Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff

Perplexity allows you to ask questions and receive answers supported by citations from online sources: Wikipedia-meets-AI. I spoke with Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity.ai, the company behind it. They use a combination of GPT, good UI/UX and a lot of behind the-scenes magic to equip you with an artificial intelligence that can make you more informed, smarter--and maybe even more com...

Ali El Rhermoul and Jon Radoff's team at the a16z Tech Week AI/Virtual Worlds Hackathon won grand prize: it's a multiplayer online game featuring a persistent world, generative AI for storytelling (Anthropic Claude) and immersive environments (Blockade Labs, Scenario) and a client/server architecture using Beamable + Unity to create a persistent world using a new technique called "sem...

I spoke with Adam B. Levine, cofounder of Blockade Labs, the company responsible for the generative skybox AI that can create 3D skyboxes from text prompts or sketches. One of the best applications of this technology is created environments for use in game engines like Unity and Unreal. We explored some demos of what this can do covered, and discussed the future of games, creativity and technology...

Voice Synthesis is about to transform game development, virtual worlds and simulations of all kinds. I spoke with Zach Johnson, cofounder of LMNT, an AI voice synthesis company that uses the magic of prosody imitation to make voices that sound strikingly like the original speaker. We covered how these technologies work; demonstrated cases with David Attenborough and a flight simulator; discussed t...

One of the fastest growing areas of creative expression in games has been the emotes and animations you can apply to your character in games like Fortnite. Yassine Tahi saw this realm of self-expression coming, and created a platform that democratizes the creation of character animations. With Kinetix, individual creators can capture movement and make their avatar animations available through a ma...

Lovelace Studios is building Nyric, a world-generation platform that starts with a text prompt and brings entire worlds to life. I spoke with Kayla Comalli (co-founder and CEO) about how they're doing this. This is a great episode for anyone who is interested in learning how you can combine generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, Polyhive, Sloyd and Convai -- along with Unreal's Nanite an...

Linus Ekenstam is a long-time product leader, AI educator, and the creator of Bedtimestory.ai. Parents use Bedtimestory to create personalized stories for their children. We discussed how language models enable new types of products that deliver higher levels of personalization and new forms of narrative structure; his learnings from product leadership at companies such as Typeform. We also spent...

Generative AI is accelerating creativity: complicated creative tasks that once took hours can now take only a minute. My conversation with @bilawal spans the transformative impact of creative tools like Midjourney, Neural Radiance fields, ControlNet, Ebsynth, phone-based photogrammetry, and the potential to "reskin reality" as generative technologies fuse with augmented reality. We also...

Cameron Wills used ChatGPT to make a ChatGPT plugin for Unity, which became #1 in AI, and #2 overall on the Unity Asset Store. We talked about his experience as an indie game developer, his Unity asset for making games with ChatGPT, and the how generative AI is changing the craft of game-making for Indies.

Kris Kashtanova is an AI artist who published the world's first copyrighted AI-assisted comic book. Her journey with the US Copyright Office has been documented in the news. I spoke to her about her work as an artist and photographer, what she learned about copyrighting AI art, the safe community she is building--and some of her newer work around ControlNet and training her own models.

I spoke with Jussi Kemppainen about the future of game development, from the standpoint of a veteran game developer and VFX artist. Jussi has worked at game publishers including Rovio and Remedy. He's currently at Mainframe Industries, working on Pax Dei--a next-gen MMORPG with deep sandbox mechanics in the spirit of Eve Online. During our conversation we covered how to build graphics pipeline...

My conversation with Edward Saatchi (CEO, Fable Simulation) is about his vision for virtual beings: digital characters that not only have conversations, but act within virtual worlds: living, playing, creating and forming communities. We covered the birth of all the new art forms and media resulting from generative AI, agent AIs, conversational vs. action-oriented characters, the integration of vi...

Emmanuel de Maistre ("Emm") is leading Scenario, which is a platform for creating the art for games using generative AI. One of their unique approaches is to focus on helping developers build their own fine-tuned models based on their own art style--helping to establish aesthetic consistency. During this conversation we spoke about the future of the game industry (across many forms of ge...

Hilary is CEO of Hidden Door, a gaming startup that is using language models to create new types of play. Previously, Hilary was head of machine learning for Cloudera; the founder of independent research lab Fast Forward Labs; Chief Scientist of Bitly; and was a professor of computer science at Johnson & Wales. In this conversation, I spoke with Hilary Mason about how language models may chang...

Do you want to learn more about scaling customer acquisition for an online product? The lessons here will apply whether you are shipping a game, a metaverse experience or any type of mobile application.  Eric Seufert worked at legendary game publishers like Rovio, Wooga, and Digital Chocolate--where he literally wrote the book on Freemium Economics for games. Eric's concern for several years...

Three-way conversation between Jon Radoff and two amazing technology experts: Keith Adams was Chief Architect for Slack--the pervasive chat platform used by hundreds of millions of people every day (fun fact: did you know that Slack started as a game company?) Ali El Rhermoul works with Jon at Beamable, where Ali is CTO. We covered engineering philosophy, and new technologies like serverless and m...

Alexander Brazie has built a career working on the design of some of the largest online games: World of Warcraft and League of Legends. We start with the inspiring story of how Alexander landed a career in game design, starting as a teenage game developer. Along the way he's learned how to create amazing, engaging, sustainable game businesses--as well as how the business models to support them hav...

Avatars are a way for you project your identity into virtual space. In the metaverse, this will also mean the ability to transport your identity from place to place, or to take on different identities as your mood or the experience calls for. Along with that is the rise of digital fashion: both a new form of self-expression and a boon to the creator economy for artists and designers. Cathy Hackl a...

The metaverse is opening up a new range of opportunities for online jobs: one of these is in the realm of online performance. Emma (known online as "Swebliss") is a Twitch streamer and TikTok personality who has assembled an audience approaching a million people by streaming her gameplay and artistry. How did she do it, what are the opportunities in streaming, and how does one "break in" to this b...

Finn is the founder of VR, AR and video game production company Chicken Waffle (creator of VR games including Baby Hands and Shadow of Valhalla); co-founder of virtual music concert company The Wave XR; and VR-based comedy club Failed to Render. I caught up with Finn before he headed down to Art Basel Miami where he planned to show off some of his work in metaverse art.  This conversation cov...

Mitch Zamara is a veteran game designer who started in the free-to-play (F2P) mobile industry at Zynga and is now with Million on Mars, where he's designing an NFT-based game experience based on the colonization of Mars. The past year has seen enormous growth in the play-to-earn (P2E) segment of blockchain gaming. Since there's been plenty of coverage of games like Axie Infinity and NFT-based game...

This was one of the most fun conversations I've had on Building the Metaverse: I spoke with Lucas Wilson about music. Lucas Wilson is CEO of Supersphere, which produces immersive VR experiences for music. He's worked with major artists including Billy Eilish, Angels & Airwaves, Kid Cudi, Chance the Rapper, Steve Aoki, Major Lazer, Wiz Khalifa, Offset & Friends, Post Malone and Paul McCartn...

Diversity & Inclusion--making a more equitable future for everyone to contribute to the metaverse--is the focus of this conversation with Trinidad Hermida. She was the head of Diversity and Inclusion for Niantic, the creators of Pokemon Go. Trinidad is now running her own consulting firm that advises game and technology companies how to bring "equity through empathy" into their organizations....

Nicole Lazzaro is a neuroscientist, a leading expert on emotion in games, gamification, and augmented reality. In this episode Jon and Nicole discuss how we can apply the learnings from emotion in games (such as Nicole's "4 Keys 2 Fun" model) to the metaverse, as well as Nicole's work within augmented reality.

James Zhang is the CEO of Concept Art House, which recently sold a Frank Miller NFT for $840K and raised over $25M to expand their business. In this episode of Building the Metaverse, Jon and James talk about the creator economy for NFTs, dispel some common misconceptions, and review the opportunity for artists and collectors.