The DeanBeat: Get ready for an awesome GamesBeat Summit: Into the Metaverse 2 event

Join gaming leaders, alongside GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming, for their 2nd Annual GamesBeat & Facebook Gaming Summit | GamesBeat: Into the Metaverse 2 this upcoming January 25-27, 2022. Learn more about the event. 

Above: Dave Baszucki controls his avatar with his voice and head movements.

Image Credit: Roblox

The pace of change has thrown all of us off our feet. I also didn’t expect so many metaverse developments this year. It started in March with Roblox‘s $42 billion public offering and its rapid growth for its user-generated content platform, which now draws 49.4 million people every day. Dave Baszucki, CEO of Roblox, will speak at our event for a second time and articulate his company’s plan to make the world of Ready Player One a reality. Back in January 2020, he talked about all of the infrastructure and tools the company was building to bring that reality to life. Now Roblox is worth $55 billion, more than Electronic Arts or Activision Blizzard.

Above: Jason Rubin (right) of Facebook speaks with Dean Takahashi at Driving Game Growth.

Image Credit: VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg shook up the world of big tech as he announced Facebook would become a metaverse company and he changed the company’s name to Meta. That raised fears that Meta’s Oculus virtual reality and augmented reality tech could create a walled garden metaverse. But Zuckerberg said he supported the open metaverse and that it would not be built by a single company. He said Facebook was investing $10 billion a year in the metaverse, and his goal was to bring a billion people into the metaverse.

Jason Rubin, a longtime game developer and one of the leaders at Meta on that metaverse effort, will speak at the end of our first-day event. You can bet that the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and even Netflix — which is making games now — are watching closely and making their own investments. It’s like the race to build an atomic bomb in World War II. After all this investment, it should bear fruit.

Above: Varjo can make you see a real place virtually in real time.

Image Credit: Varjo

But while VR holds the crown as the most immersive metaverse experience, it will face competition from augmented reality glasses that you can carry with you on the move, as envisioned by Niantic. We’ll also hear from Varjo’s Urho Konttori, whose company in Helsinki is making high-end headsets and the Varjo Reality Cloud, where people can use the internet to visit the places their friends are seeing in VR.

Above: Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

We’ve seen so many visions of the metaverse, and the ambitions have skyrocketed so fast. When Nvidia started talking about the Omniverse in the fall of 2020, it described it as a “metaverse for engineers,” a place where engineers at places like BMW could simulate factories as “digital twins” before building them in real life. Nvidia standardized the 3D data format, invited thousands of enterprise creators to use it, and invested huge amounts in the project.

Above: Ericsson is testing 5G network signals in Omniverse.

Image Credit: Nvidia

Then, just a few weeks ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — who often says we are living in science fiction — talked about Nvidia’s ambition to use the Omniverse to build the Earth-2 simulation, which will use the world’s best supercomputers and AI visionaries to create a digital twin of the earth. I asked Huang about this. He said that if they succeed in building a digital twin of the Earth, we get the metaverse for free.

Above: Prologue is Brendan Greene’s next project.

Image Credit: PlayerUnknown Productions

The implications of that kind of investment are staggering for developers, who can start with a huge base of landscapes and other content as the baseline for their creations. Brendan Greene, another speaker and the creator of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, wants to build a planet-scale metaverse dubbed Artemis. He figured he would need a combination of human game design, user-generated content, and AI to build out the content for that world. But he could start with Nvidia’s Omniverse creations.

Above: A real Keanu Reeves walks into a simulated scene.

Image Credit: Epic Games

And Nvidia isn’t the only one offering this kind of free metaverse technology. Epic Games showed off its amazing The Matrix Awakens demo of a virtual city with highly realistic global illumination, realistic cars, 7,000 highly detailed buildings, and 35,000 MetaHumans that could be mistaken for real people. Kim Libreri, who helped create the famous “bullet time” scene from The Matrix so many years ago, spearheaded the creation of the demo for Epic’s upcoming Unreal Engine 5. Libreri, the chief technology officer of Epic Games, will speak at our event about the technology. And, by the way, Epic is going to give away that virtual city, which is bigger than downtown Los Angeles, to customers of Unreal Engine 5 next year.

Carrying on with the theme of The Matrix films — the latest of which The Matrix Resurrections is coming on December 22 — Riz Virk of MIT’s Gamelab will talk about the metaverse and the notion that we will be living in a simulation.

Above: Philip Rosedale, Adam Frisby (the bunny), and Dean Takahashi (right) talk in Breakroom.

Image Credit: Sine Wave

We will also have talks from veterans of the metaverse dreams like Philip Rosedale, CEO of High Fidelity and founder of Second Life, as well as Second Life’s current overseer Brad Oberwager. Raph Koster of Playable Worlds will talk about his vast experience with online games to talk about what works and doesn’t work. And Matthew Ball will bring his thoughtfulness about the metaverse to our audience once again.

That makes me think we’re going to see the metaverse a lot faster than then skeptics think. I hope we do, because the metaverse has stayed science fiction for too long. We’ll have a number of blockchain experts like John Burris of Together Labs talk about nonfungible tokens (NFTs), which would authenticate digital ownership and allow people to take their avatars from one game to another. NFTs — and the true believers who create them — could pave the road for the metaverse. It won’t be easy, as Chris Hewish of Xsolla will remind us with a panel on the regulations of the metaverse.

Above: Jeri Ellsworth is CEO of Tilt Five, maker of an augmented reality tabletop gaming system.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

The diversity of our speakers and their ideas is going to be fascinating. Jeri Ellsworth will tell us about a metaverse-like application where you can play tabletop games with friends. Jace Hall and Rick Fox of HiDef will be able to speak to the creation of an accessible and inclusive metaverse. Nicole Lazarro will discuss designing the metaverse. We’re going to have our third (online) Women in Gaming breakfast that will feature Debbie Bestwick, the longtime CEO of Team17.

Above: Crucible wants to protect your digital identity in the metaverse.

Image Credit: Crucible

Hiro Capital’s Ian Livingstone and Luis Alvarez will talk about the chance for startups to create the open metaverse. And Ryan Gill of Crucible will also lead a discussion about the open metaverse, and why we will have to consider decentralized technology, known as Web 3, to create a peer-to-peer internet that bypasses the controls of big tech. We’ll hear from Nvidia about non-game industrial metaverse applications, and Admix will talk about brands and the metaverse, as those brands will be crucial for mainstream adoption.

Above: Our summit will be a place where business meets passion.

Image Credit: GamesBeat

And not to be forgotten, we’ll have speakers addressing the topic of the ethics of the metaverse.

If you’ll notice one thing about all of these speakers, you’ll see one common theme for the technologies associated with the metaverse, which will be the next generation of computing and the successor to the mobile internet. Games will lead the way, and that’s why GamesBeat Summit is at the sweet spot.

I hope you’ll join us there. And here’s one more thing. I also hope you’ll become part of our metaverse forum — where we’ve partnered with Subspace to bring a series of public and private events to bring thought leadership and community to the idea of the open metaverse. More on that to come.