Playing With Reality - Episode 1

 

Sorry, this content can only be visible if Functional Cookies are accepted. Please go to the Cookie Settings and change your preferences.

 

What is life like living as a virtual avatar? Will the future the metaverse holds for our online personas be heaven, or a nightmare? Find out on this episode of Playing with Reality.

Beth Coleman is an Associate Professor of Data & Cities at the University of Toronto, where she directs the City as Platform lab. Her research focuses on smart technology & machine learning, urban data, and civic engagement. In 2011, she published the book Hello Avatar, an examination of online identity and the ‘x-reality’ between the virtual and the real.

Martijn Klerks is an infrastructure engineer at Sogeti. He is also a hardware specialist in VR technologies, working with Slime VR to create affordable and open source VR technologies available to the public.

 

Subscribe Now:

Episode Transcript

Speakers: Menno van Doorn, Beth Coleman & Martijn Klerks

[Music playing 00:00:00]
Menno: We all know the online world today is not as it once was. It's filled with avatars, Deepfakes, people playing with their own realities, and all kinds of crazy stuff.
I'm traveling back to the mid-2000s to find out whether our obsession with the new digital identities is going to create an online heaven or a dystopian nightmare.
Welcome to Playing with Reality, a new podcast by Information Technology Company, Sogeti.
[Music playing 00:00:32]
My name is Menno van Doorn. I'm the co-author of Me the Media and of Real Fake. And I'm the Research Director of Sogeti Labs.
I love nature or what’s left of it, and I'm fascinated by digital culture. To celebrate 20 years of Sogeti, our team have sent me out on a journey to investigate some of the biggest questions in the world of tech today.
Are the billions of dollars that Meta is spending a guarantee for success? Will the obsession with our carefully crafted digital doppelgangers turn society into a virtual playground? And most importantly, I want to know what life is like living as a virtual avatar.
To find out, I want to speak to two different experts who not only live in these online spaces, they study them and they play with them. They push their personal boundaries to the outer limits to construct their own reality.
Beth: I'm an associate professor at the ICCIT Institute. So, that acronym, it's Information Culture, there's another C, Technology – it’s some combination of those words. And also, the faculty of information.
Menno: That's Beth Coleman, Associate Professor of Data and Cities at the University of Toronto, where she directs the city as a platform lab. Her research focuses on smart technology and machine learning, urban data and civic engagement.
Beth: And I'm the author of the book, Hello Avatar, which I wrote when I was at MIT.
Menno: In 2011, she published Hello Avatar. In it, she examined a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital, the continuum between the online and the offline. What she calls the “x-reality” that crosses between the virtual and the real.
But 2011 is an ancient history in the virtual world. So, I was curious to find out about these earlier simpler times; if the Metaverse is the future, what was the past?
Beth: For me, it just seemed like this was the first moment where we had the combination of technology and users and 3D simulations in game worlds that we really had kind of full-on avatar engagement. And now, somehow, we're back there, but in this new future moment of avatars.
Menno: What was the book about? It's about avatars, but was it your first entrance into this avatar world?
Beth: Yeah, yeah it was. It really was about something that I called in the book “x-reality.” And the argument was, whether you're thinking about McLuhan or whether you're thinking about the world after the internet, we're connected always and in multiple ways.
So, to have this moment where the technology is supporting visualization and 3D engagement with other beings in these synthetic spaces, it just seemed like, wow, we were at this threshold.
And you were there, you saw people experimenting quite a bit. And you also saw why … I don't know why often those spaces just head into a kind of toxic waste dump after a short period of time of experimentation.
And I think there's a design reason to that and a culture reason to that. But when people are looking at Meta and you hear people like op-eds in the New York Times, “I don't want to live my life in a virtual world,” I think they're missing the point.
The point is we are already networked. So, how are we understanding those manifestations?
Menno: Yeah, that's what I loved about now, reading your book, it's all back again, all the avatars. So, how was it for you, you actually interviewed people as an avatar, looking as an avatar. So, how was that experience?
Beth: In general, it was really fun because when it's Halloween and you've got a costume on, there's a way that you feel much more liberated and can be quite candid or silly.
One of the people I interviewed called himself a virtual cannibal, and we met in a Japanese tea house and we had a long conversation. And what he really was telling me is, “What I do here is real. It's obviously digital, it's simulated, but I understand my actions as real.”
But I spoke to him because he was both an extreme character, but also, emblematic of how people were trying to experiment with how they could be in the world, in this virtual space.
He made claims about being able to know if someone was really a woman or really a man, because he said “Oh, I've got whatever the virtual cannibal equivalent is of spidey sense.”
And I just thought I'm interested in your idea that the things you do are real, they're real to you, but this idea that you know what that body is on the other side of that screen, I just think there's no way to support that. That's just not who we are.
Menno: Were you at other places, IMVU or was it Second Life?
Beth: It was Second Life because that one was the biggest and most important and most famous Sandbox. When I published, I acknowledged that I was coming in at the end of the Second Life hype cycle.
But before that, there had been a dinner party at Davos. You had politicians talking about, this is an unlimited resource. None of those things really make sense, but there was a tremendous amount of excitement about having spaces for collaboration, for being able to fly.
Like you can go into Second Life and fly and rightly so that feels very exciting. I went to some others worlds, like I was in Club Penguin and there was habitat hotels. So, those are kind of like more 2D, Flutter games, but I wanted to kind of get a sample.
And then of course, there the hardcore MMORPG game worlds, later on, I spectated a lot in Overwatch and then Fortnite, but it's different when it's a design game world. Even if that game world is pretty open, people have more direction in what they're doing and they want to win.
And in Second Life, as you know, part of the pleasure and also part of the problem was there was nothing to win.
Menno: You just hang out. Was it back then also possible to have a party and play some music in front of your avatar friends?
Beth: Yeah, that was, I thought one of the most powerful things about those communities that people would build spaces, they would build avatars, they would have parties.
And we've done a strange version of that on Zoom over the past two years of the pandemic. Like everyone we know has been to a Zoom DJ party, at least during the height of lockdown.
But people were on purpose, like choosing to meet with each other on Second Life in these customized environments to play like that.
What happens when you're dancing in the room by yourself, but your friends are all your virtual friends online? Like in some ways, it's totally pathetic, but it also is kind of actually fun in the moment.
Menno: Yeah. Well, you probably would close the curtains first and then …
So, let's talk about this masquerade. What's your definition of an avatar? Has it changed from back then, your original definition in your book?
Beth: Yeah, not so much. I think that avatars are digital creatures that we craft to represent us. They either represent what we want to be, they represent an idealized version, which is often the case, but they also represent exploration.
So, if you're showing up as a dragon, you're showing up as a non-human creature, you're showing up as a different gender.
And what my assessment was after spending time with people in these worlds, is it is more like masquerade where you are part of it. You're not becoming a different person.
Some of the literature about empathy that you try on somebody else's shoes and you can understand their experience. And some of that pointedly has been directed toward experience of gender, experience of other kind of racial positions.
And I feel like especially if you're playing as a female gender, you can experience people like harassing you or whatever. But I think we have to be very cautious about how much we understand about somebody's experience by wearing their skin.
[Music playing 00:09:44]
Menno: Sure, I know what Beth means, but even if the Metaverse can make human kinds only just a little bit more empathic, it could mean a lot of difference, even if it means empathy for future cannibals.
So, like real life, the Metaverse has its limitations. We all know that. How to overcome some of those limitations will be a topic for the conversation with my second guest, someone who's working to build the framework of the Metaverse today, living as an avatar in a more modern context.
I got in touch with [Martijn Klerks 00:10:22]. He's an infrastructure engineer here at Sogeti. When he's not coding away in our offices. Martijn is also a hardware specialist working on VR technology that will create even more immersive virtual experiences.
I wanted to find out about how he feels when he inhabits the body of an avatar. Does it blur his reality both online and off?
Okay. Martijn, happy to have you on the show. What was your first experience in virtual reality?
Martijn: My first experience, well, that has to bring me back. I think like my actual first, first was like, I think like 10 years ago when a friend of my parents brought home, one of those Google cardboards, one of those cardboards fold-up headsets that you could put your phone in.
I think I played around with that fair amount, connecting it to my PC, seeing what I could do. But found it to be a bit of a gimmick. So, I kind of just stopped using it because it was fun for like 10 minutes to put it quite frankly.
And then not too long ago, I think like one and a half, two years ago, I got a girlfriend which was really into virtual reality and was like, “We have to play together. You have to try this thing out. You have to try this and once you try, you are going to buy one, guaranteed.” And I was like, “Okay, we'll see.”
So, I got invited over, I put it on and not even 10 minutes later, I was like, yeah, nope, I need one.
Menno: Sold.
Martijn: Sold, I need one. Absolutely.
Menno: Can you tell us a little bit about actually what you're doing with VR? You're creating hardware that I know, but can you explain what kind of hardware and why this kind of hardware is so important for what you're doing in VR?
Martijn: Yeah. So, I am part of the SlimeVR project, which is focused currently on building full body sensors, which basically related to full body tracking.
Full body tracking is basically being able to move your entire body in VR, which right now is a really, really expensive thing to do, costing upwards of about 1,200 euros or dollars if you want to get like a consumer grade setup for that.
There are some competitors coming up, but it's scarce.
Menno: Can you explain what do you mean with the consumer setup, what is it?
Martijn: So, basically, a consumer set would be considered something that is “affordable “to consumers. That is something that a consumer could easily use and set up for the use in applications and video games for this in these examples.
Like there's motion capture for like movie studios, where they do animation movies and video games with like all those little white balls on their suit, those range in the thousands of dollars, which that is prosumer material.
Menno: Prosumer, and that's a suit that you wear.
Martijn: Those would be actual suits, yes. The consumer market is currently more into like loose sensors that are tracked either externally or by themselves, which is a cheaper, more crude, but cheaper solution for achieving the same thing.
Menno: And how much does SlimeVR cost?
Martijn: Currently, the base set for SlimeVR to have legs and a torso like movement wise is $150, I believe, which is considerably more affordable than the competition in the market.
Menno: Oh, can I buy it?
Martijn: Currently, not yet. You can pre-order but we're supposed to ship in November.
Menno: Can you explain more about the fun of that experience? So, what is happening to you when you are full body with legs and how different that is?
Martijn: Yeah, the best way to explain that, I think is stepping out of your reality even more, when you put on the headset, you get a very audio-visual representation of what the game designer or you yourself intended.
But you're limited to just hands. So, like it's a bit of a limited experience, so to speak. And once you add the rest of your body to that, it really, really tricks the brain into believing what you're seeing even more, because it's a lot more tactile. You start feeling things that are not there by what we call Phantom touch, where body parts are being touched in game and your brain starts filling in those blanks. And it seems like you're actually being touched, which is really weird.
Menno: Like Phantom in the sense of people missing a part of their legs but still feel their total leg or, no?
Martijn: I think that that would be a decent comparison. I think it's not that strong of a sensation, but it is indeed that your brain starts filling in things that aren't there because it perceives them to be there.
Menno: I think a lot of people haven't had the experience, entered this VR world and you were talking about VRChat. VRChat is a certain taste of the VR experience, I would say. Can you help us a little bit out in explaining to someone who has never been there what VRChat actually is?
Martijn: Oh boy, the best way we describe it right now, is it's a social VR platform, which basically means the main goal of the game is to hang out with people and have good conversations whilst embodying your own avatar in whatever kind of world you want.
But everything is user-generated. There's like a few default worlds and avatars. Everything else is made by other users.
We compare it a lot to the Wild West of the VR world, just like we had the Wild West of the internet back in the early 2000s where websites were crazy with like glittery, starry images and text everywhere and make your website explode with colors. It's kind of comparable to this VR experience.
Menno: Have you chosen VRChat for a specific reason? You could have gone to another world. There are many of these kind of worlds.
Martijn: We could have. There's not a whole lot of them to be honest, there is like four main ones, which that would be Horizons by Facebook, which kind of died out. We tried it once and there was no one, like the worlds were empty and there was no one playing. So, we were like, okay, that's not the one.
Menno: Oh, you mean hangout places?
Martijn: Hangout places, yeah, which were all empty. So, maybe it has potential, but just at the time that we were trying, there just wasn't any demand for it.
Neos, which doesn't work particularly well. Chillout, I still have to try. And VRChat is just by far the biggest, most popular and has the most support for hardware and sensors and stuff.
It looks silly when you're wearing a headset, but imagine yourself with your friends, all embodying avatars, playing minigolf in like a massive dragon stadium. Whatever the mind can think of, it basically exists or will be created at some point.
I've seen roller coasters, I've seen moving trains where you're just relaxing, looking up at a stars. There's just a lot to do and it's kind of crazy.
[Music playing 00:17:06]
Menno: I think Martijn’s comments on the affordability and accessibility of VR hardware were really interesting as were his stories and experiences of interacting with others, in VRChat. He's working to create open-source hardware that will allow many people to jump directly into the bodies of their virtual selves.
This sparked another line of questioning, as we begin to be able to access these worlds more intensely and more frequently, is it changing who we are and how we behave around each other.
I went back to Beth to discuss the mental aspect of being an avatar and whether the very idea of our real self is changing. Does it also affect our lives beyond these virtual communities?
Beth: But here's something that I want to mention in terms of simulation; the VR therapy for chronic pain, it's really interesting because that immersion, your brain is changing and your body responds, which I think is different than what we're talking about in terms of trying to embody somebody else's experience.
Menno: Yesterday, I had a talk with my friend Roshan Nejal, and he's a documentary maker, and he made a documentary called Deepfake Therapy where you are confronted with a deceased person that you loved, isn't here anymore, but that's part of the therapy.
So, you can see this person and this person is impersonated by someone in another room, and you can have a conversation all backed by therapist, by the way. So, it's not like an amateur or techies doing the thing.
So, what do you think, should we be cautious doing these kinds of things? Is this something we need to explore?
Beth: I think it's pretty interesting. There was this idea of memory and reanimation. Remember the controversy around extending Anthony Bourdain's dialogue using AI? So, this is a version of a Deepfake, there’s enough recordings of Bourdain that an AI could be trained to credibly sound like him, and then you can make it say whatever you want.
And people were conflicted about whether that was a kind of manipulation of the audience. And it's also something that Bourdain, since he'd already committed suicide, there's no possibility of consent. So, you're just like, well, whoever's in charge of his estate.
So, in thinking about that instance, that's part of documentary and also, thinking about Deepfakes and what we can do with AI and simulation now, we run into a tender zone in terms of the satisfaction of the viewer or the analysand, but we're just kind of throwing things at something that's not there.
So, if your mom comes back to you as an avatar, or if Tupac Shakur comes back to you in a concert as a 3D avatar, it is satisfying for us. And I remember comic books that I was reading when I was a kid, a hero would die and there'd be kind of like their spirit in like a 3D orb.
So, it's a memento, but in terms of therapy, I'm interested to know what does it mean when you can make your mom say exactly what you wanted her to say when you — like instead of saying, “You're such a bad kid,” she’s saying, “Oh, you're so smart. You're so handsome, I'm so proud of you.”
Menno: Would you go back — interviewing avatars today, would you repeat your research or do we know enough?
Beth: I was thinking about that. And I actually gave a talk to a group of psychologists about avatars in September. And it was like Laconians in a room talking a little bit about Second Life. I was like, “Okay, this is pretty weird.”
Would I interview avatars now? Yeah, I'm interested to see if avatars include people who are experiencing VR therapy. If people who are using augmented reality to map a city or to leave each other graffiti or notes in city spaces, I am quite interested to see how people are playing with things.
And I'm particularly interested in how the virtual and the real continue to map closer together, that the things that happen in the virtual space impact kind of our engagement in the real world.
[Music playing 00:21:45]
Menno: So, where are our avatars going next? And what will x-reality mean in the world of tomorrow?
I wanted to ask Martijn the young pioneer, the forefront of hardware in this space, what he could see existing in the near future and how he thought we might experience it. Is he nervous about what's around the corner?
The VRChat experience that you talk about have no limitations, but still, I can imagine there are some kind of things that you would like to do, but what are your dreams?
Martijn: Yeah, of course, there's always like new technology coming out. There's some technology coming up that I'm watching currently that are really exciting.
Something that I particularly found really cool was VR gloves, which instead of controllers, you're wearing gloves that just track your finger movements and actually give feedback to your fingers.
So, there's like really tiny or air pockets, or like tiny vibration motors in there that simulate texture, which is really cool.
And another development, which both scares me and excites me at the same time is BCIs (brain computer interfaces), which are the sensors that you put against your head and they can read your brainwaves, and basically can use that to control video games, like basically think of doing something and then it happens.
Or in VRChat, it is technically possible than you would always see. I saw someone who had an animal avatar with like massive bunny ears, and depending on his mood and his brainwaves, the ears would go down or up.
So, when he was excited, the ears would move up. And then when he was sad or tired, the ears would start drooping down, which is really, really cool.
Menno: So, if you extrapolate, so you are an innovator searching, what can be done in this VR world, where will it go? Is there a point at the horizon? Are there things happening now that you can imagine where we will be in 10 years’ time?
Martijn: Well, I think adoption of VR headsets is going to increase a lot. We currently have a battle going on between ByteDance and Meta, which are really duking it out to make cheaper, more available headsets and better ones.
They're currently investing such large sums of money that as someone that I follow said, and I really like the words that they said, “Meta has invested so much money into VR at this point that even if the main company Facebook would go down, they most likely would still be working on virtual reality hardware, because they've just invested so much.”
Menno: And how will they get a return? So, will people spend tons of money in this kind of worlds?
Martijn: Not necessarily in these kinds of worlds. Facebook's currently like … I'm going to call them Facebook — their Meta platform is currently making a lot of money through the Oculus store, which is basically since the headset, you don't technically need your computer, you can use the headset on its own.
All the games that you purchase, I think it was like 20 or 30% of that income, every game sale makes goes to Facebook. And imagine a game sells like 20,000 copies at like $15 per copy. That is a lot of money per game per everything that's on the Oculus store. So, that is where they're getting a large part of their return.
Menno: And I know you have some doubts about the corporate side of Meta that people will join this kind of virtual offices and work from there. You called it quite ridiculous.
Martijn: Yeah, no, I call that quite ridiculous. That is something that they want to go to, but like just envisioning in my head, people sitting at home with a headset on just staring into blank space for eight hours.
Menno: With bunny ears.
Martijn: With bunny ears. No, I don't see that happening anytime soon, if ever.
Menno: And how about events? There are a lot of companies organizing events, bringing people together.
Martijn: Yes, I do see that taking off a lot more. I have been to a couple of virtual reality events, especially during the pandemic. I've mostly been through The Tube, which is a massive VRChat underground club, partners up with actual real artists from the real world and hosts massive sessions about it.
I think the last event I went to had just over 3,000 people participating, which is a lot of people for one event.
Menno: And what are you doing at those events?
Martijn: Mostly, just enjoying the music and kind of having fun with people around you. Some people are dancing, like people really enjoy dancing at festivals. So, they set up a play space at home and just with those sensors on start dancing around and it's really fun to watch.
Menno: So, we talked about what you're doing. We talked about the dreams where VR might be going. Maybe a last question, you work with in VR, you work with those people at the front of VR. So, what's the one thing that they should understand?
Martijn: Well, there's a couple things that I would like to tell people; for one, VR is a very, very open community. It's very easily approached. There's bad apples everywhere, but VR community especially is this really open and enthusiastic for new people.
There are some controversies every once in a while, in VR, which mostly have to do with the age rating VR titles. So, if any parents are listening, please don't put your kids into something like VRChat. It's mostly adults. They're not going to have a great time, because it's just not meant for younger audiences.
Yeah, I wanted to bring that up because that's something that we've seen recently, a lot younger kids starting to approach these communities.
Menno: What's a safe place?
Martijn: I think it's Rec Room, REC room, which is like Roblox. So, it's kind of like VRChat meets Roblox, had a child's situation.
[Music playing 00:27:23]
Menno: Beth is similarly split between hope and caution for the future of our lives as avatars. It's easy to focus the discussion on gaming as social adventures, but Beth sees us existing as avatars in a wider sense. For her, technology will make us exist as digital personas in other more niche areas. We will be avatars for whatever we do and wherever we go.
You might go back interviewing avatars, at least you're considering; what do you think is different now from then? So, what would you like to explore?
Beth: I'm interested in digital twins, and digital twins are when you do an action with your controller and you might see it simulated on a screen, in the building next door to you, there's a crane that then moves something. I'm quite interested in how we're mapping the virtual in relationship to reality.
And one of the places that we see this most strongly has been, I guess, eCommerce. You press a button on Amazon and then something real shows up at your house.
So, what's the avatar in that situation? The avatar is also not just how you look, it's also that interaction. And I think we're at a deepening of interaction and interaction design that is quite powerful and exciting.
And now, we do end up a little bit at smart cities because the more sensors there are around you, the more your gestures where you're located can translate — you sweep your arm over your head, and that gesture shows up in Sydney, Australia on a big screen in some game world. That I said Sydney is silly because it's a server someplace.
Menno: Another guest in the same podcast is someone who is working on motion capture suits in an open-source environment. It's called SlimeVR. So, it's very affordable. If you would do an interview with this guy as an avatar, would it be different than doing a Second Life 2007 interview?
Beth: So, you remember Ready Player One. So, one of the things that was so important, both in the book and also Spielberg's movie, is that haptic suit that when you enter … I forget what their universe was called. But when you enter, it's a full immersion experience and then you're able to simulate. It's all like electrodes, but you're able to simulate touching the avatars next to you.
So, this kind of skin, tactile connected to a network, embedding you in a simulation and then you and I are shaking hands or you're having a dance with someone — teledildonics is a long tradition. Like since people have been doing simulation, they've been trying to attach things to other parts of your body.
Menno: You've just used my favorite word; colleagues are getting mad when I use these words, “teledildonics,” yes. I would suggest the listeners to just google the term and find out what it is yourself.
Beth: Have somebody filter it for you first.
Menno: But again, but when you go to Glue, one of these new environments, you can shake hands. You feel haptic feedback when you shake hands. So, you could say we're almost there, you envision.
Beth: Yeah. And is it creepy and terrible? Are we losing our way? Are we having, you know, children die of obesity because they're just sitting on a couch and going with their controller all day? Yeah.
Menno: But let's move to the future. You're already touched upon this smart city combination with avatars. Do we need to imagine a world completely dominated by commerce? If we would be using AR everywhere, you walk around in streets and you see McDonald's popping in your eye or people seeing you as an avatar, but you advertise yourself.
I don't know what kind of crazy things can happen. We don't know because you can't predict the future maybe, but what would your pick be if we combine smart cities and these kinds of technologies?
Beth: Yeah, this is a problem in terms of once you have augmented reality advertisement, why wouldn't it just show up every place and chase you around.
We already on our browsers and our YouTube channels, we’re being chased around by advertising that's customized for us. And unless we do a better job, we'll have the same thing in terms of the augment reality of the whole world.
And it's just noisy and junky. And there's also the environmental issue that more and more is clear to people in terms of what the cost is of computing; how hot and expensive it is to run these massive servers.
So, a couple things at once, both the experience of your whole life being sold and advertised, which unfortunately, is the strong precedent we have right now.
And then the environmental one of not taking care of the park outside your door. But we have all of this apparatus that is just continuing to heat things up and use expensive and rare materials.
Menno: Well maybe a final, final question; what company do you think will be running this future envisioned smart city avatar world? Will it be Meta? Will it be one of the other big tech companies? Will it be a revolution, open-source revolution because people got sick of all the things now happening in the tech world, or …?
Beth: It's going to be the big four. It will still be Meta, Google, Apple, and Amazon, partly because they came in early and they own all the pieces.
But I think and I will follow you into this battle. This is the right time for people to push back because we are building what this future that we're going to live in, we're building it right now and we don't want to be caught in a cage, and we want to have freedom to play with each other. And we also want control over who sees what and what they do with it. And that's not where we are.
So, and GDPR, the EU, we see some really important progressive both policy, but even more important, the long history of culture and pushback and hackers, et cetera, saying, no, actually this is my life. So, let's see how we can do with that.
Menno: Well, thank you, Beth. Thank you for this hopeful perspective at the end of the story. And I would say let's meet in the Metaverse next time.
[Music playing 00:34:31]
Menno: How we exist online is undoubtedly changing. Our virtual selves and our real selves are becoming more and more entwined. We are existing as avatars more frequently with more and more ways of emerging ourselves in digital bodies becoming widely available.
And if Meta and other companies’ plans come to fruition, well more surprises are certainly around the corner. And yet as Beth and Martijn have both mentioned, we have already seen virtual spaces and realities take over our lives.
We already live as avatars. Whether we like it or not, we are already deep inside the Metaverse. The question is, how far can we go? We’ll be finding that out in the rest of the series?
That's all for today. Thanks to Beth and Martijn for joining me and thank you for listening.
Next time, we'll be moving from virtual reality to augmented reality, to see if the Metaverse is already infiltrating the real world.
Do join us again next time on Playing with Reality.
[Music playing 00:35:44]