We tap on screens. If you can have all of this in your brain, just thinking about what kind of interactions you might want to make with an interface, I think that’s much more efficient. How does that translate into the metaverse? That intersection is quite interesting to think about as well. I think the future is going to be a crazy place.

33:28 • Finn
Maybe we’re too early, maybe not, but it’s definitely inevitable in my mind that we’re going to be spending more and more of our time in the metaverse and in the coming years.

33:37 • Piers
Yeah. I love that and could not agree more on the Neuralink and other brain computer interface initiatives, the idea that you can dramatically expand the bandwidth of your interactions with machines. It is a pretty exciting prospect. I wonder how it ultimately manifests. Realistically, we are a reasonable way off from what is promised by Elon there, I think, but it is a fascinating area. I almost got a glimpse of a science fiction thinker from you there, Finn. The next question was about the most impactful book you guys have ever read. Which ones resonated with you the most, what would that be?

34:14 • Mark
For me, 1984 by George Orwell, definitely. Just reading that and thinking about when he wrote it – he predicted so much: drones, a TV in your apartment watching you, the three major axes of power in the world all fighting with each other, propaganda in the press. I feel like he predicted it so well. He was maybe 20-30 years too early, but that is just such an epic book to read to understand where he thought the world was going and actually it did go that way.

34:58 • Piers
Absolutely brilliant.

35:00 • Finn
I think Space Odyssey 2001, although it is not a book, really stuck with me at a young age when I watched it. The singularity and AI kind of works against humans; Terminator 2 as well. Again, these are not books, but I think great stories, nonetheless, that really resonated with me. I think it’s very fascinating. These are real risks as well. It is quite interesting to see what happens on the AI front and how these things manifest.

35:37 • Piers
Absolutely. Fun journey ahead. On a similar note, your favorite game ever?

35:45 • Mark
Grand Theft Auto – all of them. Right from the start when the first one launched, it was just one of the first games where you could really do what you wanted in a world/in a city, right? You did not have to follow the storyline. You could go off and take over a train or take over a car. Of course, when the 3D version of GTA came through, and then I believe Rockstar also just announced that they are working on the latest version… That game production is pushing the limits every time they bring a new one out. You have really got to give them a big thumbs up at Rockstar for developing that series.

36:40 • Finn
Plus one on that, I mean, I spent so many days skipping class at uni just playing GTA Vice City and San Andreas. It was a lot of fun. I spent tons of hours during my teenage years playing Age of Empires and Warcraft. To me, they were pretty amazing. Actually, I had to stop playing because I was just spending too much time on it. I used to love Counter Strike. I know that is four or five there, but I remember back in the day going to internet cafes and playing LAN games for hours on end, meeting up on a Friday night with friends before the days of having DSL at home. Definitely Counter Strike, too.

37:23 • Piers
I will tell you what you got to try then if you were into Counter Strike / Source / 1.6 or whatever, like from back then – there’s a game called Pavlov. It is a first-person shooter in virtual reality and there’s loads of custom maps that people can upload. Obviously the original Dust and Dust2, those Counter Strike maps – it is so weird to actually be in virtual reality, playing them with the same guns and stuff. It is pretty fun. I also lost probably over a thousand hours to those games, the Counter Strike series over the years. It’s pretty fun to go and physically embody those worlds now. You forget what a luxury it is to be able to just press ‘R’ to reload. Like, when you actually got to stick the mag in the gun and pull back – it’s a mess.

38:11 • Piers
In a similar vein, what would you guys regard, perhaps beyond games or perhaps within a game, as the most impactful digital experience you’ve ever had.

38:21 • Finn
I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom back in the day. Those were some of my earliest PC playing game experiences. For me, they were addictive. I was playing a lot. When you look at them today, they look pixelated and super Lo-Fi, but it was some of my earliest addictive video game experiences for sure. To be fair with you, these days, I do not play a ton of games. I have not had a ton of experience with more realistic games and whatnot, but I remember being young and playing Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and being like, “Wow, this is so much fun. It feels like I am running around with a shotgun shooting these creatures.” What about you, Mark?

39:10 • Mark
The first time I really experienced the Oculus when the first Oculus came out – I used to live in Amsterdam at the time and a friend of mine actually had…because not that many people could have the hardware to power and Oculus back then…In Amsterdam, all of these VR rooms popped up and actually a friend of mine had a VR room that tourists could rent out. I was actually staying in the room next door. We would just go in and play the Oculus for the first time. They overcame some massive hardware hurdles with developing that. Also, how you really sit inside the environment – I thought that was really impressive, which obviously inspired me for moving forward into this industry as well.

40:05 • Piers
Couldn’t agree more. It was very exciting going into the void with the Oculus for the first time. I had an early headset way back when, always messing around with the Samsung gear and VR when that stuff came out. That was pretty cool. It has been a pleasure chatting today. For those listening that want to follow along and learn a bit more about the project – where is best to find you?

40:26 • Mark
We are active in our Discord. We respond to people there. The whole team’s in there. You can find our Discord through our website Metamundo.co, or you can go to discord.gg/metamundo. That is probably the best place to contact us, search, follow the project, and find out about the MetaPortal. You’ll hear a lot more about this in the upcoming months and years.

40:55 • Piers
Awesome. Well guys, thank you very much for coming on, and we’ll have to get you back in the future to learn how things evolve.

41:01 • Mark
Thank you, Piers. Appreciate it.

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