Jacob Loewenstein on Spatial and the Metaverse for Culture | Unreleased NFTS.WTF Interview

Previously unreleased: this interview is published here for the first time.Jacob Loewenstein, head of growth at Spatial, on building "the metaverse for culture": art exhibitions, fashion shows, and concerts anyone can open with a click on web, mobile, or VR.Interviewed by David Cash. Book David to host, moderate, or speak: https://davidcash.ca

Recorded live in April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, Jacob talks with David Cash about how Spatial went from an augmented reality collaboration tool to a home for NFT galleries once artists started building there on their own. He tells the story of Krista Kim's Mars House arriving on Spatial, why Spatial stopped waiting on headsets and focused on web and mobile, and how it mixes Web2 product habits with Web3 ownership. They discuss onboarding, creators who teach other creators, why Spatial chose not to sell land, interoperability and avoiding ecosystem lock-in, a transparent roadmap borrowed from DAOs, lessons from GeoCities, and the technical work of making 3D render well on any device. The conversation closes on avatars, standard file formats, what high fashion needs from the metaverse, and Jacob's prediction that young people will own large digital closets.

Watch on YouTube

Chapters

1. 00:00 Intro: Jacob Loewenstein of Spatial
2. 0:40 Spatial, the metaverse for culture
3. 1:50 Krista Kim and Mars House as a first touchpoint
4. 2:20 A Web2 company that is fully NFT compatible
5. 3:08 From AR collaboration tool to consumer platform
6. 4:19 VR, then web and mobile: meeting users where they are
7. 5:06 Artists start building galleries on their own
8. 5:42 Krista Kim's Mars House: the aha moment
9. 7:03 MetaMask, Web2 DNA, and Web3 ownership
10. 8:21 A metaverse that works on your phone
11. 9:37 Designing for first-timers and autoplay tours
12. 11:19 Onboarding without full decentralization
13. 12:15 Listening to the Web3 community first
14. 13:33 Creators who onboard other creators
15. 14:26 Treat your community with love
16. 15:00 Why Spatial doesn't sell land
17. 16:31 The open metaverse and interoperability
18. 18:24 Avoiding lock-in, and the token question
19. 19:29 Borrowing a transparent roadmap from DAOs
20. 21:01 Lessons from GeoCities
21. 22:21 Experimental but ruthless
22. 23:28 Unity, WebGL, and cloud rendering
23. 25:09 Designing for different devices and bandwidth
24. 26:31 Betting on the web browser
25. 27:23 Making the experience great today
26. 28:26 Identity and avatars in the metaverse
27. 30:10 PFPs, scarce identity, and 3D avatars
28. 31:23 Standard avatar models and file formats
29. 32:34 What high fashion needs from the metaverse
30. 33:57 Prediction: bigger digital closets
31. 34:37 Takeaways: listen and stay open
32. 35:46 Where to find Spatial

Speakers

• David Cash, interviewer and editor-in-chief, NFTS.WTF
• Jacob Loewenstein, head of growth, Spatial

Key topics

• Spatial and the metaverse for culture
• Virtual art galleries and NFT exhibitions
• Krista Kim's Mars House
• Accessibility on web, mobile, and VR
• Web2 product design meets Web3 ownership
• Community-led onboarding
• Business models without land sales
• Interoperability and the open metaverse
• Transparent roadmaps and building in public
• Browser 3D, Unity, and cloud rendering
• Avatars, Ready Player Me, and VRM
• Digital fashion and digital closets

In their words

"Once we met people where they were, they started telling us how they wanted to use the metaverse." Jacob Loewenstein

"We're experimental, but we're also ruthless." Jacob Loewenstein

How to cite

APA: Cash, D. (2022). Jacob Loewenstein on Spatial and the metaverse for culture [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/fKU6fk0HiDE

Chicago: Cash, David. "Jacob Loewenstein on Spatial and the Metaverse for Culture." Recorded April 2022, Lisbon. YouTube video, 36:11. https://youtu.be/fKU6fk0HiDE.

About NFTS.WTF

NFTS.WTF was a Web3 culture publication and interview series edited by David Cash. It covered artists, collectors, and builders during the 2021–2022 NFT boom. It ran for two years and closed after a board decision by the NFTS DAO, which left many of its interviews unpublished.

Recording details

Recorded April 2022 at NFC Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal. Previously unreleased. Published 2026 with chapters and captions.

Transcript

Machine-transcribed and reviewed. Timestamps link to the moment in the video.

[0:04] Hello, everybody. Welcome back to NFTS.WTF. My name is David Cash, editor-in-chief. And we're here at Non-Fungible Conference Lisbon. Really excited to be here. And we're joined today by one of my favorite people, Jacob Loewenstein, who's going to do Spatial. Hello. I don't know your exact title. What is it? Business VP of... Head of Growth, head of whatever you want. It's fine. Yeah. They're growing. I just love to do cool stuff with you. Well, Spatial's doing really cool things. They're one of the top metaverse platforms right now active in space. And so many cool activations are coming out and a lot to talk about, a lot of new developments. But just to take a step back, I'll let Jacob introduce himself and tell you a little bit about what he does at Spatial. Absolutely. So, hey, y'all out there in the world, in the real-verse, I guess, not in the metaverse right now. But so we're Spatial.

[0:47] We like to think of ourselves as the metaverse for culture, right? So the most beautiful and accessible way to create and share experiences in the metaverse. So it could be anything from an incredible art exhibition to a fashion show to a concert. And you could just create it super easily so you don't have to be an expert or developer to know how to build it. And you could share it and anyone can access it with just a click on web, on mobile and in VR. So we've been around for five years, not degenerationally, but basically turned out last year, all of our users became these incredible artists and creators. And so we made the switch. And so now my job is just the honor and privilege of working with incredible creators all the time to just help them create these beautiful experiences to share with the world. And that's how you and I met, thankfully, because it behooves me to find people with incredible taste that just know everything about this Web3 Space.

[1:39] And if I could sum you up in one short little blurb, beautiful taste knows everything about the Web3 Space. I'm flattered. No, but really, I appreciate you and everything that Spatial does. And it's interesting because I feel like most people's touchpoint to Spatial is some specific project that's usually really personal to them, because I first came across Spatial through Krista Kim, who's part of our DAO as well, Krista Kim and Mars House, which I think is one of the biggest NFT projects that was launched on Spatial, at least initially, and really helped allow other NFT artists to realize what was possible. And I mean, obviously, we have a lot of conversations, especially in WTF about the idea of the open metaverse, what that means, how we can be more interoperable, how we can be more cross-chain, all these ideas. But I think one thing that's worth mentioning is Spatial is technically a Web2

[2:25] company, in terms of it's hosted online. I can't believe you just said that. I classify you in this font category of mine, which I call CDFI, centralized decentralized finance, because Spatial is 100% NFT compatible. You can still, same as decentralized, click through on an image and go to where you can buy that image as an NFT, which I think is super important. And any metaverse solution, in any sense of that word, or that term, operating right now, I feel like that's a necessity. I think you guys do a great job of it. So you want to maybe mention, obviously you guys have been around for, let's say, longer than the NFT space has been booming, quite a while longer. And yeah, I would love to talk about when that shift was, like when you made the decision to actually make NFTs accessible on Spatial. It was a really interesting exercise. So when Spatial was founded, right, like we were essentially a collaboration

[3:12] platform. So our mission was how do we enable people to work better together from anywhere in the world, quite different from where we are now. And you know, what we learned very, very quickly in that mission was that despite the fact that we were so passionate about virtual reality and augmented reality, it just wasn't accessible. Like the truth is, is that very... What year was that? So we, Spatial was founded in 2016, really got building in earnest in 2017, and then the alpha came out on augmented reality headsets in 2018. And so we had this like big viral video, we got like a ton of coverage, and then we ended up on stage with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, for the launch of the Microsoft HoloLens 2. It was an incredibly cool time, but the Microsoft HoloLens 2, amazing device, but it, you know, it costs thousands of dollars. So like for your... I feel like that was also like mixed reality's false start.

[4:00] Yes. It was very hyped in the tech industry, but there was not a lot of follow through, at least on the consumer side. Not on the consumer side. Like in enterprise, things were taking off. Lots of investment, but like really focused on training these sort of like very nitty-gritty industrial applications. And on the consumer side, it was really, nothing was happening. And then... Saying not consumer friendly is an understatement. Yeah, very much so. Now, I will say, one thing that started to happen was that VR started to take off more than we expected. So Meta, you know, they came out with the Quest 1 and then the Quest 2, and they actually sold in like pretty serious numbers. So our initial move to something a little bit more consumer facing started with Meta. We went on VR. We saw really, really great growth. You know, people weren't visualizing things in the real world, but they were jumping into virtual spaces. But the real aha moment came when we launched on web

[4:47] and mobile. And that was when we sort of finally said, you know what? We're going to stop resisting this and stop wishing that headsets were a real thing. And we're just going to focus where like users actually are, which is on web and mobile. And when we did that, something really interesting happened, which is like once we met people where they were, they started telling us how they wanted to use the Metaverse instead of the other way around. And instead of it being training or, you know, replacing conference calls or things like that, it was Federico Clappis, amazing, amazing 3D sculpture artist, discovered us and like made an atelier without even talking to us. He's just a creative guy. And we saw it on Twitter and we're like, what is this? Like this is such a weird use case of Spatial. And then like it started to just like waterfall. So Harlan Perez, amazing 3D artist. He created the artifact Clone Pod.

[5:34] He's a 3D designer behind it. He was like next in line and created a gallery that he started to like rent out to people. And we're like, okay, this is really interesting. Something's happening here. And I would say the ultimate aha moment was probably Krista. So like Krista Kim really put her faith in us at a time when like objectively we probably didn't deserve it. Like we had not really done very much in the NFT space. She's a visionary. She really was. And like so I met her and I said, hey, like Mars House is pretty incredible, but I can imagine that your collector might feel a little bit frustrated that like what they own is this immersive space, but they can't actually embody it. Like they're blocked out of, you know. Are they going to experience it? They can't experience it. And so Krista sort of saw what I was talking about and she's just like let's do it and like shout out to her.

[6:20] She was like willing to go along for the ride. And one of the features we had at that time in Spatial was that you could just upload any 3D model and set it as an environment. So we already kind of had the functionality. And then all of a sudden she went along for the ride with us and we did it and we had this just amazing moment where she brought Mars House in and the collector and all of her fans were just like holy crap. Like I can't believe, now we really understand like you saw the video, you know, you saw it at auction, but to actually be inside it is just like a transformative moment. And that was I think the moment we really like finally woke up and we said, okay, like experiencing art in this way is like this is finally the use case for the metaverse. Like this is really a use case where people want to go above and beyond what they can experience just on like a 2D website. And we were hooked. And so that was like spring of last year.

[7:06] We worked really, really hard over a couple of months, launched MetaMask integration, starting with ETH support because that's, you know, where the market was. And, you know, you mentioned this like meeting of Web 2 and Web 3. It's super interesting because it's like, I mean, we mint NFTs and partnerships with creators as well. Everything is stored on chain. Like we bring everything in from the blockchain. But as you said, like to facilitate a really good user experience, you still need to bring some Web 2 DNA to the table because like otherwise it would just be a bad user experience. Like things would take a long time to load. Like the visual fidelity would be bad. Customer support. It doesn't support. So we really, I'd say the Web 2 DNA in us is like put the user first and make things beautiful and just insanely easy to use. And then the Web 3 part is make sure that everyone has ownership of it and make

[7:56] sure you really go community first and reward people for helping build the product from the ground up instead of just being, you know, I feel like old, you know, products like, oh, I was one of the first Facebook users. Like who cares, you know? Okay, you referred people, great. But it's like if you bought into Spatial's like Genesis collection, it's like we're giving you pro for free. We're putting you on the reserve list for upcoming drops. Like we're making sure that you're rewarded for buying in early. And I think that's like a very core tenet to being a Web 3 company. There's so many things I want to touch on but I think a really cool thing that you guys have done, maybe to redefine what I said before, but it's the same sentiment I think maybe I just contextualized it wrong. I think that you're a great use case or example of a Web 2 company that's crushing it at Web 3, if that makes sense.

[8:35] Because inherently and from its roots, you know, you guys come from tech. And also the fact that you guys are accessible initially via computer and mobile. I think that's so important. And, you know, honestly, as a metaverse consumer, let's say, as somebody who, you know, spent a lot of time in Decentraland, et cetera, I remember the first time I came across Spatial, I came across it on the web browser, so that was very native for me. When I heard about the iPhone app, I was like, I don't want to view a metaverse on my phone until I tried it and then realized, wow, this is such an amazing user experience and incredibly accessible to a point that there's no other solution that does that exactly the same way from my perspective. I mean, we forget how much time we spend on our phones and the majority of our time. And so, like, yes, the nirvana is we want, you know, this big expansive way to experience the metaverse. But, like, convenience rules everything around me.

[9:20] It really is the other cream, but it's like... And you need to do it right now. Are you going to set up your whole VR headset or are you just going to go click? Click. And that's what it is. And it's actually surprising, like, how beautiful of an experience you could have. I mean, there is this, like, it's not suspension of disbelief, but it's like... But the UI UX is also really good. Like, it's quite easy to move around. That's shout out to our head of design, Peter, and our head of product, Jin Ha. Like, they have just incredible DNA. Like, Peter was a lead designer at Uber and at Google. Jin Ha was a lead designer at Samsung. And they just, like, the... What we basically said is, like, the metaverse needs to be something that someone who has literally zero experience in this could even, like, accidentally use productively without knowing what they're doing, right? And so, actually, like, a new feature that's launching, I think, like, this week is

[10:04] autoplay, which is pretty cool. So, like, one of the pieces of feedback we learned from users is, like, I was talking to someone, like, this, like... I'm not going to say a name, but, like, a prominent person in Hollywood in L.A., and he's like, Spatial is amazing, but I just, like, I don't know. Do I click around? Like, what do I do? And I was like, that's really interesting. Because on the one hand, like, you're at the cutting edge of this in terms of, like, creating ways of experiencing top-end IP. But even for you, this is still a little bit of bridge too far. You don't know how to run it necessarily. Exactly. And so what we're... So you mean, like, it's just a slow kind of pan when you... Well, so now it's basically going to be, like, you set, like, waypoints of, like, here's the perspective that I want you to experience, like, each part of this, you know, this exhibition in, and it will either just, like, auto-take you

[10:42] through it or you just click, like, next, next, next, next. And so people know that, right? It's, like, it's basically like, you know, Instagram, Tinder. It's, like, people are used to swiping or that type of, like, next user experience. So, again, it's, like, the carousel. And so we're just trying to take what people, meet them where they already are, and then, like, once they're there, you can bring them on to the new paradigm. You could say, yeah, now you're going to learn, like, zooming in and zooming out. You can always skip tutorials. Exactly. But, like, you know, for a lot of people, they're not ready for that yet. And so you have to, like, the gamers and the degens, like, it has to be easy enough that they could skip the tutorial, but for people that don't, they should, you know, benefit from it and actually want to go through it because it's going to lead them to have a better experience.

[11:19] And so just for more context for the people watching as well, you know, most of our consumers, they're degen. They're Web3 people. They're super hardcore. And I think one thing really important to mention, you know, just to come back to that, like, CD-Fi element. You know, when we're working in Web3 and when we're building in Web3, especially when we're creating a consumer-facing product, that we want to be mass market. We want to be accessible to mass market. It's, from my perspective, currently impossible to do so in a 100% decentralized way and still have satisfied customers. Because it's what you're talking about. It's the onboarding. It's the first aspect of the user experience, which you guys do a great job of and also make your team and, you know, resources as accessible as possible. So maybe you want to speak on that. I mean, I'm sure there's some people watching who either come from a tech

[11:57] background or might be living and operating in the Web3 space themselves, but maybe their business doesn't. And I think, you know, Spatial is a great example of, you know, as I said, somebody who did that shift successfully and is now, like, welcomed in the space. So what do you think? Like, how do you start that onboarding for an audience that already exists, you know, in a previous environment? I mean, I think that honestly, like, a lot of it is, I think we set up these barriers of, like, there's the dGen community and the not dGen community. And I think from a very early point in our process of evolution, we said, like, we want all these people to connect and talk to each other because they have a lot to learn from each other. And so I think that, like, putting aside sort of, like, the tutorials and some of the stuff we already talked about, I think number one was just, like, interviewing and listening to users and understanding, like, what their

[12:42] respective needs are. So first we talked to the dGen community because we knew that, like, the dGen community needed to be the shepherds. Like, if, you know, regular people are going to come in and believe in this, it's the dGen community that's going to sell it and say, like, here's why this is important. And so we really wanted to make sure they were happy first because that's like... Champions of the metaverse have to champion your metaverse. Exactly. And so, and that's why, like, it started off, we're like, okay, we're going to integrate what wallet? Okay, MetaMask? Sure. Like, what, you know, you want this... Which wallet has the most users? Which wallet doesn't mean, okay, you want, you know, Ethereum above all else? Okay, like, what should this process look like? Like, oh, if you bring in your NFT, like, should it persist? Should it not persist? And, like, really dig into, like, figuring out the right

[13:19] balance between decentralization and serving them. And then I think, like, once they started coming onto the platform, it was like now we had our base community that could evangelize but also start to help onboard new people. So this is, like, really fascinating. So in the Polygon community, for example, CreativeOwl is this incredible community organizer, artist, who discovered Spatial, and, like, that was, like, one person we listened to very early on where we're like, Owl, like, what is it that you need to, like, make your community happy and facilitate these types of community meetups? But now Owl is, like, making better videos than we've ever made about how to use Spatial, better documentation, because, like, it's kind of like we empowered them and now they're empowered to bring on other users. So that's, like, one, like, really, really interesting example. Like, another is Tyrone Webb, this, like, really dope, amazing artist, spray-paint

[14:08] artist, sold, like, his first NFTs ever by, like, setting up a gallery in Spatial, and then next thing we knew, like, Tyrone was setting up, like, weekly Twitter spaces and stuff, teaching other people to do it, just to, like, pay it forward, because he was like, oh, well, I want to help other people sell. Exactly. And so community, like, really is everything, and when I say that, I don't mean, like, I don't mean it, sometimes people think it's, like, oh, it's about, like, Play to Earn or these other things. No, it's just about, like, if you genuinely, like, give your all to, like, make the thing you're building, like, helpful to people, they will give it in return. Like, you'll receive as much as you get, and so, like, if you treat your community like a product, I think they probably won't appreciate it, but if you just, like, treat them with love and appreciation for what they do, and they recognize that,

[14:54] like, and if you, if you align your incentives so that you only succeed when they do, and this is a really different and important thing about Spatial, like, again, no shade to people that sell land, but one of the issues that we see with land sales is that there can sometimes be, like, competing incentives where it's, like, I make money on the land sale, but now it's, right, and now it's, like, my hands off, and it's up to you to figure out how to develop, whereas our business model is, like, we don't, it's free to use Spatial, and the way we're setting up our business model most likely is we're probably not going to make any money unless you make money on Spatial. So unless, like, you sell, you mint, and you do well, and so we like that because it forces us to continue to listen to our user and optimize the platform to helping them in that way, versus we were worried if we did land sales, like, we'd probably

[15:38] make money in the short term, but then it might lead us to make decisions that are, like, more geared towards marketing for the land and less of, like, what I think our sweet spot is, which is, like, the user tooling, the shareability, and that stuff we're really good at. And I think that that, what you just spoke about, is what makes you guys more Web3 than even some on-chain solutions because, in essence, the basis of OpenSea, yes, decentralization, but also the idea of being open source, and if you have information, making that information accessible to others. Most definitely. Like, you know, help me help you very much, you know, or help you help me even more so, you know. If you can empower your community, they're going to be the biggest champions of your project, and you guys have exemplified that more than anybody because even just by giving things away for free, when you do have these NFT drops, which I

[16:20] would love to talk about in a kind of next segment, but when you do the NFT drops, you have an amazing response because you've given so much value to so many people. And you also touched on one other thing I want to bring into this point, you know, the idea of negating land sales. I think that's also a really interesting element because, you know, when we talk about open source, or the idea of an open metaverse, a lot of the time we're just talking about interoperability, but, you know, I work with Accentureland, I work with Sandbox, I think all these solutions are great, but I do also think that it's worth mentioning, you know, the dichotomy between the two options and what it looks like to have a metaverse that is limitless and that can be built upon piece by piece, and when you're considering, you know, more of this kind of omniverse solution, which most people are realistically looking at right now, nobody wants a single hierarchical,

[17:04] you know, like meta, we don't want them to own the whole space, unfortunately, you know, God bless, but yeah, I think that it's really important to consider what that looks like, and when we consider, you know, things that Krista talks about, you know, the idea of, you know, this is the metaverse, we can explore it and we can create it, we can do whatever we'd like, you know, solutions like yours allow that to happen on even a larger level. Absolutely. No limitations. None. And nothing gets locked in. I mean, that's like, so first off, like we love Decentraland, we love Sandbox, and I mean that genuinely, like we talk to them and we're having conversations about interoperability all the time. One thing I will say is that like, you know, Decentraland, Sandbox, Somnium, like everyone is down for interoperability and so I think that's just like a beautiful- And if we can all work together, it's actually going to happen soon.

[17:46] Absolutely. And there's like a beautiful wag me aspect of this that I think people really believe in, and so that's like very heartwarming. And I think like the technological limitations are solvable to enable true interoperability, right? Compared to all the other stuff you guys have just done, I mean, it's comfortably easy. Like a lot of it is just like if we could just like get everyone to abide by this like similar specs of like, okay, it's like this file type and size. Like honestly, you solved most of the interoperability right there because at this point, most of the metaverse platforms are all built using the same core technology. Like a lot of them are built on Unity or they're built using like- And so it's that part is not really, really hard. But I will say like, yes, like I think our main goal is we said from day one that like, there's web 2 stuff that's very tempting but that we're trying to resist,

[18:32] which is like the idea of lock-in, like ecosystem lock-in, where it's like, I think it's very Roblox. It's like, okay, I have to buy like Robux and then like, and I can only exchange it through Roblox and the stuff I can buy is only through this like centrally gated store. And I think like we don't want it to be that way. We want everything to be open where it's like, if you want to sell stuff on Spatial, you can. With Ethereum or crypto. With Ethereum or crypto. I mean, when token is a question we get all the time, the true answer is we don't know. But I think our answer is mostly like the same as everything, which is we would only launch a token if on day one of us launching it, we felt like it would actually make the experience more useful. So if we already had the marketplace- Not just give everybody any like for- Exactly. Like if we already had the marketplace and we already had the things you

[19:15] like on day one, you could go and buy stuff. We'd be like, okay, that's awesome. So I think that's how we see it is like, I think to your point, one of the things we're trying to do is we're not a DAO, but I think we're trying to learn from some of the best practices we're seeing in different parts of Web3. So like what I love about DAOs is I really love the transparency in the roadmap. And I think it's really amazing to sort of like be that transparent with your community about roadmap and just say, you know what? There are no secrets here. It's really just how well we execute and like let us know what you like and don't like. And so I think probably very likely you're going to see a good portion of our roadmap go fully transparent just so that our users can be like, okay, I know when avatars with legs are launching, cough, cough, April. Or like I know when these drops are happening or I know when token gating is

[19:59] launching, also cough, cough, April. But like if people can't plan for that, then it's really hard for people to build their livelihood on top of their platform because they're like people need to be able to plan three, six, nine, 12 weeks out. And I think a lot of centralized platforms have these habits of like not telling their community what's actually happening. So people are like, okay, I don't know what I'm going to do. Or an official email or something. Exactly. And I think that's another element I think of Web3 that you guys really embody which is building in public but also, I mean, yes, you ask for advice but also you take elements of the fact that you're taking reference points from doubts and bringing that into a company. I think a lot of companies can learn from that because there's almost this like us versus them mentality I feel like in the Web2 versus Web3 space and it shouldn't

[20:46] really be versus, it should be and. Like this inclusive mentality I think is very Web3 but at the same time it's also like that's how we can move forward together. As you were saying, the metaverse solutions coming and talking together is the only way that we can actually have interoperability, this thing that we've been talking about for so long. Totally. So it's really important. I don't get the, I don't really get any hostility one direction or the other, Web2 to Web3 or vice versa. It's like there's so much to learn in both directions. I think at the end of the day, like the most abstract goal is the same which is you're just trying to like do good by users and I think like you're just trying to understand what are the best tactics to do that and so like walling things, like yes, there's sort of these cultural movements but like the tactics don't need to be walled off. Like you could learn from Web1.

[21:30] I mean honestly like we sometimes look back at the playbook of GeoCities which I know like feels like dinosaur land but it's like. What was it, a million dollar listing where you could put all the little, there's so many things. But it was like GeoCities like back in the late 90s, mid to late 90s, it was like okay, they solved discovery like even beyond search engines, people went to GeoCities to discover really cool content. They created like an understandable paradigm for like what the purpose of the internet was by like framing it like a city. I mean all that stuff was really, really valuable and like I think in the internet, the memory we have is so short like we kind of think back maybe like four or five years and we forget that like a lot of this stuff has been tried before, maybe unsuccessfully but it's been tried and so I think it's. I.M.V.U. Yeah like. You know, real life, there's a million, yeah.

[22:13] Exactly and so it's like, I mean, and so it's just good to always keep an open mind and be experimental and I think like at Spatial, we try and find the balance between like we're experimental but we're also ruthless. So like we'll run an experiment but if it doesn't get traction within like a couple of weeks, we'll cut it and I think that's like, that's a good middle ground because it means that we still try new things like sometimes they don't work out. We launched this really dope product two years ago called Telly that was this like very cool FaceTime competitor. It was amazing, like it pushed us forward technologically. It did not get traction but like, now we are like way further forward than we ever would have been thinking about like UX for how people get into experiences really quickly and avatar design. So like, you know, I think people need to like stop, I think don't like, you know, prescribe onto yourself too rigid of an identity.

[23:03] I think like the opportunity of Web3 is more about breaking down those barriers of identity, more it is sealing yourself off in something new. Right. No, I think it's so cool and obviously I love what you guys are doing and I think one other thing that you touched on that I just want to mention for folks as well, you know, in the shift from Web2 to Web3, oh my god, I had such a good point and I just want to say exactly what I was going to say. It's all good, in the shift to Web2 to Web3. Oh, I remember. When we're talking about the shift from Web2 to Web3, one thing you touched on which I love is this idea of all getting on the same page but it goes beyond just, you know, all of us getting in a Zoom call and, you know, giving a thumbs up. It's like what you said. There are, while wanting to remain open, there are definitely technological limitations that have to be taken into account and the primary one is where is all

[23:45] this being built? And one thing I just want to mention because obviously this year is a big year with the next stage of Unity coming out, I think hopefully that will consolidate things for a lot of people and again, we don't want a monopoly but it would be amazing if even for a brief period of time, everybody was on the same tech just so we could all align. I think so. And I think that now that Unity is, I think, comparably, you know, getting to the same level if not higher than, you know, something like Unreal Engine, I think we're going to see so much happening with the next stage of Unity in terms of the metaverses like yours who want to be more realistic or more lifelike. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To exist in the same ecosystem as something like Decentraland. Absolutely. And by the way, like self-plug, like I gave a talk at NVIDIA's developer conference a couple weeks ago that gets into some of this like

[24:24] underlying tech but yeah, like, I mean, the fact that like Unity has like better and better support for WebGL is really important that you could build in a browser. The fact that like the limits of WebGL are getting pushed and so you have like WebGPU that's coming down the road, maybe like two years and you're going to be able to render far more robust graphics in a browser. We're not quite there yet but like the cost and availability of cloud rendering may be starting to come down, which, you know, you see... It's almost prohibitively expensive. It's, I mean, it's insane right now but it's like, you know, the base technology is there. You see companies like Google rolling out, you know, Stadia for gaming and so you're like, okay, maybe over the next... I would show you that it was like $3 per user or something like that. It's super expensive but like I do think that over probably the next two years

[25:02] you'll see the price come down and again, like, it starts to abstract away a lot of the limitations right now which are like... I mean, here's an example. Spatial, we're big in the U.S. but our two other locations where we're massive is in Thailand and in India and like in Thailand and India, like, the hardware that people are using is very different than the hardware people are using in the U.S. and so it's like you want to design a software product that's consumable all around the world but the constraints are very different and... You need to test it on those devices. You need to test it on those devices. You need to test it on the bandwidth that's available, right? And on the users. Exactly. And so like it, you know, once you start to have technologies like cloud rendering and things, it starts to abstract away some of these limitations. I mean, infrastructure is always going to be problematic.

[25:41] And make it more consistent. Yeah. Because right now it's not at all. Not at all. And that's tough because it's like, you know, we'll have some people that are able to render like the best graphics and then some people it really slows down. Oh, it's perfect. No problem. And then they try loading on some other device and it's... Exactly. So like that, those types of problem, I mean, it's fun to talk about the sexy stuff. It's fun to talk about, you know, clothing, avatars, this new feature, all these things but I'll say like in the trenches, just making it work well, like making it render the graphics beautifully. What about a unanimous user experience? I think it's almost impossible, but it's what everybody's kind of striving. Exactly. And again, you think about like Web 2, it's like I can feel with like a high degree of confidence that like most people are experiencing Instagram in largely the same way. That's not true of the 3D internet right now.

[26:23] Like there's insane variability. So like that's, that's what we're trying to really solve right now. And, you know, I think, I think we're making really good progress, but again, like I would say like our dogmatic belief is like, I don't think we started this way, but I think like, again, a Web 3 thing that like we've really started to adopt is like, yes, we have iOS and Android apps, but like, man, what we're building in a web browser, like the accessibility, just the one click access. It's like, I think we're really bullish on what you're able to do in a web browser. And that you would have never heard us say that at Spatial like five years ago, like five years ago, we're like, no, we're building on a $5,000 device. And now we're like, no, like this needs to load in mobile web in one second or else people won't use it. So I think like, you know, that is the new mantra we've adopted is like, yes, we do cool R&D, but we don't think Web 3 needs to be like

[27:09] this futuristic Ted talky, like sort of idea. We're here right now. People should be able to access us right now. And if they're not like able to, then I think like we got to fix something and do something different. Cause I just there, this could help so many more people than it is. Just tell me. Yeah. So my point was just that I think that like the opera, like we're seeing new creators get onboarded into the metaverse every day. And just the excitement that we feel knowing that there are all these creators out there that haven't been onboarded yet that can, but like their only requirement is that people can actually access the experience and have a really enriching experience. That's it. And so we just solved that problem. We make it super accessible. Well, we're going to hopefully be able to do for like this whole class of creators, whole community is going to be really profound. So that's why we're like, let's not wait to for whatever many years until the

[27:58] technology gets there. Like let's just be like really scrappy now and like just do whatever we can to make this experience dope today. And then it'll naturally grow and improve as better technology becomes available. So like as much as you want to be in like the dopest VR headset connected to the most powerful machine, I'm telling you, you'll be surprised by like how amazing an experience can be just in a web browser, very simple avatar, beautiful graphics, and then loading into our main Unity client. It really is powerful. So considering all of this and the way that you guys treat your community, because again, another really web 3 element of Spatial obviously is the immediacy that you interact with your community. You know, there is a very, you know, every day there's some form of interaction, whether that's email or socials or something, it's very direct. And I feel like people know that they can come and ask questions.

[28:46] There isn't the disconnect. Like I said, building in public all these kinds of ideas. And I think that, as you've mentioned, that has resulted in a lot of, you know what people want, you know what people want next, and you know where their mind's at. So considering those things, you know, kind of looking at the cultural zeitgeist that we're in right now and what people are thinking about when they're thinking about the metaverse, I think it's going, it's obviously going beyond space, right? Obviously we've been thinking about the idea of exploring the metaverse now for the past, you know, since the meta announcement, really on a wide, wide scale, us for a while longer, but still conceptually, you know, this idea of exploring the metaverse I think is there now. At least if you're not exploring it, you're wondering what it is. So at least that's there. But now we're kind of going further. We're considering, okay, obviously anything can happen, so what does that mean?

[29:24] How do we perpetuate our identity in the metaverse? What does that look like? How do we, you know, show off our avatars? So two things I want to talk about with that. And again, if we can cut something out, this is obviously prerecorded, but avatar integration, because I'm super, super excited about the Ready Player Me thing. I don't know how much you can talk about that yet. If you want to cut that out, that's fine. No, it's all good. Okay, so I'm super, super excited about the Ready Player Me integration. And then obviously also with that, how virtual fashion is going to integrate into Spatial and really, I think, make your ecosystem even more 360 than it currently is. So would love to hear your thoughts. Obviously, I think some things are not released yet. It's all good. You can't say everything. You know, I'll say that like we love Ready Player Me, their terrific partner we've explored with

[30:02] and that we are launching avatars with legs and their avatars happen to have legs, like maybe read a little bit between the lines, but we're not properly prepared for any announcements. But I think it's all, so, you know, last year, like two things became really obvious to us, which is like one, like with the boom of like PFPs, people are really interested in owning like a scarce identity that feels uniquely them, that they can express in the metaverse. And then that extends beyond PFPs into sort of like new categories of things like fashion. And so you end up talking about avatars and you end up talking about fashion. On the avatar side, I think everyone's nirvana is like, man, I wish I could just like buy a PFP and then just like have a 3D avatar. Really technically hard problem. And like anyone who's trying to do it right now, the results I've seen are I'm like, yeesh. So I think like, you know, Ready Player Me actually, for instance, did

[30:51] like a cool solution with the punks, which is like, they sort of did like a punky body and then the punky is just displayed on like a screen for a head. I think like things like that are cool, sort of like practical ways to get around it. And you're seeing more and more like PFP projects put on the roadmap, like the creation of a custom 3D file so that like that's part of the roadmap and the value you get. Now, if we get that, we are trying to move towards like standardized, like avatar models, you know, where, you know, the neck is standardized, the skeleton is standardized. And this is like one of those things where it's like the standard needs to be widely adopted. There's a file format VRM, which, you know, I think was widely popularized in VRChat, largely for use of like, you know, like hyper-sexualized anime characters and like furries and stuff like that.

[31:39] So I think it has like a weird stigma, but technically it's actually just like a very good file format. And so I think like the hope is probably just that like some file format like that gets widely adopted and then that plus whatever avatar solution we're rolling out is gonna, I mean, I think phase one of what you're gonna see from us is we're gonna partner with some creators and communities to like more hold hands and like launch their avatars in their clothing so that their community can come to Spatial and access it on a token-gated basis. But then I think probably like the later phase two is really we want anyone to just be able to upload, you know, whatever avatar or whatever clothing and wear it. It comes back to what we were talking about before though, which is you want the consistency of the experience across all devices. And the more customization you add, the harder it is to ensure a consistent

[32:23] experience, right? Like someone could put an avatar with an insane amount, you know, level of detail and that's gonna slow down the experience for all the other users. That's why specs have to be very specific. So there has to be like very specific specs. So there's gonna be push and pull and I think that's actually one of the things holding back a little bit of what I know like the high fashion industry wants to do in the metaverse because obviously like the idea of what clothing should look like, there's a very high bar for beauty. Like obviously there's people whose entire job... Precision, there's an entire job is not to even just create the garment but to think about like how the garment is displayed and in the metaverse, like a lot of those contingencies have not been taken into account yet, right? Like how cloth moves and how, you know, physics simulation and things like that. So I think, you know... And it's not perfect.

[33:06] Certain brands will just wait, I feel like. Exactly. And so I think like the more that brands get into digitally native fashion, it's cool. Like if they create a line that's specifically for the metaverse and they're willing for it to be like a little bit lower res, I think it's cool. But I think like... That's a great place to be right now, I feel like. For sure. But I think the idea, like some people are dreaming of like, oh, like, you know, this dress was shown, like Givenchy showed X and now someone wants to wear exactly that in the metaverse. We're not quite there yet because honestly the metaverse is just not able to achieve that level of precision, the level of fidelity you need to really represent the garment in the way it deserves. But we're on our way. Standardize the avatars, standardize the file formats, you know, make computing power more robustly available. And in a couple of years you're going to see people wearing just like stunning

[33:46] fashion in the metaverse. This isn't space age stuff. This is like we're in the decade now, like the way things are going to look coming out of this decade are going to be profoundly different in terms of the internet than they looked coming into it. And that's one of the areas where things are going to be wildly different and one of like my big predictions is I think particularly young people are going to own such larger closets, not just real closets, but digital closets and the habits that we form around how we like change our identity will have gone from like seasonal, fast fashion, you know, made it more rapid, so it was no longer seasonal. Now I'm talking about, you know, I don't know, daily, right? It's changing your outfit on the way to dinner. Exactly. Right now it's impractical, but if you could just do it on your phone. Exactly. I think the level of speed with which people are going to like swap and

[34:29] customize their identities is going to rapidly accelerate and we hope to be a big part of that. So we're excited. And there's no waste. It's all environmentally friendly. So, yeah. No, I mean, last thing I wanted to touch on, you know, as we're wrapping this up, you know, as you mentioned, we're here, right? We're able to build clothing at that level. We're just not able to display it to a lot of people yet in the metaverse. And that's a small limitation. It's a technical limitation that has to be worked on probably for another year or two or three, but we're almost there. I feel like we're just at the puzzle. And I think that, you know, is representative of a lot of what's going on right now. Obviously, you know, all of us are working at the bleeding edge here. And, you know, just to have a takeaway from you watching this, I feel like one thing that people should learn from Jacob and from Spatial language is I feel like

[35:10] a master class and one of the core tenets of Web3 is, you know, learning from people and really being receptive and open to taking advice and figuring out what that means. And if we can do that, and if you can continue doing that, you know, as you said, when you want to work in virtual fashion, you're going to talk to the virtual fashion brands. Absolutely. Real recognizes, really, you get what you want. There are no competitors. Be really open. You'll find that it just leads to a really positive feedback mechanism that helps you execute better. And I think, like, just embrace that. I love the iterative element to that, you know, process that you guys built. You know, if it works, amazing. If it doesn't work, next. No break. Boom. All gas. Done. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm going to give you a hug. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. One of my favorites. Love. Just for people watching, I mean, I'm sure they already

[35:49] know, but if you don't know where Spatial is, where can they find you guys online? Spatial.io. Super easy. That's how you can access us on web. Download us in the iOS and Android stores if you want the app. And if you have a metaQuest 2, get us in the app store. The VR experience is really cool. I will meet you in the metaverse anytime.