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Journee is a team of creators and technologists reshaping the future of the internet by creating the world’s most beautiful virtual experiences for enterprises.

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Leverage the world’s leading spatial technology to deliver real business impact in the immersive web.

We are a team of creators and technologists reshaping the future of the internet by creating the world’s most beautiful virtual experiences for enterprises. With our patented spatial immersive technology, we reach new global audiences on any device and browser, anytime, anywhere.

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End-to-end services bringing immersive experiences to life.

We focus on developing strategies, creating virtual environments, and integrating key technologies

We offer comprehensive services for use cases built on JourneeX, including strategy formulation, design execution, production management, and technology support. These end-to-end services are key to delivering engaging, immersive online experiences that drive substantial business value.

JourneeX The Premium Enterprise Solution Suite for Virtual Experiences

Crushing costs and creation cycles elevating engagement and quality.

With over 10 million users, the platform facilitates streaming of immersive worlds with superior visual quality, integrated functional web layers, and extensive Web2 and Web3 tool landscape integrations. It allows connection and engagement with audiences on any browser and device type, without the need for additional software or hardware.

Innovate The Future of The Web Together

Join a global network of immersive technology and Web3 leaders revolutionizing internet usage. Our partners will receive an extensive on-boarding and certification program, plus full support for immersive web projects, covering strategy through to technical implementation.

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Clinique virtual lab, shiseido skytopia, macy’s mstylelab, featured in, see why people love what we do.

"The execution is impressive"

"Massive Multiplayer Realtime Online Experience. Mindblowing. Mind-expanding. Benchmark. Or in a word: GOLD."

"Journee is the best enabler and partner to think of! Everyone thinking of a relationship with them- do it."

“It’s a new way to present our brand — an adventure that’s deeply experiential and aspirational, with an element of personalization both in the avatar and the way you decide to engage with it.”

"Journee has revolutionized the way we showcase and share our projects. At Polycount, we have always sought efficient and immersive ways to demonstrate our creations to clients and stakeholders, and Journee has provided the perfect solution through their platform."

"A key tenet of journalism is to show, not tell. The goal of this experience is to showcase the potential for beauty and fidelity within virtual worlds and digital clothing for an audience of executives across fashion, beauty and technology. If you saw the highlights from the last time, you’ll know that this doesn’t look like a childhood video game, and it’s definitely not your standard business conference. This time, it’s even better."

" Interactions and experiences in virtual spaces are becoming more and more important and we learn and evolve from every step we take in this world. Journee is an inspiring partner for us and technologically wise one of the best."

"Journee has quickly become the leader in the metaverse space, known for powering the most beautiful and rich high-fidelity immersive experiences. With a wide array of features, including eCommerce, web3, avatars and many more, Journee is a partner of choice when we bring brands and corporations into the Metaverse."

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Latest insights, latest insights latest insights latest insights latest insights, journee and monstarlab announce groundbreaking partnership to advance immersive software solutions, exploring immersive virtual worlds power by journeex with apple vision pro, announcing the next leap in virtual experiences: journeex's revolutionary upgrades.

Journey celebrates metaverse studio release

• June 18, 2022

Journey opens virtual offices in Core Metaverse, Decentraland, The Sandbox, Roblox, Fortnite Creative, RecRoom, and VR Chat. Together with Nasdaq, the corporation rang the metaverse’s opening bell.

Journey CEO Andrew Zimmerman and Co-Founder and Chief Metaverse Officer Cathy Hackl rang the Opening Bell at Nasdaq in Times Square and in a virtual version produced by Journey on the Core Metaverse platform. Journey’s Metaverse Studio clients and industry partners helped them celebrate.

Cathy Hackl, Journey’s co-founder and CMO, leads the Metaverse Studio. The studio helps worldwide brands with education, strategy, roadmap creation, implementation, and execution. The Studio provides world-building services for multiple gaming platforms and strategic consultancy for Web3 and metaverse plans and roadmaps. The studio helps businesses and organizations make sense of the metaverse and Web3. Visit https://twitter.com/NasdaqExchange at 9:20 AM ET for a livestream.

“Journey’s Metaverse Studio was formed by brands’ need to grasp Web3 and the metaverse,” stated Hackl. “We construct virtual worlds, metaverse experiences, bespoke NFTs, and virtual fashion collections with our global partners. Our clients design the future, create effective strategies, and meet fans and customers where they are and where they’re going.”

Journey’s new studio has attracted industry leaders to lead virtual world construction, metaverse, Web3, and market research activities

The Studio team consists of developers, strategists, creatives, and futurists who have pioneered this sector for years. The Studio has worked with Clinique and the Orlando Economic Partnership.

The Journey Metaverse Studio de-mystifies Web3 ecosystems, builds brand-centric virtual approaches that meet audiences where they are, and creates best-in-class Metaverse World-building solutions to help brands stay two steps ahead of consumers’ expectations.

“Journey integrates best practices in physical experience design, conversational AI, and metaverse/web 3.0 to suit audience needs. We’ll do this by helping customers unleash the power of their brands in the metaverse, establish best-in-class voice programs, and choreograph physical-to-digital interplay in connected spaces where they live, work, learn, and play “Journey’s CEO, Andy Zimmerman.

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Journey Guides Brands to the Metaverse

Overview CES Tech Talk podcast, in its sixth season, features interviews with industry experts who bring you an insider’s look at what’s new and trending in the world of consumer electronics, and at CES. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe via your favorite podcast platform to get the latest. In episode 25, discover how creative firm Journey works with companies to boost their brand via metaverse spaces. Founder Cathy Hackl explains how and why.

• The metaverse is not any single technology, or owned and operated by a single company; it isn’t strictly AR or VR.  
• Journey worked with Walmart to create Walmart Land in Roblox with places that include the entertainment aisle, fashion aisle and electric aisle. For the holidays, Journey even added snow. At last check, the space – which launched in September 2022 – had received more than 7 million visits.  
• Despite what many may think, the metaverse is about much more than gaming, which Hackl sees as the new shopping mall. She points out that gaming is often the entry point for metaverse denizens.
• Hackl has literally written the book on metaverse; her recently published title is Into The Metaverse: The Essential Guide to the Business Opportunities of the Web3 Era . She also hosts Adweek’s popular podcast, Metaverse Marketing .  

They Said It

Journey is a new design and innovation consultancy. We work to merge the physical and the virtual worlds…We do both: Work in the physical space, for example, TSX Entertainment, which is the first Web3 building, but we also do a lot of work in the virtual space. For example, we created the two Roblox worlds that Walmart launched last year.

Cathy Hackl (00:38)

[Y]ou have to look at [the metaverse] as the next iteration of the internet. So, a more immersive, 3D version of the internet, a further convergence of physical and digital. It's about virtual shared experiences that happen…in virtual spaces. That could be in VR or it could be in gaming, but eventually will happen in the physical world as well.

Cathy Hackl (01:44)

Journey at CES 2023

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Listen to what the industry’s thought leaders have to say about the tech events and advancements that are changing consumers’ lives. Past episodes are available on demand.  

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Brands’ metaverse leads: where are they now?

• Facebook Messenger

By Webb Wright, NY Reporter

August 22, 2023 | 9 min read

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Until recently, many prominent brands including Disney, H&M and Coca-Cola were all-in on the metaverse. Now, times have changed and so have the business models within (some of) those companies.

Once such a priority, the metaverse has largely slipped beneath the surface of many marketers’ attention. / Adobe Stock

Remember the metaverse?

Not so long ago, many brands were thoroughly fixated on this vague virtual world, a space that comprised both online gaming and virtual reality (VR) and that was typically conflated with blockchain-based web3 technologies such as NFTs and cryptocurrency. Though the concept of the metaverse has been around for decades, it was catapulted into the public psyche after Facebook changed its name to Meta – thereby signaling its pivot from being a social media-first company to being a metaverse-first company – in October 2021. Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse’s most devoted proselytizer, painted his vision for the future of the virtual world as being one in which the humanity of the not-so-distant future would work, play, date and do just about everything else.

Many brands, captivated by the notion that there could soon be a virtual realm populated by throngs of (mostly young) consumers, were quick to drink the metaverse Kool-Aid. Wendy’s opened up a ‘ Wendyverse ’ in Meta’s Horizon Worlds; Miller Lite hosted a virtual bar in Decentraland; Playboy built a ‘ MetaMansion ’ in The Sandbox and so on. Every other day, it seemed, some new brand was eagerly staking its claim in what seemed to be a virtual gold rush.

Then, almost as quickly as it had materialized, the bubble popped.

Following a sharp decline in the crypto market, a general lack of popular enthusiasm for virtual reality-based ‘experiences’ such as Meta’s Horizon Worlds and a surge of popular interest around artificial intelligence, some brands that had previously seemed so enthusiastic about the metaverse dropped it like a bad habit. Others appear to be tentatively treating it as a phenomenon that, like a child’s forlorn toy, has been temporarily abandoned by the culture but might one day be embraced again.

“Many brands were excited about the metaverse ... [and] their shift in attention makes sense with the current acceleration and adoption of generative AI,” says author and futurist Cathy Hackl, who has come to be known as the “ godmother of the metaverse .”

Hackl believes that although the term ’metaverse’ has fallen into disfavor, it still points to some very real and ongoing technological trends. “It comes down to evolutionary and revolutionary technologies,” she says. “Generative AI went from evolutionary to revolutionary in the last year, and other technology sectors like spatial computing are still in their evolutionary phase. There’s [going to be] a future after the smartphone and a new version of the web will replace the current mobile internet; whether or not we’ll choose to call it ’the metaverse’ remains to be seen. The headlines have moved on from the term but the future has yet to be determined.”

Formerly the chief metaverse officer of Journey, a company that she founded, Hackl’s current job title is chief futurist. “The chief metaverse officer [title] was starting to limit me in some ways and was putting me in a box,” she says. “I felt the need to branch out further since my work encompasses so much more.”

Hackl changing her job title is also perhaps a reflection of a broader trend of tech and marketing experts who are shying away from the terms ’metaverse’ and ’web3.’ To explore this trend a bit further, let’s take a look at the recent career arcs of (in some cases former) metaverse leads within some prominent companies.

Mike White (Disney)

In February 2022, when metaverse fever was starting to heat up across the marketing landscape, Disney tapped Mike White to lead its in-house metaverse initiatives as the company’s executive vice-president of next-generation storytelling and consumer experiences. White had been with Disney by that point for more than 10 years.

The company’s metaverse division was dissolved under the newly reinstated Bob Iger in March and White was let go from the company earlier this month. Disney now seems to be shifting its technological focus to AI .

Pratik Thakar (Coca-Cola)

During his time as the Coca-Cola Company’s head of global creative strategy and content – a position he was first appointed to in January 2021– Pratik Thakar was, like so many marketers, excited about the metaverse . The brand moved quickly in its efforts to establish itself as a pioneer in the web3 space; it launched an NFT campaign way back in July 2021 and a little under a year later released a soda aimed at the gaming community, which it alleged to contain “the flavor of pixels.”

Today, Thakar is still with Coca-Cola as the company’s global head of generative AI.

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Robert Triefus (Gucci)

Fashion industry veteran Robert Triefus, who first joined Gucci back in 2008, was appointed as the company’s chief executive of Vault (the company’s online concept store) and metaverse ventures last September. He parted ways with the company about six months later to “pursue another career opportunity,” according to a statement that Gucci provided to multiple outlets at the time. He’s now the CEO of the Moncler-owned fashion brand Stone Island.

Max Heirbaut (H&M)

Sparked by what seemed to be a surge in the market for digital fashion, H&M was another big-name brand that was quick to capitalize on the metaverse. In January, the fashion brand launched Loooptopia , a branded virtual experience hosted on Roblox that emphasized educating users about circularity, or the recycling and reuse of clothing.

Back in May 2022, H&M hired Max Heirbaut to spearhead the brand’s web3 and metaverse efforts as global head of brand experience. Heirbaut still occupies that role, according to his LinkedIn page, and the company as a whole still appears to be committed to building its presence in the metaverse. (“The metaverse offers a new way to look at personal style and the potential of ever-evolving, limitless wardrobes,” the brand wrote on its website earlier this month.)

However, it isn’t the only brand that’s still moving forward with its metaverse and web3 plans . And Heirbaut isn’t the only metaverse lead within a well-known brand who has retained their role, despite the broader cultural shunning of the metaverse; LVMH’s Nelly Mensah, for example, who was named as the company’s global head of web3 and metaverse in January 2022, still appears to be occupying that role, as does L’Oréal’s Camille Kroelly (chief metaverse and web3 officer) and Nike’s Eric Redmond (head of Metaverse Studio).

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Making the metaverse mainstream is about the user experience. Here's why

The metaverse was once the preserve of gamers, here's how we can make it mainstream. Image:  XR Expo/Unsplash

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• The metaverse – essentially a 3D version of the internet – is the next big thing when it comes to technology.
• But it still has a long way to go before it breaks into the mainstream and becomes popular with the public.
• Metaverse platforms should focus on user experience and minimizing entry barriers to increase uptake.

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society, when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered" – Martin Luther King

The metaverse – a virtual space in which users can interact digitally within an environment and with other users – is a hot topic right now, but there is still a lot to develop for it to make it into the mainstream.

With the aim of helping people build a better metaverse, we used a framework to assess the current user experience of existing platforms and identify areas for improvement.

The metaverse user experience matters

User experience is crucial for any technology product to enter the mainstream market. Just look at the history of the smartphone, where the product that won over the mass market was not the first with the technology – it was the one who built a better product.

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How can we make sure the metaverse will be safer than the internet.

By the time Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, smartphones had already been in the market for a while. The world’s first Windows 3G smartphone HRC Universal was launched in 2005 and the LG Prada, the first with a large capacitive screen, came out a year later.

But the iPhone was the defining product because the high-resolution display with a user-friendly multi-touch function gave users a fundamentally better way to use their phones.

Quest 2 – the defining metaverse technology?

Mark Zuckerberg seems to see this trend replicated in the metaverse world. According to Business Insider , he compared Meta's Quest VR headsets to the first iPhone. Zuckerberg argues that XR technology – an umbrella term describing immersive technologies that merge the physical and virtual world – is on the right track to become mainstream because of Oculus Quest 2 , the first mainstream virtual reality (VR) headset with a significantly improved user experience.

It used to be costly to get a VR headset, which tended to require a console or a gaming desktop to support it and involve content mainly targeted at gamers. So it made little sense for the general public to pay more than $1,500 to try this new technology as there was no clear use case.

Quest 2, a standalone VR headset with better graphic quality, lighter weight and a cheaper price (only $299 for the 128 GB model) than its predecessor Oculus Quest, was simpler and more affordable for the mass market. COVID lockdowns also gave users a strong reason to hop on VR and metaverse platforms.

As a result, Quest 2 was a huge success – in November 2021, Qualcomm stated that at least 10 million Quest 2 headsets had been shipped worldwide . To put that into context, according to Gartner, the sales number of the worldwide PC market in 2021 was just 88.4 million, highlighting how VR technology is becoming increasingly mainstream.

More work needed on the metaverse user journey

Though there has been a breakthrough on the hardware side, there is still much to improve on the current user experience and journey of metaverse platforms.

We explored the platforms The Sandbox, Horizon Worlds, Decentraland, Mona, Cryptovoxels, Somnium, Roblox, Rec Room, Spatial and VRChat and evaluated them by the six phases of the user journey. Here are the issues that came up:

• Consider Most metaverse platforms have one common pain point: how to convince more mainstream users to try it. A lot of people see the metaverse as a place just for gamers or Web 3.0 investors. Many still cannot see a use case for them to try it and some of them do not know how to access the relevant platforms. To address these issues, metaverse platforms should spend more resources on promoting their services. A good example of best practice is the Quest 2 advert that seeks to attract mainstream users.
• Purchase/acquire Companies need to continue reducing the financial entry barrier of the metaverse and give users a strong reason to try it, so they are willing to invest their money, time and energy to acquire the required products/services. Many users feel traditional computer or mobile applications already fulfil many of their requirements. If Metaverse platforms cannot lower the initial costs and offer a better use case, there is no reason for potential users to spend.
• Set-up and exploration First impressions of using metaverse platforms is extremely important – if users face a lot of frustrations in the ‘set-up’ and ‘exploration’ phases, they will quickly lose their enthusiasm. Everyday technologies such as mobile apps have been through years of user experience optimization and people are well-versed in using them. By contrast, the Metaverse user experience can be frustrating. Decentraland, for example, asks users to set up the account on top of a cryptocurrency wallet and to configure their browsers or operating systems. Casual users may be unwilling to do that.
• Repeat usage Users who successfully set up and explore metaverse platforms need reasons to return. People who have invested time and money to set up and explore the metaverse want to find the unique experience that it can provide. So it is crucial for companies to develop use cases, create the right culture and support people to build bonding relationships with other users, creators and the platform itself. But Metaverse platforms still have a lot to improve. Take Roblox as an example, many games on it are not as user-friendly as PC games and there are frequent notifications asking for pay and upgrades. We found these frustrating and didn’t come back.
• Advocate Last but not least, companies need to optimize functions that allow their loyal users to share their metaverse experience. The metaverse is still in the growth stage. Most potential users are still on other traditional 2D channels such as Youtube and TikTok. Users can only share their 3D experience in the 2D format, and it is hard to let others fully experience why they enjoy the Metaverse. Platforms need to build functions that allow fans to communicate the immersive experience in other channels.

Token rewards to attract users

Applications with token system and “play-to-earn model” currently attract a lot of attention and venture capital funding. Some metaverse platforms such as The Sandbox also adapt this mechanism to entice users back by providing tokens with potential monetary value.

However, optimizing user experience is still the key for metaverse platforms to attract mainstream users. In the short term, setting up a good token reward system can be effective to attract some. But the users motivated by the token system are quite a niche – they are those who are already familiar with the decentralized economy and believe in value of a the token released by the relevant metaverse platform.

For platforms that attract the first group of users merely by token, it is hard for them to collect useful user data and feedback to optimize their platforms for mainstream users further down the line.

The World Economic Forum has brought together governments, businesses, startups and civil society into its Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Network .

It promotes public-private collaboration in the development of policy frameworks and pilots new approaches to technology regulation and adoption to ensure it benefits people and the planet.

Headquartered in San Francisco, the network has centres in Azerbaijan , Brazil , Colombia , India , Israel , Japan , Kazakhstan , Rwanda , Saudi Arabia , Serbia , South Africa , Turkey and the United Arab Emirates . It has also launched a thematic centre on the ocean , based in Norway.

The network is playing a vital role in shaping the governance of emerging technologies at a local, national and regional level.

Read more about the Network impact

The better path is to attract people by the user experience first, then integrate token systems into their platforms later. The more loyal users a platform has, the more likely people are willing to invest in their tokens.

As such, and echoing the quote from Martin Luther King, we hope the future metaverse can be a person-oriented world that people enjoy being in. Profit motives should not be more important than people.

If we want people to treat the metaverse as a world that they want to spend their time in, the joy that comes from using the platforms should be the strongest reason for people to keep using it.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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Metaverse and immersive experiences: How one company is getting started on the journey

Marc Jennings, CIO of analytics and AI at travel and transport giant TUI, says the one big technology trend to watch out for next year is immersive technologies. 

As the cost of the hardware – such as virtual and augmented reality headsets – begins to drop, he says, more businesses will start to explore how they can make the most of the metaverse.

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Like other industry experts, Jennings suggests the fact that major IT vendors – particularly Mark Zuckerberg's Meta – are betting big on immersive experiences means it's likely to gain significant traction soon: "That's quite clearly where the world's going," he says.

Also: Metaverse: Momentum is building, but companies are still staying cautious

Consulting firm McKinsey suggests the metaverse could generate up to $5 trillion across consumer and enterprise use cases by 2030. It also expects the average internet user to spend up to six hours a day in metaverse experiences by 2030.

Those figures might sound unlikely right now, especially when key metaverse technologies such as virtual and augmented reality still have a long way to go before they meet with mainstream interest or acceptance.

Yet rather than waiting until the end of the decade, some organisations are thinking about how metaverse technologies might be applied to their own use cases.

"My advice would be to think about how those technologies can potentially support your business," says Jennings. "Where do you think they can add value in the workplace, which type of capability or service does it lend itself to?"

Jennings says TUI already has a number of initiatives under way where it's developing an understanding of how it can use the metaverse to develop richer experiences for internal colleagues and external customers.

"It's very low-key at the moment. You could spend a lot of money in this space. It's still early days. But it's the type of innovation that TUI thinks it needs to do," he says. 

Jennings says his data team and colleagues across the IT department and the rest of the business are always on the lookout for key technology trends that are likely to affect TUI and its customers in the short to medium term.

The aim of the exploratory work into immersive experiences is to get a handle on the way that end-user requirements are likely to change during the next decade. These explorations help the business to get a grip on the types of capabilities that are likely to be required in the not-so-distant future.

"If the metaverse becomes the norm, then we need to be building those skills – and it is a new set of skills that is completely different to many of the ones that you have in your business today. So, how do you understand that requirement and become prepared to take advantage of the metaverse before it really blows up?"

Jennings says TUI is working to develop an understanding of potential use cases across both the industrial metaverse, which applies to applications used internally by staff, and for external customer experiences.

When it comes to industrial use cases, initial explorations show that immersive technologies can be very useful in helping to develop muscle memory. He gives the example of training aircraft pilots.

"Virtual technologies mean you don't have to be physically in an aircraft to do that. Having an aircraft grounded to do some training is very expensive, as is getting your cabin crew and your pilots from all over the world to that single location. If you can do these things on a virtual device, or you're doing your annual checks, then that's potential very useful."

Another potential example of the industrial metaverse is remote assistance for engineers – having someone who can help employees virtually means the company doesn't need a range of highly trained experts at every physical location.

In terms of customer experiences, Jennings says TUI can use virtual technology to showcase content to customers and to provide a better feel for the hotel or cruise ship they might be staying in during their holidays.

"With a headset, you can walk through the hotel virtually – and that's much more powerful than looking at pictures on a website. You can look at the layout of your room, and you can see what the pool looks like. If you go on a cruise ship, you get a feel of where your room is located. It's all about bringing the holiday to life. It's extremely powerful."

Also: What is the metaverse, and who will build it?

TUI has invested in hardware to help explore these use cases. Some of the company's internal developers are working alongside external startups to develop expertise and knowledge. Jennings says his team is also investigating opportunities for the metaverse with some of the big tech firms.

"Those things are in flight – and it's about providing the right-sized investment. It's all about developing a phased approach."

Jennings says TUI has already created a three-year roadmap for immersive experiences. This strategy outlines where the company would like to get to in terms of capabilities, skills, and use cases.

"Things might get rolled out in that three-year period. But the aim it to test the waters. We want to dip our toe and make sure we're cognizant of what's happening and staying abreast with changes in the technology," he says.

"The hardware people wear is evolving all the time. The investment from the big players is immense. The cost of devices, the cost of hardware, and the ability to build applications in this space is becoming more accessible. And we need to be aware of these things that happen over time."

As well as longer-term aims, Jennings recognises that his firm's tentative moves into the nascent metaverse provide lessons for other professionals who are thinking about their strategy.

He says the key lessons so far relate to technologies and skills. Professionals should note that testing use cases will mean you probably need a different technology stack from practically everything else you've got in your estate right now. 

Successfully applying these technologies as part of the metaverse also requires a shift in mindset and skills, says Jennings.

"The kind of person you would want to hire right now is probably somebody who works in the gaming industry. They typically have a lot of the right skills," he says. 

"Building a training programme around that internally, or trying to switch staff, is feasible, but it's quite challenging as well. These are things we will need to consider as we move forwards."

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Is Facebook leading us on a journey to the metaverse?

Nick Clegg will on Monday set out the tech giant’s vision of a virtual world where you can work, shop and ‘live’. But the move is prompting new fears over privacy

T he concept of the “metaverse” first came from the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash as a place that people flee to escape a dangerous corporation-dominated world. It has since come to refer to a range of virtual experiences that have gained popularity during the pandemic – including video games such as Fortnite , non-fungible tokens or even online meetings and events.

But in recent weeks the term has gained new traction – and concern over its potential ethical and societal implications – after Mark Zuckerberg said that in five years, Facebook would be a “metaverse company” and declared it the “successor to the mobile internet”.

Sharing his vision of what it might look like, the founder and controlling shareholder of the $1tn (£750bn) company described an online world where people wearing VR headsets – Facebook also owns Oculus, the virtual-reality platform – would not just view content but be inside it. It would be an online space built by companies, creators and developers in which people could also live their lives – virtually going to performances and even work.

In Washington, Facebook’s political push to promote the metaverse is reportedly already in full flow. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, and Nick Clegg, its vice-president for global affairs and communications, are leading the lobbying campaign. On Monday, Clegg is set to lay out the company’s plans for how the metaverse could reshape society in a talk entitled Journey to the Metaverse.

According to the Washington Post the company is in conversation with thinktanks about metaverse standards and protocols – a move that some observers say allows the company to shift discussion away from issues such as the antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission last year.

But experts fear that with regulation still struggling to catch up with the impact of the first wave of social media, the metaverse is likely to be a way for companies like Facebook to capture and profit from even more data. They also warn that more foresight and government protections are needed to counter the risk of the space, and people’s lives, being overrun by big tech.

“I know it’s not necessarily a popular view but I do think that the harms that we see after the fact, for children especially but also for adults, are sufficiently worrying that it would be more sensible to work to put in place governance arrangements – checks on transparency, on data protection, etc, and harms, especially to children – before these companies are permitted to come forth,” said Robin Mansell, professor of new media and the internet at the London School of Economics.

While to most people the metaverse is an abstract term, internet giants are already investing much hope – and money – in it. Facebook recently launched a virtual-reality meeting service, Horizon Workrooms , where people gather remotely wearing headsets and meet as if they were physically there in an online virtual meeting space.

It has also launched Ray-Ban Stories , its first “smart glasses” featuring two cameras, a microphone, speaker and voice assistant. Meanwhile, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has said the company is heavily investing in the “enterprise metaverse”.

Mansell said the social-political issues associated with the metaverse will be identical to those on existing social-media platforms, such as Facebook – including data, surveillance, regulation and representation of gender, race and ethnicity. But in the immersive world of the metaverse, they will be on a far larger scale. She believes tech giants should be forced to wait before launch until there is “clarity about how they’re going to be governed”.

“For me, it seems like it is simply another step in the monetisation of data to the benefit of Facebook and other large platforms sold to people as fun, exciting, helpful for productivity at work and so on,” she said.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business in New York, said Zuckerberg is at the heart of why the metaverse is attracting attention. “The notion that he’s decided that the only way to increase our attention is to become the universe is one of those problems when you sit back and ponder on it too long, it feels like it could go nowhere good.”

He added: “I don’t think people are scared of the metaverse, they’re scared of the Zuckerverse. And that is what he has accomplished in social media. There are more people who get their information from Facebook than people in the southern hemisphere plus India.”

Dr David Leslie, ethics theme lead at the Alan Turing Institute in London, said the metaverse would offer an “escape hatch” out of dealing with society’s biggest problems.

The concept, he said, poses ethical questions around everything from who builds and controls it, the risk of losing “the safe space of private life”, and an unrepresentative virtual population. “There is a risk that in terms of a socioeconomic, gender, ethnic makeup, the populace of the metaverse may be imbalanced. We don’t live in a time where there’s equitable access to the sorts of infrastructure that one would need to engage in these technologies.”

Dr Brent Mittelstadt, senior research fellow in data ethics at the Oxford Internet Institute, said the potential social impact of the metaverse is far from certain. “If it were as disruptive as, say, people going on virtual dates rather than meeting up, to be able to say what effect that would have on the nature of relationships would be very difficult in the same way that predicting the impact social media would have had when it was just being talked about as an idea.”

But, he said, if Facebook manages to get you to spend lots of time there, it is accomplishing its goal of collecting more data and monetising it. “Suddenly you have more data sources than currently exist being combined and funnelled through this one thing – the metaverse. And if Facebook gets its way, then you’d obviously be spending a significant chunk of your time on there.”

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‘We're Doing it, We Believe in it’: The Sandbox’s Nicola Sebastiani on Bringing Gaming to the Metaverse

Since at least 2021, you could trace the arc of crypto by following the word “metaverse.” It was once filled with buzz and hype and potential to be The Next Big Thing — even Facebook changed its name to Meta — and then lost its luster during Crypto Winter, as prices plunged and excitement cooled.

But look closer. It’s now a cliche that many in the Web3 space “kept building” during the bear market, but it’s a cliche that has the ring of truth. And people kept building in the metaverse. “It’s thriving,” says Nicola Sebastiani, Chief Content Officer of The Sandbox. He calls this the “Year of the Creators,” as 280,000 Sandbox users are actively creating games and experiences. Nicola Sebastiani is a speaker at this year’s Consensus festival , in Austin, Texas, May 29-31.

A big focus of The Sandbox is user-generated content, and another is partnerships with blue chip IP. The Sandbox now has 484 partnerships that range from The Walking Dead to Care Bears to Snoop Dogg to a splashy new deal with “The Voice.”

In the run-up to Consensus, Sebastiani shares what users can soon expect from The Sandbox, his predictions for the future of the metaverse, and why he shrugs off the ups and downs of the hype cycle, as “We're doing it, we believe in it. It's what we stand for.”

Interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Bring us up to speed on what’s happening in The Sandbox. How many users do you have? What are people doing in the world?

Nicola Sebastiani: So, the current environment is great. The Sandbox has had about 5.8 million, almost 6 million accounts created. This year, for us, is the Year of the Creators. And that is really the focus for the company.

About 280,000 users have experimented and used our Game Maker tool, which is the engine that creators use for experiences, and our VoxEdit tool, which is the engine that users use to create assets. [Note: For a much deeper dive into these tools, you can check out my profile of The Sandbox from 2021 .]

We ran a variety of initiatives for creators, where they can find new ways to create new experiences and win Sand and other rewards like Land. Often those experiences are tied to IP like Avenged Sevenfold or Care Bears or Gordon Ramsay. And we continue to host a variety of events based on music or specific franchises, like the Smurfs. There’s a big focus on user-generated content.

What are some of your favorite experiences or games being built?

Recently we ran this Game Jam themed around cooking, and “Hell's Kitchen.” It was amazing to see a cooking simulators game built with such ingenuity. And there are incredible UGC [User Generated Content] studios around the world, such as Vox Machina in Southeast Asia, that are really pushing the boundaries in terms of what can be made with no-coding. I like what our own proprietary studios are capable of making with some of our biggest franchises. Like Snoop Dogg experiences, and a lot that we do in music — We worked with Perry Seleton, Steve Aoki, and several other DJs.

You can find literally something for every flavor. You can go in and explore a museum. And you don’t even really need to play ; you can just explore and lose yourself in the metaverse.

You said that this is the Year of the Creators. What’s the next chapter for The Sandbox? What can people look forward to?

Well, I think there's a lot coming up this year. It's not going to be just about creators. And, in fact, towards the second part of the year, we will have a couple of very meaningful moments dedicated to the player, the user. Although we're not ready to announce the details, I think people have been eagerly waiting for those.

There's a continuous advancement in our Game Maker and the new features it can bring, and how it can make experiences stronger and stronger. And over the next, I'd say, a couple of months, we're going to keep announcing partnerships because we’re lucky to have a lot of established brands and IP wanting to work with us.

You have literally hundreds of partnerships. What’s one you’re especially excited about?

Well, today we announced our partnership with "The Voice." That's something that our production teams have been hard at work on. We did an experience where you essentially go through the journey of "The Voice" with judges, with deciding your style, deciding the winner, and all that. I encourage you to test that.

I’m sure you know better than anyone that the word “metaverse” has had something of a roller-coaster in the past three years. First there was lots of hype, then it cooled off during crypto winter, and for some the word became almost a punchline. How have you and The Sandbox navigated all that, and how has this change in reputation impacted you?

I think the metaverse remains the vision behind the company, the foundation behind why we're doing what we're doing, first and foremost for our founders. And that cascades down into everybody at the company. So, we see it as a long-term goal. We see it as a group of companies of today and of tomorrow that are building together.

Yes, the metaverse buzz diminished for the public. However, in the broader gaming aspect, we really entered the world of user-generated content with some of the biggest gaming platforms, including, for example, Fortnite. We're doing it, we believe in it. It's what we stand for. And it is probably one of the biggest trends in interactive media today.

Give us a prediction for what the metaverse will be like in five years.

[Laughs.] In five years, you’ll check in on me about the prediction?

No no no, you’re off the hook! The Prediction Police won’t come after you.

Okay, no worries. I think it will be multi-platform and will include a strong AR and VR element as well. Interoperability of avatars. Purchases. And most features will be done in a seamless way with other metaverses from partner companies. I think it will have an even stronger economic impact on creators, where people will be learning guitar on it, or teaching languages. Or who knows, even doing corporate jobs.

It will have a strong virtual tourism side, where if you want to learn about the museum, or a financial institution, or a cultural event, you can go in interactively. And the beauty is that it’s going to be extremely decentralized. A lot of this will be owned by users all around the world, and not by the Sandbox. So much of the innovation will happen from that.

Love it. What are you most looking forward to at Consensus?

Many of the panels. I’m blown away by the quality of the speakers that are there. In fact, I wonder what I'm doing there compared to them.

I think you’re in the right place. See you in Austin!

This story originally appeared on Coindesk

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ElevenLabs Is Building an Army of Voice Clones

A tiny start-up has made some of the most convincing AI voices. Are its creators ready for the chaos they’re unleashing?

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Updated at 3:05 p.m. ET on May 4, 2024

M y voice was ready. I’d been waiting, compulsively checking my inbox. I opened the email and scrolled until I saw a button that said, plainly, “Use voice.” I considered saying something aloud to mark the occasion, but that felt wrong. The computer would now speak for me.

I had thought it’d be fun, and uncanny, to clone my voice. I’d sought out the AI start-up ElevenLabs, paid $22 for a “creator” account, and uploaded some recordings of myself. A few hours later, I typed some words into a text box, hit “Enter,” and there I was: all the nasal lilts, hesitations, pauses, and mid-Atlantic-by-way-of-Ohio vowels that make my voice mine.

It was me, only more pompous. My voice clone speaks with the cadence of a pundit, no matter the subject. I type I like to eat pickles , and the voice spits it out as if I’m on Meet the Press . That’s not my voice’s fault; it is trained on just a few hours of me speaking into a microphone for various podcast appearances. The model likes to insert um s and ah s: In the recordings I gave it, I’m thinking through answers in real time and choosing my words carefully. It’s uncanny, yes, but also quite convincing—a part of my essence that’s been stripped, decoded, and reassembled by a little algorithmic model so as to no longer need my pesky brain and body.

Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet , and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare.

ElevenLabs launched an early version of its product a little over a year ago, but you might have listened to one of its voices without even knowing it. Nike used the software to create a clone of the NBA star Luka Dončić’s voice for a recent shoe campaign. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s office cloned the politician’s voice so that it could deliver robocall messages in Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole. The technology has been used to re-create the voices of children killed in the Parkland school shooting, to lobby for gun reform. An ElevenLabs voice might be reading this article to you: The Atlantic uses the software to auto-generate audio versions of some stories, as does The Washington Post .

It’s easy, when you play around with the ElevenLabs software, to envision a world in which you can listen to all the text on the internet in voices as rich as those in any audiobook. But it’s just as easy to imagine the potential carnage: scammers targeting parents by using their children’s voice to ask for money, a nefarious October surprise from a dirty political trickster. I tested the tool to see how convincingly it could replicate my voice saying outrageous things. Soon, I had high-quality audio of my voice clone urging people not to vote, blaming “the globalists” for COVID, and confessing to all kinds of journalistic malpractice. It was enough to make me check with my bank to make sure any potential voice-authentication features were disabled.

I went to visit the ElevenLabs office and meet the people responsible for bringing this technology into the world. I wanted to better understand the AI revolution as it’s currently unfolding. But the more time I spent—with the company and the product—the less I found myself in the present. Perhaps more than any other AI company, ElevenLabs offers a window into the near future of this disruptive technology. The threat of deepfakes is real, but what ElevenLabs heralds may be far weirder. And nobody, not even its creators, seems ready for it.

I n mid-November , I buzzed into a brick building on a side street and walked up to the second floor. The London office of ElevenLabs—a $1 billion company—is a single room with a few tables. No ping-pong or beanbag chairs—just a sad mini fridge and the din of dutiful typing from seven employees packed shoulder to shoulder. (Many of the company’s staff are remote, scattered around the world.) Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ 29-year-old CEO, got up from his seat in the corner to greet me. He beckoned for me to follow him back down the stairs to a windowless conference room ElevenLabs shares with a company that, I presume, is not worth $1 billion.

Staniszewski is tall, with a well-coiffed head of blond hair, and he speaks quickly in a Polish accent. Talking with him sometimes feels like trying to engage in conversation with an earnest chatbot trained on press releases. I started our conversation with a few broad questions: What is it like to work on AI during this moment of breathless hype, investor interest, and genuine technological progress? What’s it like to come in each day and try to manipulate such nascent technology? He said that it’s exciting.

We moved on to Staniszewski’s background. He and the company’s co-founder, Piotr Dabkowski, grew up together in Poland watching foreign movies that were all clumsily dubbed into a flat Polish voice. Man, woman, child—whoever was speaking, all of the dialogue was voiced in the same droning, affectless tone by male actors known as lektors .

They both left Poland for university in the U.K. and then settled into tech jobs (Staniszewski at Palantir and Dabkowski at Google). Then, in 2021, Dabkowski was watching a film with his girlfriend and realized that Polish films were still dubbed in the same monotone lektor style. He and Staniszewski did some research and discovered that markets outside Poland were also relying on lektor -esque dubbing.

The next year, they founded ElevenLabs. AI voices were everywhere—think Alexa, or a car’s GPS—but actually good AI voices, they thought, would finally put an end to lektors . The tech giants have hundreds or thousands of employees working on AI, yet ElevenLabs, with a research team of just seven people, built a voice tool that’s arguably better than anything its competitors have released. The company poached researchers from top AI companies, yes, but it also hired a college dropout who’d won coding competitions, and another “who worked in call centers while exploring audio research as a side gig,” Staniszewski told me. “The audio space is still in its breakthrough stage,” Alex Holt, the company’s vice president of engineering, told me. “Having more people doesn’t necessarily help. You need those few people that are incredible.”

ElevenLabs knew its model was special when it started spitting out audio that accurately represented the relationships between words, Staniszewski told me—pronunciation that changed based on the context ( minute , the unit of time, instead of minute , the description of size) and emotion (an exclamatory phrase spoken with excitement or anger).

Much of what the model produces is unexpected—sometimes delightfully so. Early on, ElevenLabs’ model began randomly inserting applause breaks after pauses in its speech: It had been training on audio clips from people giving presentations in front of live audiences. Quickly, the model began to improve, becoming capable of ums and ahs . “We started seeing some of those human elements being replicated,” Staniszewski said. The big leap was when the model began to laugh like a person. (My voice clone, I should note, struggles to laugh, offering a machine-gun burst of “haha”s that sound jarringly inhuman.)

Compared with OpenAI and other major companies, which are trying to wrap their large language models around the entire world and ultimately build an artificial human intelligence, ElevenLabs has ambitions that are easier to grasp: a future in which ALS patients can still communicate in their voice after they lose their speech. Audiobooks that are ginned up in seconds by self-published authors, video games in which every character is capable of carrying on a dynamic conversation, movies and videos instantly dubbed into any language. A sort of Spotify of voices, where anyone can license clones of their voice for others to use—to the dismay of professional voice actors. The gig-ification of our vocal cords.

What Staniszewski also described when talking about ElevenLabs is a company that wants to eliminate language barriers entirely. The dubbing tool, he argued, is its first step toward that goal. A user can upload a video, and the model will translate the speaker’s voice into a different language. When we spoke, Staniszewski twice referred to the Babel fish from the science-fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy —he described making a tool that immediately translates every sound around a person into a language they can understand.

Every ElevenLabs employee I spoke with perked up at the mention of this moonshot idea. Although ElevenLabs’ current product might be exciting, the people building it view current dubbing and voice cloning as a prelude to something much bigger. I struggled to separate the scope of Staniszewski’s ambition from the modesty of our surroundings: a shared conference room one floor beneath the company’s sparse office space. ElevenLabs may not achieve its lofty goals, but I was still left unmoored by the reality that such a small collection of people could build something so genuinely powerful and release it into the world, where the rest of us have to make sense of it.

E levenLabs’ voice bots launched in beta in late January 2023. It took very little time for people to start abusing them. Trolls on 4chan used the tool to make deepfakes of celebrities saying awful things. They had Emma Watson reading Mein Kampf and the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro making racist comments about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the tool’s first days, there appeared to be virtually no guardrails. “Crazy weekend,” the company tweeted , promising to crack down on misuse.

ElevenLabs added a verification process for cloning; when I uploaded recordings of my voice, I had to complete multiple voice CAPTCHAs, speaking phrases into my computer in a short window of time to confirm that the voice I was duplicating was my own. The company also decided to limit its voice cloning strictly to paid accounts and announced a tool that lets people upload audio to see if it is AI generated. But the safeguards from ElevenLabs were “half-assed,” Hany Farid, a deepfake expert at UC Berkeley, told me—an attempt to retroactively focus on safety only after the harm was done. And they left glaring holes. Over the past year, the deepfakes have not been rampant, but they also haven’t stopped.

I first started reporting on deepfakes in 2017, after a researcher came to me with a warning of a terrifying future where AI-generated audio and video would bring about an “infocalypse” of impersonation, spam, nonconsensual sexual imagery, and political chaos, where we would all fall into what he called “reality apathy.” Voice cloning already existed, but it was crude: I used an AI voice tool to try to fool my mom, and it worked only because I had the halting, robotic voice pretend I was losing cell service. Since then, fears of an infocalypse have lagged behind the technology’s ability to distort reality. But ElevenLabs has closed the gap.

The best deepfake I’ve seen was from the filmmaker Kenneth Lurt, who used ElevenLabs to clone Jill Biden’s voice for a fake advertisement where she’s made to look as if she’s criticizing her husband over his handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The footage, which deftly stitches video of the first lady giving a speech with an ElevenLabs voice-over, is incredibly convincing and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The ElevenLabs technology on its own isn’t perfect. “It’s the creative filmmaking that actually makes it feel believable,” Lurt said in an interview in October, noting that it took him a week to make the clip.

“It will totally change how everyone interacts with the internet, and what is possible,” Nathan Lambert, a researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, told me in January. “It’s super easy to see how this will be used for nefarious purposes.” When I asked him if he was worried about the 2024 elections, he offered a warning: “People aren’t ready for how good this stuff is and what it could mean.” When I pressed him for hypothetical scenarios, he demurred, not wanting to give anyone ideas.

A few days after Lambert and I spoke, his intuitions became reality. The Sunday before the New Hampshire presidential primary, a deepfaked, AI-generated robocall went out to registered Democrats in the state. “What a bunch of malarkey,” the robocall began . The voice was grainy, its cadence stilted, but it was still immediately recognizable as Joe Biden’s drawl. “Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again,” it said, telling voters to stay home. In terms of political sabotage, this particular deepfake was relatively low stakes, with limited potential to disrupt electoral outcomes (Biden still won in a landslide). But it was a trial run for an election season that could be flooded with reality-blurring synthetic information.

Researchers and government officials scrambled to locate the origin of the call. Weeks later, a New Orleans–based magician confessed that he’d been paid by a Democratic operative to create the robocall. Using ElevenLabs, he claimed, it took him less than 20 minutes and cost $1.

Afterward, ElevenLabs introduced a “no go”–voices policy, preventing users from uploading or cloning the voice of certain celebrities and politicians. But this safeguard, too, had holes. In March, a reporter for 404 Media managed to bypass the system and clone both Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s voices simply by adding a minute of silence to the beginning of the upload file. Last month, I tried to clone Biden’s voice, with varying results. ElevenLabs didn’t catch my first attempt, for which I uploaded low-quality sound files from YouTube videos of the president speaking. But the cloned voice sounded nothing like the president’s—more like a hoarse teenager’s. On my second attempt, ElevenLabs blocked the upload, suggesting that I was about to violate the company’s terms of service.

For Farid, the UC Berkeley researcher, ElevenLabs’ inability to control how people might abuse its technology is proof that voice cloning causes more harm than good. “They were reckless in the way they deployed the technology,” Farid said, “and I think they could have done it much safer, but I think it would have been less effective for them.”

The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said, referring to the company’s research efforts. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways.

I n the basement of a Sri Lankan restaurant on a soggy afternoon in London, I pressed Staniszewski about what I’d been obliquely referring to as “the bad stuff.” He didn’t avert his gaze as I rattled off the ways ElevenLabs’ technology could be and has been abused. When it was his time to speak, he did so thoughtfully, not dismissively; he appears to understand the risks of his products and other open-source AI tools. “It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “We need to be quick.”

Later, over email, he cited the “no go”–voices initiative and told me that ElevenLabs is “testing new ways to counteract the creation of political content,” adding more human moderation and upgrading its detection software. The most important thing ElevenLabs is working on, Staniszewski said—what he called “the true solution”—is digitally watermarking synthetic voices at the point of creation so civilians can identify them. That will require cooperation across dozens of companies: ElevenLabs recently signed an accord with other AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, to combat deepfakes in the upcoming elections, but so far, the partnership is mostly theoretical.

The uncomfortable reality is that there aren’t a lot of options to ensure bad actors don’t hijack these tools. “We need to brace the general public that the technology for this exists,” Staniszewski said. He’s right, yet my stomach sinks when I hear him say it. Mentioning media literacy, at a time when trolls on Telegram channels can flood social media with deepfakes, is a bit like showing up to an armed conflict in 2024 with only a musket.

The conversation went on like this for a half hour, followed by another session a few weeks later over the phone. A hard question, a genuine answer, my own palpable feeling of dissatisfaction. I can’t look at ElevenLabs and see beyond the risk: How can you build toward this future? Staniszewski seems unable to see beyond the opportunities: How can’t you build toward this future? I left our conversations with a distinct sense that the people behind ElevenLabs don’t want to watch the world burn. The question is whether, in an industry where everyone is racing to build AI tools with similar potential for harm, intentions matter at all.

To focus only on deepfakes elides how ElevenLabs and synthetic audio might reshape the internet in unpredictable ways. A few weeks before my visit, ElevenLabs held a hackathon, where programmers fused the company’s tech with hardware and other generative-AI tools. Staniszewski said that one team took an image-recognition AI model and connected it to both an Android device with a camera and ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech model. The result was a camera that could narrate what it was looking at. “If you’re a tourist, if you’re a blind person and want to see the world, you just find a camera,” Staniszewski said. “They deployed that in a weekend.”

Repeatedly during my visit, ElevenLabs employees described these types of hybrid projects—enough that I began to see them as a helpful way to imagine the next few years of technology. Products that all hook into one another herald a future that’s a lot less recognizable. More machines talking to machines; an internet that writes itself ; an exhausting, boundless comingling of human art and human speech with AI art and AI speech until, perhaps, the provenance ceases to matter.

I came to London to try to wrap my mind around the AI revolution. By staring at one piece of it, I thought, I would get at least a sliver of certainty about what we’re barreling toward. Turns out, you can travel across the world, meet the people building the future, find them to be kind and introspective, ask them all of your questions, and still experience a profound sense of disorientation about this new technological frontier. Disorientation. That’s the main sense of this era—that something is looming just over the horizon, but you can’t see it. You can only feel the pit in your stomach. People build because they can. The rest of us are forced to adapt.

This article previously misquoted Staniszewski as calling his background an "investor story."

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Trezi to transform UAE's AEC landscape in the Metaverse era

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Trezi debuts in the UAE with the support of iAccel Gulf Business Incubator

Trezi debuts in the UAE with the support of iAccel Gulf Business Incubator, under the patronage of Dubai SME

Dubai: Trezi, a pioneering software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform specialising in the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector has announced an expansion in UAE through a collaboration with iAccel Gulf Business Incubator, under the patronage of Dubai SME, the company has announced.

According to the company, the move comes at a time when the sector is bolstered by the UAE government's proactive efforts such as the Dubai Metaverse Strategy, and represents a pivotal achievement in Trezi's goal to reshape design collaboration and elevate stakeholder engagement in the burgeoning building industry of the region.

Trezi is an immersive technology platform developed by SmartVizX, according to the media release. The company has touched upon all the key sectors, particularly transforming the building industry creating seamless communication between designers, clients, and the key stakeholders. The platform offers annual subscriptions and bespoke services to architects, interior designers, real estate developers, infrastructure enterprise customers, building product manufacturers, suppliers and students through its offerings.

Trezi's mission is to transform the AEC industry through immersive experiences that deliver unparalleled value and business impact. The platform’s integration of immersive technologies including the Metaverse, AR, VR, MR, XR, conversational AI, and metahumans is poised to change the dynamics of the real estate market in the UAE, making it more aligned. TAAS one of their services is crafted for real estate space helping the builders communicate to the clients to showcase their unbuilt property.

By enabling remote collaboration and real-time interaction, Trezi caters well to architects, designers, engineers, building product manufacturers, and other stakeholders to collaborate seamlessly, irrespective of their physical locations.

Commenting on the expansion, Tithi Tewari, co-founder of Trezi, said, "The UAE's dynamic landscape and commitment to technological innovation perfectly align with Trezi's mission. We are enthusiastic about the substantial potential to revolutionize collaboration and innovation within the real estate industry. The platform enables engineers and architects to seamlessly converge in a virtual realm, meticulously visualizing your project. Such capabilities hold the promise of significant cost savings and error prevention."

“As we enter the UAE market, we are grateful for the support of iAccel Gulf Business Incubator, as we launch our innovative venture in the UAE, gateway to the Middle East,” Tithi added

This move underscores Trezi's commitment to redefining the way professionals in the built environment collaborate, design, and bring visions to life. The platform's intuitive interface facilitates quicker decision-making, reduces errors, enhances product experiences, and ultimately delivers significant business impact across the AEC value chain.

Deepak Ahuja, CEO and Co-Founder of iAccel Gulf Business Incubator said, “Aligned with Dubai's D33 agenda, the UAE’s economy is growing rapidly, providing startups with a large market to tap into. iAccel Gulf Business Incubator, a comprehensive ecosystem player in the UAE and the wider Middle East is equipping innovative tech all around the globe to navigate the complexities of the UAE market and achieve strategic market entry. With Trezi's innovative offering, we aim to foster technological advancements in the AEC space.”

Elaborating further on the vision, Tithi added, "We are excited to contribute to Dubai's vision of becoming a global metaverse hub and look forward to collaborating with local stakeholders to drive innovation and create value in the AEC sector.”

Founded in India in 2015, the company has garnered over $4 million in funding to date. Their last funding round of $2 million was in January 2023, spearheaded by YourNest Venture Capital, which was earmarked for product development and market expansion initiatives.

In addition to its expansion in the UAE, Trezi continues to strengthen its presence globally, with a mission to empower architects, designers, and building industry professionals with transformative immersive experiences.

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Digital twins: The art of the possible in product development and beyond

Industrial companies around the world rely on digital tools to turn ideas into physical products for their customers. These tools have become increasingly more powerful, flexible, and sophisticated since the 1960s and 1970s, when computers first began replacing drawing boards in design offices. Today, product life-cycle management (PLM) has become engineers’ first language: PLM systems help companies to capture, codify, process, and communicate product knowledge across their organizations.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Mickael Brossard , Sebastien Chaigne, Jacomo Corbo, Bernhard Mühlreiter , and Jan Paul Stein, representing views from McKinsey’s Operations Practice.

Yet as engineering tools have become more capable, the demands placed upon them have also increased. Product functions are increasingly delivered through a combination of hardware and software. Sensors and communications capabilities allow products to offer more features and to respond more effectively to changing operating conditions and user requirements. Advanced, adaptable user interfaces have simplified the operation of complex and sophisticated machines.

Evolving business models are also blurring the boundaries between design and use. Customers expect the performance and functionality of products to improve during their life cycle, enabled by over-the-air software updates or the ability to unlock new features as needed. Many products operate as part of an ecosystem of related products and services. Increasingly, customers are not buying products outright, but paying for the capabilities they provide on a per-use or subscription basis.

The birth of the digital twin

These changing requirements have triggered a transformation in digital product representation and the creation of a new tool: the digital twin. Digital twins combine and build upon existing digital engineering tools, incorporating additional data sources, adding advanced simulation and analytics capabilities, and establishing links to live data generated during the product’s manufacture and use. A conventional PLM system uses one digital model to represent each variant of a product. A digital twin, by contrast, may have one model for each individual product, which is continually updated using data collected during the product’s life cycle.

The digital-twin approach can be applied to products, manufacturing processes, or even entire value chains. In this article, we will focus on their application to products, specifically to product design.

Digital twins offer multiple potential benefits for product-based companies and users. They can aid design optimization, reduce costs and time to market, and accelerate the organization’s response to new customer needs. Digital twins can also be a critical enabler of new revenue streams, such as remote maintenance and support offerings and “as a service” business models.

Based on the experience of companies that have already adopted the approach, we estimate that digital-twin technologies can drive a revenue increase of up to 10 percent, accelerate time to market by as much as 50 percent, and improve product quality by up to 25 percent. Digital-twin technology  is becoming a significant industry. Current estimates indicate that the market for digital twins in Europe alone will be around €7 billion by 2025, with an annual growth rate of 30 to 45 percent. 1 Infinium; MarketsandMarkets; MarkNTel Advisors; Meticulous Market Research; Mordor Intelligence; SBIS; Technavio, last accessed April 2020.

Digital twins in practice

Companies in many different industries are already capturing real value by applying digital twins to product development , manufacturing, and through-life support (exhibit).

An automotive OEM, for example, has used the digital-twin approach to create a concept configurator for early phase development . The start of the development process is especially challenging for complex products because the various stakeholder groups, such as sales, engineering, and finance, may have different or even contradictory product requirements. The OEM now balances these trade-offs using a digital concept configurator that allows for simultaneous evaluation of customer requirements, technical concepts, and product costs. When a technical concept within a system or subsystem of the product is changed, the implications for meeting customer requirements or product cost targets become immediately transparent.

Would you like to learn more about our work in Product Digital Twins ?

Using the configurator within cross-functional development teams has helped the OEM to reallocate 5 to 15 percent of a new vehicle’s material costs to the attributes that drive the most customer value. Applying the approach to select customer-facing components has allowed the company to optimize costs and customer value simultaneously, improving the contribution margin of those parts by 5 to 10 percent. As a further benefit, the configurator helped the team reduce the time taken to reach agreement on changes by 20 percent, thus accelerating time to market.

Digital twins are even being used to replicate systems in complex mission scenarios. Using this approach, one aerospace and defense player has cut the time required to develop advanced products by 30 to 40 percent. The digital twin also aids discussion with customers during the development process, helping the company validate and improve its designs.

In the consumer electronics sector, a company is using product digital twins to boost quality and supply chain resilience . It stores detailed information on the content of its products, including the exact source of individual components. In the event of quality issues during production or early failures in the field, the company can trace problems back to specific supplier facilities, then take appropriate action to prevent reoccurrence of the issue. An automotive supplier uses the same approach to trace quality deviations in its production through to the upstream supply chain, and in the process has reduced scrap by 20 percent.

Digital twins are increasingly being used to improve future product generations . An electric-vehicle (EV) manufacturer, for example, uses live data from more than 80 sensors to track energy consumption under different driving regimes and in varying weather conditions. Analysis of that data allows it to upgrade its vehicle control software, with some updates introduced into new vehicles and others delivered over the air to existing customers.

Developers of autonomous-driving systems , meanwhile, are increasingly developing their technology in virtual environments. The training and validation of algorithms in a simulated environment is safer and cheaper than real-world tests. Moreover, the ability to run numerous simulations in parallel has accelerated the testing process by more than 10,000 times. Incorporating sensor data from real-world vehicles into these tests helps companies improve the veracity of their simulations and identify blind spots in the virtual test database.

The mainstreaming of additive manufacturing

A company in the renewable-energy sector is using a digital twin to automate, accelerate, and improve the engineering of hydroelectric turbines . Using the machine learning system to evaluate the likely performance of the new designs allowed it to rate more than a million different designs in seconds rather than the hours required for conventional computational flow dynamics (CFD) analysis. The winning geometry delivers the maximum theoretical performance, significantly higher than what is achievable by conventional optimization methods. Moreover, by using machine learning, the overall end-to-end design cycle time was cut in half compared with the conventional approach.

Digital twins in three dimensions

Digital twins can take many different forms. Organizations that want to take advantage of digital-twin technologies must select an appropriate form that will enhance its technical and business objectives. The design of a digital twin can vary across three dimensions (exhibit).

The first dimension encompasses the value chain steps that the digital twin will cover. An engineering twin covers value chain steps similar to those covered by conventional PLM systems, ranging from product definition to detailed engineering. A production twin replicates a product throughout the manufacturing process, incorporating data such as the components, materials, and process parameters used, as well as the results of tests and quality checks. A service twin incorporates data collected from the product in use, such as operating modes, performance, diagnostic information, and maintenance history. The most sophisticated digital twins span multiple parts of the value chain, allowing in-service data to optimize manufacturing processes or future design iterations.

The second dimension is the scope of the digital twin. A product may consist of several major systems, multiple subsystems, and hundreds or thousands of hardware and software components. Some digital twins cover only one or several components, for example, those that simulate the flow of liquids through a pipe. Others cover a full product, for example, those that simulate a car’s crash characteristics. Given the limitations of computing power, generally, the narrower the scope of a digital twin, the more precise its virtual replica will be. In contrast, full-product digital twins often need to abstract or simplify certain product behaviors to remain manageable.

The final dimension of a digital twin is its degree of sophistication . The simplest digital twins consist of various sources of data relating to a product, often from sources that have few or no links with one another. The second level of sophistication uses traditional simulation tools to perform analyses of design performance and integrate the various sources through a PLM system or similar platform.

At the third level of sophistication, a digital twin will use predictive or prescriptive analytics, as well as machine learning technology to run automated simulation refinements and yield new insights. This allows design and manufacturing teams to make informed decisions based upon direct results and performances.

At the last level of sophistication, digital twins use predictions of component failure rates or performance variations to react to changing environments and manipulate the real-world counterpart in a closed-loop setup. This approach might be used in a condition monitoring system, for example, where sensor data and simulations are combined to make inferences and predictions about the state and behavior of a specific product, and might allow a machine to compensate for wear or variations in operating conditions by adjusting parameters in real time.

Companies in other sectors are also starting to use digital twins to derive deeper insights into customer behaviors and preferences . For example, white-goods manufacturers can use data from in-service products to identify the most and least used features. That can inform future product development decisions, such as deleting rarely used features or revising the user interface to make the features more accessible.

The adoption of digital twins is currently gaining momentum across industries, as companies aim to reap the benefits of various types of digital twins. Given the many different shapes and forms of digital twins (see sidebar, “Digital twins in three dimensions”), and the different starting points of each organization, a clear strategy is needed to help prioritize where to focus digital-twin development and what steps to take to capture the most value.

How to start and succeed on your digital-twin journey

Embarking on a digital-twin journey can look daunting at first sight, especially since the breadth and depth of use cases can span the entire corporate landscape, including product portfolio choices, business model design, R&D, manufacturing, and through-life support.

This versatility can also be a strength, however, as it allows companies to start small and expand the scope, sophistication, and value-chain coverage of their digital-twin projects over time. The experience of companies that have applied digital twins in their own product operations leads to a few simple rules that can greatly increase your odds of success.

Define your aspirations

Be aware of digital-twin best practices. Do your homework and seek out perspectives on best practices and future trends in digital-twin technology. Assess and prioritize the elements of your vision. Evaluate the potential of digital-twin-related opportunities and prioritize them into an implementation road map.

Be clear about the business case. Quantify the value offered by different digital-twin opportunities and determine the minimum level of model sophistication required to generate that value. Successful projects focus on short development times and rapid ROI.

Test the waters by prototyping select use cases. Run a series of hackathons (possibly supported by digital-twin specialists) to assess your capabilities’ baseline, develop solution prototypes, refine, and adjust the initial concepts. This step calibrates the approach and prevents you from losing time and resources by attempting an impossible plan. It is part of a broader value assurance move aimed at bringing the entire project to a successful conclusion.

Know your strengths

Perform a maturity assessment. Understand your current digital product development capabilities along six main dimensions: development methodologies, PLM governance, data strategy, business processes, system complexity, and collaboration. Understanding the areas where you are most advanced and where you are lagging behind will help prioritize areas of investment for a balanced implementation of a digital twin and its use cases.

Access to appropriate talent and capabilities can make or break a digital-twin initiative. Many organizations need to develop additional expertise in areas such as advanced simulation and modeling or data analytics for user experience design.

Plan a step-by-step, agile implementation

Invest several months in developing a minimum viable product (MVP). Incubate a cross-functional, agile team dedicated to bringing priority use cases to life and building digital capabilities in the process. The MVP is now the must-do approach to maximize value gains from the start rather than waiting until the program is finalized before experiencing the first benefits.

Perform an MVP retrospective to pivot or persevere. Derive lessons from the first MVP phase to confirm your digital-twin aspirations or pivot them based on the findings (for example, the validity of use cases, complexity of implementation, and maturity of the organization). This is the second value assurance move that enables you to further calibrate the implementation plan and revise the scope to avoid generating sunk costs.

Scale up the digital-twin initiative and accelerate ROI. Optimize and standardize implementation based on insights from the MVP phase. Define an (internal or external) recruiting and capability-building strategy. Build an operating model to enable rapid scaling of successful approaches. The most advanced organizations typically consider digital-twin technologies a core strategic capability.

By following these simple best practices, you will be able to reap the benefits of digital twins in a scalable, progressive way. Are you ready?

Mickael Brossard is a partner in McKinsey’s Paris office, where Sebastien Chaigne is an associate partner; Jacomo Corbo is a partner in the London office; Bernhard Mühlreiter is a partner in the Vienna office; and Jan Paul Stein is an associate partner in the Munich office.

The authors wish to thank Roberto Argolini, Elia Berteletti, Kimberly Borden, Akshay Desai, Hannes Erntell, Alessandro Faure Ragani, Anna Herlt, Mark Huntington, Mithun Kamat, Michele Manzo, and Alessandro Mattozzi for their contributions to this article.

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Young users suffer harassment and hate crime on Metaverse

Search the website, majority of young users suffers from harassment and hate crime on metaverse - research.

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Study into the dangers facing children in the virtual worlds found most had been asked to send an image

The latest research into the threats and benefits of the Metaverse for children shows that the majority of young users have experienced harassment, hate speech or exposure to harmful adult content.

The Virtual Reality Risks Against Children (VIRRAC) research project is led by criminology and psychology researchers from Middlesex University’s Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies (CATS) and from the Institute of Connected Communities at the University of East London.

Academics, working with the charity Childnet, spoke with young people aged 13-18 about their experiences in the Metaverse and found that they believed the greatest risks they could face were ‘grooming’ and ‘doxing’, which involves the malicious act of revealing someone’s identity online.

Most of the young people revealed they had been asked to send an image and reported another user.

Key findings include:

• The study raised issues about virtual assault incidents and the possible impact on childhood development in relation to cognitive effects of VR use, neuroplasticity, and even potential physical harm from prolonged VR headset use. Experts voiced concern about specific vulnerabilities among children with special needs and those on the neurodiverse spectrum, which includes autism, and requirements for closer caregiver attention.
• Addressing age verification, parental involvement and understanding and safety protocols is crucial to safeguarding children in the Metaverse, with young people calling for safety tech improvements. There was frustration at the lack of avenues for reporting indecent behaviours across Metaverse platforms.

Co-leads, Professor of Criminology at the University of East London, Julia Davidson, OBE, and Dr Elena Martellozzo, Professor in Criminology at Middlesex University, have presented the findings to industry, including representatives from Ofcom, Meta, the Metropolitan Police and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport recently.

Researchers are working alongside tech company Kabuni whose Co-Founder Nina Jane Patel made headlines last year when she said she had been sexually harassed and assaulted by three male avatars in the Metaverse.

Speaking at the industry event, Nina Patel, a psychotherapist and Head of Metaverse Research at Kabuni, said: “The abuse and harassment was very shocking in this new very social, virtual and fun environment that is being advertised as a place to spend time with your friends and family. I’m a parent and what if it had been one of my children who experienced that abuse? Is this the type of behaviour that we want as the first experience that a child has in a 3D virtual space? We’re getting this very wrong.

“Let’s be very clear about the metaverse, the amount of money being invested in these technologies is significant – in one year alone it has exceeded trillions of dollars, this is the new frontier for technology companies. We cannot look the other way as this technology is being developed and put into the hands of children on a daily basis with no recognition of the potential harms that it is unlocking for them.”

Prof Martellozzo said: “In our research, we have identified that online harms in immersive environments can impact victims greatly. Besides emphasising the positive aspects, our young participants described concerns such as gender-based violence and increased physical vulnerability. As technology develops, the immersive experience in VR can make virtual assaults feel real.”

Professor Davidson commented: “The studies unanimously recognised the need for more guidance, awareness, support and platform online safety features to keep young users safe from harm in the Metaverse.”

Experienced researchers from criminology and psychology, Dr Ruby Farr, Paula Bradbury and Boglarka Meggyesfalvi are working on the pilot study and consulting with tech-industry and practice-policy panels.

Young people also reported enjoying various activities in the Metaverse such as building new cities, exposure to entrepreneurialism, exploring new worlds, dressing up in VR​ avatars, along with the opportunity to become someone new.

The project has been funded by the UK Research and Innovation REPHRAIN Fund.

A series of educational videos for young people have been produced and are available to view .

The academics have also produced safety tool kits for tech providers, practitioners and young people and their final report is due to be made public in the coming months.

Find out more about the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies.

• 26 April 2024

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Bringing the latest capabilities to Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers

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With Microsoft Copilot, we are bringing the power of generative AI to everyone across work and life. And with Copilot for Microsoft 365, we are committed to making sure our commercial customers have access to the very best generative AI models and capabilities from Microsoft.

Today we are announcing two important updates for users of Copilot for Microsoft 365 . First, we are bringing priority access to the GPT-4 Turbo model to work with both web and work data. We will also be removing limits on the number and length of conversations while increasing file uploads. Second, later this month we are bringing expanded image generation capabilities in Microsoft Designer to users of Copilot for Microsoft 365, including priority access during peak times.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

Discover Copilot features that work alongside you

Priority access to GPT-4 Turbo and unlimited conversations

Starting today, all licensed commercial customers will have priority access to GPT-4 Turbo in Copilot for Microsoft 365. As part of this change, we are removing the limits on the total number of chats per day and the number of turns per conversation, along with additional updates.

Together, these changes mean that customers will receive faster, more comprehensive responses whether they are using Copilot in the web context or in the work context.

In the web context, Copilot users get the power of the latest foundation models grounded in the latest public information from the web. The web context includes commercial data protection , meaning Microsoft doesn’t retain your prompts or responses, doesn’t have eyes on your prompts or responses, and doesn’t use your chat data to train the underlying foundation models—ensuring a more secure alternative to using other public generative AI services.

The work context lets you go even further by grounding in your work data––that’s your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, contacts, and more––so you get contextually accurate responses. Copilot can help you quickly scan your email for important messages to prioritize, help you get ready for key meetings by pulling information from across your work, and help you ideate on the best path forward. The work context also benefits from enterprise-grade data protection, going further to ensure that your data remains within the Microsoft 365 service boundary.

Expanded image generation capabilities in Microsoft Designer

Starting next month, we’ll increase the number of image generation boosts per day from 15 to 100. Powered by the DALL-E 3 model, Microsoft Designer image generation allows users to create custom images from text descriptions, transforming written ideas into visual art. Users will be able to initiate up to 100 rapid image generation requests daily, significantly reducing waiting times for image creation and unlocking new productivity.

Harnessing the full power of Copilot

We are learning alongside our customers that AI is so much more than a new technology. It is a new way of work that gives organizations the opportunity to completely reinvent their business—rewiring everything from core processes and workflows to hiring and training the workforce of the future.

These new capabilities will be initially available in copilot.microsoft.com , followed by the Copilot mobile app , in Windows, and in Edge, as well as the places where users can access the work context directly, like in Microsoft 365 . Additional details about these changes are available on the Copilot for Microsoft 365 documentation page .

Learn more about  Microsoft Copilot  and visit the  Copilot for work  site for actionable guidance on how you can start transforming work with Copilot today. For the latest research insights on the future of work and generative AI, visit WorkLab .

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