It is against the current that Ready Player Me attacks the metaverse. Although many players are multiplying virtual spaces, the Estonian company seeks to disguise all these projects. It proposes to design interoperable avatars that a person can keep and integrate into a maximum of experiences.
Creations that can be used for free
Pursuing its ideal of breaking down the boundaries between different virtual universes, Ready Player Me managed to raise $56 million from a16z on August 24. This Californian venture capital fund -also known as Andreessen Horowitz- is specialized in web3, in which metaverses are an actor. While many projects have regressed following the cryptocurrency crash, a16z remains convinced of the potential of the sector.
Starting from a predefined photo or model, Ready Player Me’s online tool allows everyone to imagine their digital double. Anonymous users and professional developers can try it for free. Commercial use of all royalty-free avatars created in this way are simply subject to an association with the company. This raises the question of their economic model.
Thus, it is now possible to purchase customization items in the form of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) on the specialized OpenSea platform.
More than 20,000 scanned faces
The technology is used by more than 3,250 developers and had already been supported by the end of 2021 by an initial fundraising of $13 million. It is based on the Wolf3D experience created in 2014, indicates the echoes. This company had used deep learning to create the animations of the virtual faces. More than 20,000 3D faces were scanned to achieve the current result.
From now on, the list of Ready Player Me followers includes influential names from the new technology sector, but also from video games (the tool is adapted for the Unity and Unreal Engine game engines): King co-founders Riccardo Zacconi and Sebastian Knutsson, the president of Roblox, David Baszucki, or even the co-founder of Twitch, Justin Kan.
Coincidentally, the company’s second fundraiser comes a few days after Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to the teasing surrounding his avatar in Horizon Worlds. To announce the opening of his metaverse in France and Spain, the Meta boss had published a photo, especially criticized, of his avatar in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada Familia.
Source: BFM TV
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