To many, the metaverse is a concept that is straight drawn out of fancy sci-fi Hollywood movies, but there is more to it in reality. The rapid technological advancements and the keen interest and active involvements of industry’s leading giants like Facebook( now meta), Microsoft, and others have brought this aspirational concept to the juncture where it could completely disrupt the digital space. Technology in its fullest can completely change the way we now interact digitally. The idea is to give a whole digital immersive experience and increase the degree of interaction in these spaces.
We are all set to enter the new era of digitization and the virtual interactive space called metaverse. A new realm of immersive experience where everyone can have their look-alike digitally rendered avatar, donning these avatars and costumes, they can venture into these digital spaces, meet and socialize with new people, do shopping, watch movies, and the possibilities are endless. It’s high time we could say this with great certainty that Metaverse is real, and it’s happening right now!
Numerous projects are building their own metaverse, and multiple individuals are actively involved in this space to make it big. Companies are pouring billions and billions into their metaverse venture, seeing the future potential it has. Today, we will look at some visionary personalities who dared to bet big on this technology when no one else did. These are some of the handful of visionaries who pioneered this tectonic shift that will forever change the digital space.
Table of Contents
1. Sebastien Borget
Sebastian Borget is a co-founder and the chief operating officer of The Sandbox, a bluechip project in decentralized gaming and the virtual world. He is a serial entrepreneur with 13 years of experience. Nine of those years account for the experience in growing and developing mobile gaming. The past three have been at bringing the cutting edge technology, blockchain, into the mainstream gaming experience.
He is known for his impeccable contribution and influence on decentralized gaming with NFTs. He has been a great ambassador for metaverse and decentralized aspirations. His Sandbox is the latest iteration of this blockchain-based virtual metaverse with features that include creating a gaming experience by the players which they can even monetize. Borget is also the president of the Blockchain game alliance, which intends to increase the general awareness about blockchain within the gaming industry by partnering with more and more influential people in this space.
2, Andrew Bosworth
As popularly known, Andrew Bosworth — or Boz is the new CTO of Meta( formerly Facebook), who is leading the Reality Labs team. Reality Labs team heads the development of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality for Meta. He is among the close friends of Marck Zuckerburg and has gained a reputation as Zuckerberg’s go-to-fix-it guy. His association with Zuckerberg and his company Facebook dates long back; he was summoned to create anti-abuse systems for Facebook way back in 2006.
In 2017, he headed the creation of Facebook’s AR/VR organization, which was later renamed to Reality Labs. Today Andrew leads Meta’s efforts in futuristic AR, VR, AI, and other consumer hardware across Quest, Portal, Ray-Ban Stories, to name a few. Andrew is known to be Facebook’s most accessible executive who is hyperactive on Twitter and Instagram. He holds a regular Q&A session on these two platforms. One can also listen to him talk about technology and the future of AR, VR, and AI in gaming and metaverse on his podcast, which he recently launched called “Boz To The Future.” He also blogs regularly, which you could check out here.
3. Dirk Lueth
Dirk Lueth is a Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Upland; it’s a metaverse-themed virtual property trading game based on real-world geo-locations. He is empowering the masses using blockchain technology with the true ownership of digital assets in an open, decentralized community. Dirk is a serial entrepreneur and a very early adopter of blockchain technologies. He is among the renowned figures in Silicon Valley with a very strong and optimistic opinion about metaverse.
He is a frequent speaker and panelist about blockchain and platform economies. He shares his knowledge and experiences in his entrepreneurial journey in the fin-tech and digital media spaces. His passion for metaverse, distributed ledger, gaming, startups are all well known. He is very confident about the gaming experience that has a relationship with the real world. He has developed Upland with this thought which is growing in the active user base at an exponential rate.
4. David Baszucki
David Basczucki is the Chairman/Pres/CEO/Co-Founder, Roblox. Roblox is an online space and also a storefront where users go to play games. David has been working on bringing the world together through the power of play, harnessing players and creators of different ages from all around the world. He is big on metaverse and has consistently worked to bring the gaming industry into the metaverse. With Roblox, he has successfully created an immersive and customizable play experience for gamers across all age groups.
David intends to create a gaming experience that allows for greater shelf expression, unleashing the limit of imagination to enable anyone to be who they want to be. He is slowly achieving all these dreams with Roblox. Roblox also launched a podcast with the name “Roblox Tech Talks”. The first episode of the podcast titled “ Step Into The Metaverse” has an insightful discussion about metaverse and its future between David and Dan Sturman, Roblox’s CTO.
5.Jamie Burke
Jamie Burke is the Founder and CEO of Outlier Ventures, the first blockchain investment fund in Europe dedicated to blockchain tech and Web3. His accelerator project has helped fund more than 50 pre-seed projects raising over $130 million in capital across NFT and DeFi. Jamie Burke is currently exploring dCommerce and The Open Metaverse OS. Open Metaverse OS is best understood as an evolving collection of highly composable technologies that will increasingly, but selectively, be used to make aspects of an Open Metaverse possible as it seeks to serve a more significant global population across several use cases and environments.
Jamie Burke has a very insightful take on metaverse and how crypto and Web3 make it open. He is among those who believe metaverse isn’t some far-off future. He believes it’s emerging right now. He is bullish on this tech that is bringing closer the duality of the physical and virtual world, but he is also concerned about the dark sides of this future. He, therefore, wants the principles of Web3 hardcoded into the metaverse so that we don’t bring the things that are broken in Web2 into this side of reality. You could listen to him talk about Web3, metaverse, and crypto here.
Wrapping Up
Web3 and metaverse can take the world by storm with the unprecedented disruption expected to cause in the digital space. Realizing this opportunity, more than a thousand key players are working to build their metaverse with their own set of USP. The technology underpinning this advancement, blockchain and the time, seems very apt for developing these metaverse projects.
We at Blockwiz feel that with metaverse, we are about to move into the next cycle of next-gen hardware in spatial computing and 5G, where the world becomes more accessible and ubiquitous. Drop a message now if you need marketing expertise on metaverse marketing. We are a team of crypto growth hacking experts that have helped grow many crypto metaverse projects.
