#561: Decentraland: Using Ethereum Blockchain ICO to Sell Virtual Real Estate

ari-meilichDecentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual real estate. They’re having an initial coin offering for the ERC-20 token MANA from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they’ll have up to 2 million plots of virtual land that will be sold for 1000 MANA. They hope to create a virtual city with different thematic districts that will help with content discovery.

esteban-ordanoThe blockchain contract will contain a Bitorrent link or IPFS hash that contains the content for each virtual plot of land. They have a Unity plug-in, but are also planning on using A-Frame and other WebVR technologies to create their virtual city. They’ll be using using other blockchain technologies like district0x for secondary markets for reselling land, Aragon for distributed governance, uPort for self-sovereign identity Ethereum Name Service for human readable names. More specific architectural details are described in their Decentraland Whitepaper.

I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano in San Francisco to talk about how Decentraland is using blockchain technologies to manage their virtual world, and why it’s important to create artificial scarcity to help with the discovery of virtual worlds.

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So on today's episode, I'm going to be diving into a company that's using the blockchain in order to sell virtual real estate in a virtual world that they're creating in order to help with content discovery. The idea is that if you create artificial scarcity, then you can create something that's of value and then you go into this virtual city and then you have these different plots of land that people have bought in order for you to discover these different types of experiences and that there will eventually be these different districts where people can have these different types of experiences that will be all clustered together and then these secondary markets will emerge that are using the blockchain in order to exchange and sell these different plots of virtual land. So this whole idea is called Decentraland and I talked with a couple of the founders Ari Malek and Esteban Ardano and I just had a chance to catch up with them in San Francisco back on July 23rd 2017. So we'll be covering all the different things that they're doing on Decentraland, all the different ways that they're using blockchain technologies to do distributed governance and secondary markets. And we'll cover all that on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:01:29.293] Ari Meilich: I'm Ari, I'm the project leader at Decentraland. And Decentraland is basically a virtual world that uses a blockchain to enable people to claim ownership of land and other assets in a decentralized way.

[00:01:45.473] Esteban Ordano: I'm Esteban, I'm the technical lead at Decentraland. I've been working in the blockchain industry for quite some time together with Manuel Aos and some other people in the team a couple of years back. We started this project Ari as well and we are trying to make the metaverse a reality.

[00:02:09.058] Kent Bye: Great. So I'm curious if you could expand on this idea of selling, you're having an initial coin offering using Ethereum and then you're selling like basically land on a two by two pixel. So maybe you could describe to me a little bit about like the mechanics of how that works and then that how that gets translated into a map or a landscape of virtual experiences.

[00:02:32.689] Esteban Ordano: Yes, so we started our experiments on ownership of digital assets using a blockchain back in 2015. Back then we had a pixel grid similar to the million dollar web page where you could own a pixel inside that million dollar web page and anybody could get into that website and see what everybody else was displaying in there. Then we switched that towards a virtual gallery of digital assets, 3D models, that are being distributed using BitTorrent and the ownership of each land parcel uses its own blockchain to keep track of who owns which parcel and what content sits there. Our next stage is to move towards social experience, where people that get into the world can experience the world together with other users, because what we have right now is a testnet. It's actually a proof of concept of the idea. And we think that the social aspect of it is going to add a lot of value to that. The token sale that we are doing is in order to fund the development process and allows you to claim parcels of land in that virtual world, on top of which you can set up your creations, your buildings, your applications and all sorts of virtual reality experiences.

[00:04:09.248] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess there's been some other experiments that have been out there in the world of the blockchain in terms of creating almost like artificial scarcity in a way because these are digital assets and there's really no reason for them not to be copied, but yet you're creating a way in order to create scarcity by giving ownership to people. So in a world where, in a virtual world where you are going beyond the bounds of scarcity, why is it important to use the blockchain to create artificial scarcity?

[00:04:37.873] Ari Meilich: So in Decentraland particularly, this scarcity is important because for us, users are going to discover or stumble upon other people's content or applications just by walking around, by this world exploration exercise. And if the land were infinite and it had no value, then most of the land would be a wasteland, which would ruin the user experience of discovering content and actually valuing your land. So it's not scarce. It basically has no value.

[00:05:09.061] Kent Bye: And maybe you could tell me a little bit more about some of these other experiments that are out there. I read in your white paper you had mentioned this Rare Pepe, and there's also this districtox.io as well. Maybe you could talk a bit about some of these other existing social phenomena that you've seen that you're taking inspiration from in order to kind of go forward with this plan.

[00:05:29.358] Esteban Ordano: So I see all these experiments as an evolution of the current state of digital assets. Right now in most games or other kind of digital experiences, 3D experiences, you have avatars, items, skins, mods of games, and we are seeing an evolution of that into an open standard. with a blockchain interface in which everybody can see what everybody else is building and creating, and there's a layer of social proof that arises on top of that. The Rare Pepe experiment, for example, takes these funny cards, most of them in the likes of magic, the gathering aspect, anybody is allowed to upload one of those and try to sell to other people kind of like a digital memoir of owning that digital asset. Establishing a digital scarcity of course that is based on the social proof of people that take some emotional value and that want to be a slight owner of that idea that want to compensate the artist for their creation and for the value that it generated for themselves. There are some other experiments out there, like the cyberpunk GIFs. There's a lot of work being done, especially by a guy named Simón de la Rubier on curation markets, which is this idea of taking out what is most valuable out there, out of the whole noise of the internet, and compensate both artists and curators for the job of picking up what really matters out of the noise.

[00:07:29.439] Kent Bye: And for people who are listening, maybe you could describe the difference between, when we talk about Ethereum, there's Ether, which is like the currency, and then there's the, I guess the ETC20 standard that is describing these contracts. And so maybe you could kind of just walk through the difference between like, if you buy like a piece of land, how does that work in terms of the cryptocurrency? But then what does it actually contain?

[00:07:55.247] Esteban Ordano: So Ethereum is a platform for smart contracts. One of the things that it allows you to do is to set a record of information that is out there in the blockchain and establish a very precise set of permissions over what people can do and can't do with that information. Right now, when you execute a program in your computer, nobody can really know how your computer really executed that. Everything that sits on the cloud actually is being executed, but there's no real verification of that execution. That's the power of Bitcoin and Ethereum and all those blockchains. The execution of those programs, in Ethereum they are called smart contracts, is easily verifiable by everyone. So everybody can see that the rules were followed as the original writer of the program intended. So that allows us to have a public database of what happened when and at what time and that allows this digital scarcity based on social proof to take part. ERC-20 tokens, what you discussed, is an implementation of that. It's a database of who owns which token at which moment and it allows you to verify that you received it in an open distributed database.

[00:09:26.403] Kent Bye: So it sounds like in some ways you're you're kind of creating the equivalent of like a steam or something which is kind of be thought of as a content distribution network where you could have Things that are near each other in a virtual space such that you can start to have content discovery based upon these neighborhoods that you're kind of buying real estate of the hot new area that if you have some sort of virtual representation of that then you can go to the area that has all of the immersive agency experiences or the stories. So maybe you could talk a bit about how you see that visualization or manifestation of what is the volumetric experience of Decentraland, or is it just a matter of these BitTorrent or distributed hashes where you're downloading things before? I'm just trying to get a sense of what the actual experience is when you go in there, and if you're trying to create this kind of city-like metaphor.

[00:10:19.795] Ari Meilich: OK, so we see a virtual world to be a very good, at least first use case for people to find content. And we think that people with similar interests are going to have applications in places that are going to be more easily discoverable by people. So in a way, this first experiment of Decentraland has enabled a new way for people to discover applications. Unlike Steam, for instance, something that's really different about what we're creating is that we're going to let people have items that are interoperable for all applications. Whereas in Steam, you buy items for each different game, and then there's no universal marketplace, to put it in a way, where you can transact or use this sword for different games. So that makes what we're creating basically different.

[00:11:14.288] Esteban Ordano: I think that your description of originally what we are envisioning with cities on this virtual world in this metaverse was fairly accurate. We're trying to build the centerland in a sense that it's more similar to the web, that it In a way that it doesn't have siloed applications, it has no walls between different applications, which was what Ari was describing. So everybody can fully benefit from different applications on the same platform.

[00:11:48.875] Kent Bye: Maybe you could talk a bit about, once you buy a piece of land, you have an ability to send it off to an address, whether that's an interplanetary file system, like the distributed file system, or a BitTorrent link, or other sort of decentralized hosting as well. Maybe you could talk through that in terms of how you envision that, because I imagine that most things like BitTorrent you have to download it before you go there, which means that there has to be a number of people who have already downloaded it that are seeding it and getting it out there. So maybe you could talk a bit about your vision of, it's almost like this city map that is giving you access so that you could choose which things to download. Because I'm not imagining that people are going to download everything, or they're going to be a little bit more selective. Or once they decide to go somewhere, then they have to wait before they can actually go there, since they have to download it first.

[00:12:37.173] Esteban Ordano: So, with regards to the user experience, we are sticking at first with the low-poly graphics. That reduces the amount of information that you need to download. Also, we are using different levels of detail, so if you are flying through land with a plane or in a Lamborghini or something like that, you don't really need to see everything in deep detail, you just only need a broad sense of what's sitting in there. People that are serving this content at first, so we already have a testnet where there are a lot of volunteers that are seeding that torrent, that information, But until the technology to allow incentivization of that bandwidth to be spent arrives, which I think it's something that will happen in the next couple of years, we are going to serve the content ourselves or subsidize that. Also content creators, if you own a piece of land, it's going to be in your best interest to serve that content. and also the content of your neighbors to improve the experience of users going into your land.

[00:13:59.454] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm wondering if you could walk through a little bit about how this initial coin offering that's happening on August 8th that you're doing, how that works because, you know, have you already mined a lot of these networks and kind of seeded it with your own program? And are people able to already start to mine their own pieces of land or mine their own pieces of mana? And sort of how that works in terms of like getting ready for that August 8th initial coin offering, what do you have to do in order to do that? And then are there people that are mining stuff already that get money from selling it already or if that's sort of all within the purview of what you're creating within Decentraland?

[00:14:38.762] Ari Meilich: Okay, so currently we are using our own blockchain and people are mining land on a testnet. But our plan is to move over to Ethereum and this token sale that's going to happen on August 8th will be for a new mainnet that's going to start from zero. So there's not going to be any pre-mining in that regard and people will be buying the mana tokens which in turn they're going to be able to turn into land and in order for us to populate the world for the first time we're going to hold this terraform event where we're going to enable people to grab land for the first time. and after the initial land grab people are going to be able at any time to use a thousand mana to claim a new piece of land with the rule in place that this new land has to be adjacent to already created land. So in essence there's this terraform event and then any time afterward people can claim new pieces of land.

[00:15:37.103] Kent Bye: What's the overall pixel size? Because it sounds like you're going to have a total bounded number. So how big is it?

[00:15:44.746] Esteban Ordano: So it's pretty large, about 2 million land plots. Our reference client, our reference browser, is going to visualize that as a land plot of 10 by 10 meters. We are in America. It's 32 by 32 feet. But yeah, we are envisioning that some people may be able to shrink that or enlarge that. In VR, everything is possible. But I think it's going to be a social standard not to change that.

[00:16:17.715] Kent Bye: I guess that's a follow-up question is because you know like in virtual reality you have kind of like an infinite once you're in the world you can make it as big as you want and so are you actually bounding the virtual space to that same space so that if you wanted to have a more expansive adventure you'd have to buy multiple land blocks?

[00:16:35.674] Esteban Ordano: So, there are two answers to that question. One of the things that we envision Decentraland is going to be is a virtual storefront for other more advanced experiences because there's also a security risk on the amount of things that you can do on Decentraland. You cannot execute any script or any shader program that can go into your system and infect your computer. The second answer is that you lose a lot of value out of the experience of exploring the virtual space if land is infinite. If my land hugely expands and I'm a user and I jump into somebody else's land and I can never get out of there or stuff like that, then I think it loses a lot of value.

[00:17:22.605] Ari Meilich: Ultimately, what scares you is people's attention. So if you have anybody who decides to have an infinitely big parcel of land, that person would take away everyone's attention away from other creators.

[00:17:39.084] Kent Bye: So how do you deal with the situation if I get a piece of land and I want to create a spiritual exploration center for visualizing the I Ching or something like that, and then completely surrounded around me is the Red Light District. How do you go about trying to actually create these different districts in an emergent way?

[00:17:59.257] Ari Meilich: So what we think is going to happen is that people are going to associate with their peers or communities and go together and buy larger plots of land and they will be free to have their own governance over there.

[00:18:12.913] Esteban Ordano: Yeah, another interesting aspect of that is that in Ethereum, the owner of a parcel of land could not be a person, but rather a smart contract. And so virtual legislation could be set on top of those parcels of land.

[00:18:30.059] Kent Bye: I noticed in the footnotes you were talking about different sort of governance models. I don't know if that was the district 0x or if there's other things that you had mentioned in there that I came across. Maybe you could talk about some of the other kind of blockchain distributed systems that you have on top of and to be able to deal with these different issues of governance.

[00:18:47.348] Ari Meilich: Okay, so DistrictOX is a partner of ours. What they do is decentralize marketplaces. And the first use case that we saw for Decentraland was having a secondary market for land. So land, when you buy a new parcel of land that was previously unclaimed, it has a fixed value of 1,000 mana. However, once the land is out in the market, it gets its own value based on its adjacency to other cool content, what area it's on, whether it has any content that has already been created on it. For instance, someone recently paid $50 for a parcel of land on this test net with a building on it. So, there are going to be very different values, and in order for this to be traded, you need a sort of eBay interface. DistrictOX provides that, with the exception that it's decentralized, meaning the community that has a stake in this district or marketplace gets to decide how the district is monetized and gets a share of the revenue, and can also decide on the UI and whatever rules of the district. So unlike eBay, for instance, where there's one party that decides on what rules are possible for monetizing this or for what the interface is going to look like, on DistrictOX, the people that own the district get to decide on all these factors.

[00:20:13.103] Esteban Ordano: Another project that we are standing on the shoulders of is Aragon, which is an open platform for distributed consensus and taking decisions among a group of people. I think it's one of the biggest experiments on governance and social structures out there. It's really interesting.

[00:20:35.871] Kent Bye: I know in your white paper you talked about how there's these transaction fees for whenever you sell a game on Steam. They take 30% and that any sort of in-game marketplace that you have, they take another 5% cut. So there's this question, which is that the blockchain has this possibility where you can not be the middleman in that way. But then the question becomes like, how do you survive as a company in this new kind of blockchain reality? Is it more that you're kind of there first and you're mining a bunch of coins and then you're self-sustaining your own livelihood based upon your own cryptocurrency that you were there at the beginning? Or, you know, there's a capital infusion, I guess, that you're in the process of raising money. But I guess in the long term, how do you make money in a model like this?

[00:21:20.479] Ari Meilich: So there are two aspects to Decentraland. On the one hand, there is a foundation that will foster the network. This foundation will survive long term because it sells a finite amount of new mana every year. Those proceeds go to the foundation so that they can allocate proceeds for operational expenses, for development expenses, for marketing, etc. On the other hand, there will be countless private organizations building the many different clients to explore the central land, and they're going to have typical capitalistic business models. So the foundation itself is a non-profit, and it's going to survive because they're going to be selling land every year, but on the other hand, there are going to be countless organizations that make money in the ways that exist nowadays.

[00:22:15.110] Kent Bye: What is the platform that people are creating virtual reality experiences on? Is it using open web standards? Is it using Unity? How do people actually generate these experiences?

[00:22:24.917] Esteban Ordano: So right now we have a Unity plugin to upload your experiences. You need to be running a node to serve the BitTorrent content out of that and to publish into the blockchain. We are switching away from that into a purely web browser experience where you can use whatever modeling tool that you were already using. This is for static content. and upload that into your parcel of land, connect directly to the Ethereum network and publish that. And for application developers, because we are going to have a scripting system that will allow you to create applications, casinos, experiences based on items and the like. And all of this content is going to be able to be created using JavaScript and A-Frame, which is going to onboard A lot of users that come from a more web developer background take advantage of all their knowledge in JavaScript applications and turn that into applications on the virtual world. We're using the A-Frame framework, which is a web VR framework from the guys at Mozilla. And I think that was also a move that is in line with our open standards, strategy, and values.

[00:23:52.522] Kent Bye: In your white paper, you have it broken out that there's like three different levels here, where you have kind of like a land, and you have the user on another level. Maybe you could talk about these different levels of how you kind of see these things stacking on top of each other, and kind of the metaphors that you use to understand these different layers.

[00:24:11.222] Esteban Ordano: The lower level is the Ethereum smart contract that tracks ownership of who owns which parcel and what is the hash of the content description. A hash is a cryptographic function that serves as a summary of content. This content description file says what objects sit on which position, under which scale, and where to download that from which other IPFS or HTTP URLs. And this also describes which are the servers that you can reach in order to find out which other users are standing nearby you. So, communications in the central LAN between users happen on a merely peer-to-peer basis. So, my computer is connecting directly to your computer, but our computers need to find out each other's IP addresses and do some other work in order to be connected to each other. So there are some rendezvous server, that's the technical expression for that, that signal these peers in order for them to communicate to each other. and be able to transmit to each other stuff like voice chats or messages or what's the position of the other user or the expression that they are making, any kind of messaging.

[00:25:43.868] Kent Bye: Are you looking at like models of self-sovereign identity that can then use the blockchain to deal with how do you manage your avatar and your identity in this kind of decentralized space? I'm just curious to hear. I know there's been a number of efforts that are out there in terms of trying to maybe have a cooperative effort towards creating some sort of open standard around self-sovereign identity. Yeah, just curious to hear like how that fits in.

[00:26:08.258] Esteban Ordano: Well, identity is one of those unsolved problems out there. We are huge fans of a couple of projects in the area. One of them is the Keybase system for cryptographic identity and proof system. Another one is Uport, which is a version of that that works on top of the Ethereum blockchain. There's definitely going to be a system that can link some identifier like your username to a public key in order to verify ownership of items and ownership of land parcels associated with a name that humans can really understand. humans, we ourselves. But yeah, those are the projects that we are looking to solve this problem.

[00:26:59.112] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?

[00:27:07.405] Ari Meilich: So we see that it's still very early for VR and the main use case nowadays is gaming, but given that we currently do a lot of the work and play and socialization on 2D screens and that VR will eventually become more widely adopted, we think that all these activities that we currently do on 2D interfaces are going to happen more and more on VR. So it's very likely that people are eventually going to work on VR, they're going to meet with other people more on VR, and it's very hard to predict what's going to happen and at what rate. But it will eventually make sense as the technology gets better For instance nowadays the the experience with mobile VR is very poor but it will eventually be overcome and It will not be an appliance that you will need an entire room devoted to it in order to use so Commerce could definitely happen more in VR Yeah

[00:28:13.923] Esteban Ordano: I'm extremely excited about the new ways to think about knowledge that could happen on VR. Right now, for example, I'm a programmer by profession and right now I can only think about code in a symbolic way. I can read it and modify it and that's it. with other things like music. I can hear it, I can dance to it, move around with my body, I can see another person playing an instrument and I can visualize that music in some sense. And I cannot do that with code. And I think that's one of the biggest things that I'm looking forward to happen on VR. Coding the centerland inside the centerland.

[00:29:03.818] Kent Bye: Yeah, and Decentraland is really kind of the first blockchain company that I've talked to, and so I should also ask, you know, how you see the ultimate potential of the blockchain, and how that is kind of fitting into things, because it seems like this is a new distributed trust system that has so many different implications, and so I'm just curious to hear your thought on like the ultimate potential of the blockchain.

[00:29:26.407] Ari Meilich: So I started using Bitcoin first to make international payments and I saw its potential in the sense that you could suddenly be transferring value to someone across the world without needing to have a bank at all. So this could probably bring a lot of people into the virtual economy just by the fact that they have a phone. And I think ultimately, the blockchain will enable the entire world to participate in the virtual economy. Whereas at the moment, it's only about one seventh of the world that has access to the banking system.

[00:30:05.602] Esteban Ordano: I think it's extremely interesting how the blockchain system allows users to come to a social consensus about a single shared data structure or ledger of information. I think it's the internet of value. It's the consensus, the agreement of all the social actors on top of the same set of information and the updates to that information. Because right now computers and computing in general is a very closed system that sometimes it's hard to read and how to get information on what's really going on behind the scenes. And I think the transparency and openness of these systems are going to bring about a good change for humanity.

[00:30:57.406] Kent Bye: Anything else left unsaid you'd like to say?

[00:31:00.167] Ari Meilich: Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it was great to talk to you.

[00:31:04.061] Esteban Ordano: Yeah, thanks a lot.

[00:31:05.783] Kent Bye: So that was Arli Melek and Esteban Ordano of Decentraland and they're having their initial coin offering from August 8th to 20th 2017. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview. First of all, I do think that these cryptocurrencies and using the blockchain is going to be a huge part of operating these different virtual economies. And I've seen different approaches of different companies of what they're going to be doing. And talking to both Project Sansar and High Fidelity, they're going to have some type of virtual currency where you're going to be doing any combination of sales tax or property tax. meaning any exchange that you're having within those specific virtual worlds, they're likely going to have some sort of combination of either sales tax or property tax. And I think that actually requires them being in complete control of that currency. I think the approach that Decentraland is taking is having this initial coin offering, having some public cryptocurrency that is able to have the secondary markets, You're able to mine the coins, but also buying a fixed set of land that they're controlling, and then there's these different secondary markets that you have. So they're less of a middleman in that way, and it's much more decentralized, and they're getting a lot of their funding from this initial coin offering that is going into the development and research and marketing of this specific cryptocurrency. What I find really interesting is all the other different ways that they're also using blockchain technologies, whether it's to do some sort of distributed governance through Aragon or do the secondary markets in the District 0x. They're using these distributed file systems with their IFPS or BitTorrent in order to have a pointer in the smart contracts that when you buy this plot of land it's basically a pixel on this grid of two million pixels and in that has information about you, your owner, but also where to get the actual content that is going to be served when people want to go to this virtual land. My sense of talking to Ari and Esteban is that they're both from more of the blockchain end of things rather than the virtual world side of things. Right now, we're going to have a Unity plug-in to do some of the content, but also starting to use these WebVR type of technologies. Once we have WebVR be officially launched in Chrome and launching later in August on Firefox, then we're going to start to see a lot more people being able to actually browse and get web VR content and it sounds like that this is going to be kind of like maybe Advertising for a much larger virtual world experience So whether you get sent to a Steam store to be able to download the full experience this seems like it's kind of like I don't know maybe an immersive marketing type of experience and or maybe they'll just be experiences that are completely self-contained. They seem to say that they didn't want to have a plot of land that then is used for infinite space, so they're going to somehow constrain the use of virtual space that you're using within this virtual land, whether it's like 10 by 10 meters or 32 by 32 feet in virtual space. Once they have their initial coin offering, they're going to then use that mana to buy land. And my understanding was that they're going to have like a separate event where once everybody has the money, then they're going to have like a terraforming event where they start to Create the landscape of this to central land by having people terraform and start to then choose these different plots of land So I imagine by that point people will be able to in the back channels Maybe do a little bit more coordination and say okay We want to create this type of experience in this region in this land And it sounds like they've had some alpha testers. So maybe some of those people will be coming out and have a little bit more sense of what to do and how to navigate this. It seems like they're trying to create this virtual city that you can go to and start to discover all these other experiences. So it's essentially like a content curation mechanism to be able to use the metaphor of physical space in order to point you to other experiences that are worth checking out. And if there's a connection there between the scarcity of the land and people actually paying for the real estate, maybe that's going to maybe attract people who have invested some amount of either effort or money or energy into creating these experiences such that they feel like it's worth it to go through and buying a virtual plot of decentral land in order to advertise these larger experiences. So that's all that I have for today. Just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast and if you enjoy the podcast then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. Your support is what is allowing me to continue to do this podcast and I'm going to be having more events. Right now I'm at SIGGRAPH, I'm doing a couple of talks here at SIGGRAPH, one on emotion in VR as well as kind of the philosophical implications of VR. And I put together a whole presentation that I'll be giving here at SIGGRAPH. I'm in a session with the New York Times and Pokemon Go and then I'm gonna be talking about the philosophical implications of VR. So it's gonna be a nice high-level look at these deeper implications of virtual reality and I'm gonna be having live stream event for my patreon members giving that talk as well as having some of an open Q&A and an opportunity to just connect to the members of my patreon. So I'll be having more information about the timing of all that once I get back from this trip but go ahead and sign up as a member for my patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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