The extraordinary ways women are shaping the metaverse by Caroline Hughes

Automatic Summary

The Extraordinary Women Shaping the Metaverse

Welcome to the world of the Metaverse! In the next few minutes, get ready to be dazzled by the innovative minds of women in technology. As they shape the new terrain of the metaverse on a global scale, you can't help but be captivated in your seat. But first, what is the Metaverse?

Deciphering the Metaverse

The Metaverse can be a confusing concept, especially as it doesn't have a 'one-size-fits-all' definition. Nevertheless, it helps to think of it as a virtual world where you can create and consume. Unlike the Web 2.0 era where we were largely consumers of technology, Web 3.0 gives us creative freedom to build and interact with a variety of platforms. It sits squarely at the intersection of games, social platforms, and commerce, combining disciplines as diverse as art, fashion, real estate, and finance. Essentially, it's a promising future for education and entertainment, where you manage how you work, play, and spend your time and money in an immersive digital environment.

Women Leading in Metaverse Technology

We can't talk about the Metaverse without acknowledging the powerful women shaping this new frontier. Let's introduce you to some of them.

This is Antonia Forster, a self-taught software developer and an expert in immersive technology. She created the world's first LGBTQ+ virtual reality museum - a platform that highlights the stories, artwork, and artefacts of LGBTQ+ individuals.

Next, meet Kyle Frazier, a former history teacher turned innovator. She founded Chi XR, an immersive education platform that allows students to experience virtual field trips, making learning more engaging and interactive.

Speaking of art, here's Nanda Chiara. A renowned fine artist, she has transitioned her vibrant works from physical canvases to digital platforms - complete with an NFT-exhibiting Metaverse gallery.

One more introduction: Ariana Waller, the founder of Mihi, a decentralized art exchange that allows fractional investments in fine art NFTs. By using blockchain technology, she is democratizing the art world, allowing artists to connect with large audiences and art lovers to own pieces of artwork they cherish.

WomenShaping the Fashion Industry in the Metaverse

Fashion, too, is breaking new ground in the Metaverse. Daniella Loftus educates the world on the possibilities of digital fashion through her platform, 'This outfit does not exist.' Here, you can explore the intersection between fashion and technology by consuming - and creating - digital fashion content.

Building Virtual Worlds

The women we've introduced so far are not just recreating lifelike experiences but are developing the spaces for these experiences to take place. Meet Myrtle Ann Ramos, who designed the 'Place War Blockchain Metaverse game' that allows players to design, build, and even battle, while earning cryptocurrency tokens.

Then there's Nicole Muniz, the CEO of Yuga Labs, which created the Bored Ape NFTs and a Metaverse called 'The Other Side.' In this world, you can buy virtual land and interact with your environment any way you want.

Promoting Safety and Ethical Engagement in the Metaverse

We've covered a lot of ground, but let’s not forget the incredible women tackling the ethical aspects of the Metaverse. Jessica Outlaw, through her research agency, The Extended Mind, provides critical insights into users' privacy, consent, and data sharing preferences to help tech companies design inclusive and safe experiences.

Last but not least, Britton Heller uses her legal prowess to examine and address issues like cyber harassment, civil rights, and human rights in the context of artificial intelligence and the Metaverse. Heller works tirelessly to promote justice and fair treatment in digital environments.

Conclusion

Tapping into the potential of the Metaverse requires the collective effort of talented and creative minds. The women we've discussed are just some of the leaders in the scene, and their impressive work is paving the way for a more diverse, interactive, and immersive digital future. So, here's to celebrating their successes and looking forward to the innovation they continue to bring!


Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. I'm so so excited to be here with you all and thank you for sharing where you're all from. Super exciting to see such a global audience before I get started. I just want to do a little bit of a sound and slides check.Could you let me know if you can hear me? OK. And you can see the slides so I can just put it in the chat. That would be great. Amazing. Thank you so much. OK. This is gonna be really good fun. And I'm gonna try and get through as much as I can in the next 20 minutes if you have questions, put them in the chat and I'll try and get to them as we go through. So the extraordinary women shaping the metaverse before we dive in a quick introduction. This is me. I'm Caroline, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Life Ties and we're building the world's first fintech metaverse. And if you're interested, you could find out more about us at Life ties dot IO and follow us on social media. We have a fantastic community of over 70,000 members on telegram and we welcome anyone who is interested in learning more about Web three and your money. So here's what we're building at Life Tires. We're building a virtual life simulator so that you can design the life you want. And we show you how to afford it in real life. So we're using the metaverse for a purpose.

So imagine being able to play out all of your life decisions in advance everything from planning your next vacation to deciding to start a family or saving for a new home and then getting a glimpse of what the future holds. So you can figure out exactly what works for you financially. And that's what we're building at life. Ties is a way for you to visualize all the things you want in life and see how to finance them and make them happen in real life. So think of it like the game of life, but where we help you win. So that's just a little bit of background about me and why I'm so invested in the metaverse and now on to the very important topic. So I've been so inspired, putting this presentation together by seeing all these other women building in Web three. And I wanted to share some of their stories with you. And I honestly feel like I have the best job in the world today because I get to showcase all the amazing things these women are building and I get to celebrate all of their successes with you. And just before we get into their stories, I wanted to just take a moment to ask ourselves what even is the metaverse.

And if you have thoughts on this, put them into the chat because I'm always interested to see how other people are thinking about the metaverse space because I feel like it's a really great question. What is the metaverse? But it doesn't have a single great answer yet. It's still a little bit vague for a lot of people. And for me, the metaverse is a virtual world where you can create as well as consume. I think for a lot of us in Web two, we were very much consumers of technology and directed by whatever the platforms were dictating for us. Whereas with web three meta verses is a little bit more open and we get to build and create alongside the people that make the protocols. And so for me, it really sits at the intersection of games, social and commerce and it brings together a lot of different disciplines. So everything from art and fashion to real estate and even finance like we're doing. And essentially when I think of the metaverse, I think of all the different ways that we can work, play and spend both money and our time in an immersive digital environment. And I'm loving the things that you're seeing like it's a future for education and entertainment. And I completely agree. And then, yeah, it's like the Sims game. But a live version, the Sims was a massive inspiration for us.

And also if anybody's old enough, the old game that was called Game of Life was a massive inspiration when we were putting together uh life ties. So, yeah, I'm glad that comes through. Ok, let's start talking about some of these incredible women. So what better place to start than with a couple of brilliant women using extended reality to make the world better. Now, extended reality covers things like virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. Basically, all of those technologies that create immersive digital experiences.

So this is Antonia Forster, a self taught software developer who is an expert in immersive technology and amongst other projects, she's created the world's first LGBT Q plus virtual reality Museum and it is so cool. So it showcases the stories, artwork and artifacts of LGBT Q people and just look at it and the way that it's been put together is so amazing because as you explore the museum, different layers of interactive content appear and respond in real time to your emotions. So it creates this really intimate and personalized experience and I just love it now, meet Kyle Frazier. So she's a former history teacher who as an educator realized the power of virtual reality to engage students and bring learning to life. And she created her company Chi Xr to bring virtual field trips to students no matter where they were so removing barriers to access and making it possible for anyone with a mobile phone or a computer, not even any fancy kit to experience the wonders of the world. And she's now working on metaverse classrooms, creating an even richer learning experience for kids. It's just so impressive. Next up, let's move into the art world and explore how artists and gallery owners are embracing this new technology to really push the boundaries of what can be done in art. So this is Nanda Chiara.

Nanda is a fine artist who has exhibited her works all around the world including at the prestigious Florence Biennial. And she creates these incredible, vibrant, huge abstract pieces. Now, previously, her work was on physical canvases and you can see her doing a behind the scenes of some of her work there. But her latest art is a series of NFTS exhibited in her Metaverse gallery that you see on screen. And what I love about this is how well Nanda understands color and composition and how she's managed to display her work digitally and recreate the scale and vibrancy of the pieces in this metaverse environment. I think it's like super, super cool and I think we're definitely gonna see more of it. I'm I'm interested as to whether or not anyone watching this has actually experienced any of these kind of metaverse environments for themselves and what they think about them. So please do share that in the chat and this is Ariana Waller. So she a K A Ariana, the techie, which is a great Twitter name and she raised recently raised over $3 million to build Mushi. And Mihi is a decentralized art exchange that allows you to fractionally invest in fine art NFTS. Now, the art world has often been a very exclusive place and hard to break into both from an artist's perspective but also from a consumer perspective.

But Ariana is using Blockchain to enable art lovers to be able to buy like small pieces of the art they love and to enable artists to connect with a much bigger community. So she's really opening up the door to a wider range of artists being able to showcase their talents and get paid for their art directly by their fans. Now, fashion has well and truly embraced the metaverse as you might have expected with brands creating rich digital experiences like this one from Rebecca Minkoff and even hosting fashion shows in the Metaverse as part of Fashion Week. And Daniella Loftus is educating the world on the possibilities for digital fashion and her Instagram page. You can see a few of the images on screen here. It's called this outfit does not exist which is brilliant and as you can see it is an absolute visual feast. Now, I often find myself looking at the images and wondering a what are they uh B is this real clothes? Is it not, is it just digital? How on earth, have they created it? And I find that incredibly exciting. Now, Daniella works with designers and brands, helping them understand how to create and commercialize both pure digital fashion. And by that, I mean, uh fashion that is worn direct to avatar, which is like a whole new industry as well as fidget, which is sounds like a horrible word.

But it is basically if you mesh together physical and digital into a single word and that is digital clothes that are worn by humans. And that's why when I'm looking at these images, I'm like, is she wearing that? Is this just transposed onto her body? I'm really not sure, but it is like, it is a fantastic, like if you're really into Instagram and imagery, like you can, it's like a rabbit hole, you can get lost for ages just trying to work out what each of these images are. And then we have Karina Knobs and Marjorie Hernandez and they're the power duo behind the dematerialized. And it's an experiential fashion marketplace where you can buy digital designer pieces, either you pay using fiat money or crypto. And already they've launched partnerships with the likes of Carl Lagerfeld, Nicholas Kirkwood and other fashion legends. And what I love about them is they've thought deeply about their use cases. So you can buy and wear your digital designer fashion on your own body and put that on social media or you can place it on your avatar in a metaverse game and just have a little bit of a disco. Again. It's just like for me, a lot of this stuff, I think, like, it's a, it's really quite interesting to see the level of innovation and to see where people are taking all of this.

And I think the more you explore it, the more it opens you up to the different possibilities for different industries and how you might think about your work and and does it apply in some way to the metaverse? So if a metaverse is a virtual world, then this presentation wouldn't be complete without highlighting some of the women building the actual worlds themselves and the spaces that we're gonna play and socialize in. So if any of you are gamers, then you should definitely check out Myrtle Ann Ramos and her Place War Blockchain Metaverse game. So in it, you get to design, build and battle these cute little tanks and Place War is what's known as a play to earn game, which means that as a player, as you're playing the game, you earn place tokens which are Cryptocurrency tokens that can be traded or cashed out on a Cryptocurrency exchange.

So essentially, instead of just playing for points, you are playing for money. Now, I don't know how she fits it all in. But in addition to leading the Place War Team Murder an is also CEO of a very well respected web three pr agency called Block Tides next up. I'm sure you're familiar with Bored Ape Nfts. And I'd love to know if anybody, if anyone in the audience happens to have one or any of the similar ones do share. So they're probably the most famous collection of NFTS that we have so far. And Yoga las who are the creators of Board Eights under their Ceo Nicole Muniz last month, dropped this teaser for their Metaverse and their metaverse is called the other side. And you can just see like the production quality of this teaser. And in the other side, metaverse, you can buy virtual land, you can own that land, you can build on it, rent it out, host events on it, whatever you wanna do. Now, the other side, land sale was so popular that sales of virtual land in that Metaverse made $561 million for yoga labs in just 24 hours. So it just gives you a sense of scale of this project is absolutely enormous. Who else do we have? Right.

This one is cool. So Janine Yorio is CEO of every realm and every realm is an investor and developer of NFT properties in the metaverse. So in other words, Metaverse real estate and their mission is to create places in the metaverse that people want to spend time in. So just like you would for a cool bar restaurant or hotel in the real world, they launched in April 21. And they built this yacht that you can see on the screen and this yacht lives in the sandbox Metaverse game. The yacht is called the Meta Flower super mega yacht and it has two helipads, a jacuzzi and a dance floor. Oh, and someone paid $650,000 for it last year. So if you've ever been in the market for an NFT mega yacht, you're gonna have to splash out $650,000. I'm afraid some of it absolutely blows my mind. So I want to end this presentation by giving a shout out to some women who are working on ethics and safety in the metaverse. One of the reasons I am so keen to promote more gender and ethnic diversity in this space is because we as marginalized groups inherently understand the need to ensure that we're not just replicating all the same issues and harms from the real world or even web two into these new 3d di digital worlds.

So I wanted to give kudos to the women actively working on projects to make these virtual worlds safe and inclusive for all. First up, the fantastically named Jessica Outlaw. Now, Jessica's research agency, the extended mind conducts user studies and applies behavioral science to help technology companies design inclusive, safe and ethical immersive experiences. They dig deep into people's preferences for privacy, consent and data sharing. And they've done some really interesting research on how to build consumer trust and safety in 3d environments. So if you're interested in kind of the ethics side of things, I definitely encourage you to check out Jessica's work. And finally, Britton Heller, who is a leading lawyer specializing in the intersection of law, technology and human rights. And her work examines issues like combating cyber harassment, cyber bullying, civil rights and human rights in innovations like artificial intelligence, extended reality and gaming.

And she promotes justice and fair treatment in the digital environment. Oh, I wish I had more time as there are so many more amazing women. I could showcase, I'm putting all of this into a Twitter thread so you can learn more about each of these women and their projects and connect with them and support them plus some that I couldn't fit into this talk. So please check that out on Twitter at KS underscore life ties. And also if you know other women who are building great things in this space, please add them to the thread so they can get their recognition too. I've got three minutes left for any questions that people have. And before I do, I just wanted to say thank you so much for being a great audience and I hope that you've been as inspired as I have. I was just saying in the chat that I need to put the Twitter thread together. So I'll do that straight after this session with all of the women and their projects that I feature and links to all of their work so that you've got like one single space to be able to find everything. Because I appreciate that was a real whistle stops.

Or unless you are kind of recording it or taking screenshots, you're not gonna have actually been able to make a note of any of their Twitter handles. So, yeah, it will have everybody else, everyone in it that I've mentioned today, plus a few others that I couldn't quite sneak in and you'll be able to find them and I'd love it if you were able to kind of give them some support. That would be fantastic. And thank you all so much. I've enjoyed this mainly because there's something wonderful about being able to showcase so many different people doing so, so many cool things. I hope you have a great rest of the conference.