At the VAM Summit 2022 Day 2 it was time for Metaverse! an opportunity or a challenge for content creators? Let’s explore.The panelists were GuardianLink co-founder and CTO Arjun Reddy, Gamitronics CEO Rajat Ojha, Paperboat Design Studios and Occult VFX Studios director and co-founder Aashish Mall, Green Gold Animation founder and CEO Rajiv Chilaka and the session was moderated by production technology veteran VK Gupta.
Over the past few years the topic Metaverse has become the interest for various industry stakeholders. Since the time Facebook got renamed to Meta, it has become a global phenomenon. The enthusiastic behavior of the industry stakeholders in investing into Metaverse has seriously directed users to the Metaverse revolution in the country.
At the VAM summit, the discussion became an eye opener not just for the creators who want to create metaverse content but also for the one who wanted to get holistic knowledge for metaverse, investment, trading and so on.
To kick start the session Mall shared how everyday they are actually learning something and experimenting in the Metaverse world. He describes, “I call Metaverse the new real estate. In this new real estate people are selling and buying land; so on this land, you actually need architects, designers, hardware guys, cement, accessories and so on. Which means you are basically creating another world on another platform. So whatever is happening in the VFX and animation field today, people are expecting the same on the metaverse land.”
He further shared that people have also started the metaverse property like a house or a farming land and so on. It will become another world for the world where everyone is living another life in the metaverse and they can choose their avatars, occupation, qualities and so on.
Veteran Ojha shared that they launched PartyNite – a metaverse platform. He said, “We launched PartyNite on the Republic Day of India with the Daler Mehndi concert. We built the concert on the cosmos blockchain with our own wallet and coin. The purpose of the concert was to make people aware that a lot of things will happen going forward.”
He also shared the difference between metaverse and gaming. Both are designed but there is something which draws the line of difference between both. He shared, “Gaming and metaverse are completely different other than the technology that we will be using. And how is it different? In games we design the tools and give some sort of feeling to the player and they are making decisions and there as a designer we take control of every move they take. In the metaverse, you are Adam. Either you eat the apple or you don’t eat the apple, you have full control of it.”
The eminent panelist also discussed how content for all will have consumers with age no bars. However if the content is restricted to a certain age group the number of users might vary. Chilaka shared, “Anything that we have seen in the 60s and 70s movie has become more real. Recently there was Ready Player One that was realistically possible and we can go and do something like this. We have the Chhota Bheem World (one of the Alien towns in the Super Bheem Series). We have plans and we are figuring out how we can cater to all audiences and not just restricted to kids.”
Further Reddy shared his idea of NFT and blockchain technology. He shared, “We were a research and development company and when we were providing R&D plans, we thought this is a good time to do it ourselves and we saw the openings. Our goal here is to make NFT a mainstream industry. We wanted to first attack space with the Indian NFT ecosystem. We wanted to bring somebody who is known and that’s when we roped in Amitabh Bachhan and we were very obliged that we were able to take his NFTs to the fanbase.
The experts shared how they are investing and creating the world of metaverse. All the experts at the panel were quite excited about the metaverse, how it is essential to create awareness. The technology is new and slowly various enterprises will uncover the folds of the metaverse for businesses going forward. The panelist also said that cryptocurrency and NFTs are going to be a new form of investment and mentioned how it will bolster the state of the metaverse. They further shared since it is the early stage, the credibility and awareness is not there in the market. A lot of development is going to happen in this space and the industry stakeholders can’t wait to explore it more.