Virtual Fashion: The Gateway Drug to the Metaverse - David Cash

okay how's it going everybody what's up denver um thanks to everybody who's taking the time to come out to this uh just wanna start off with uh people who are here physically uh quick show hands who here in the audience just like an idea currently owns an nft oh this is uh not my slides where do those go i think my oh there we go there we go beautiful that's what we're looking at how many people here own an nft one more time okay a bunch of people a bunch of people how many people here own an nft that is also a piece of virtual fashion a few people a few people and how many people have worn that piece of virtual fashion in the metaverse before we got we got two so so we're working here the nft thing has progressed very happy to hear that but today we're going to talk about virtual fashion and on-chain virtual fashion specifically as what i would consider the gateway drug um to web three even not just the metaverse but two web three so uh that's what we're gonna be talking about here today um just to give you a little context of how i'm gonna structure this i'm gonna break it down give you a little bit of an introduction talk about my theory on how entering the metaverse is uh you know facilitating the nft and web3 boom um which we're going to see this year even more so in my opinion uh talk about on versus off chain wearables and then talk a little bit about the current state of virtual fashion versus the future um so why am i talking to you about this um my name's david cash um i'm the editor-in-chief of nfts.wtf i'm also a contributor at vogue singapore i write a lot about virtual fashion in the metaverse um i'm also the curator of decentraland's upcoming metaverse fashion week where we're working with almost 100 different brands from around the world both traditional and digital and trying to present fashion in every single way humanly possible via the metaverse um so i also did a master's thesis on nft so that's kind of what got me into this space in the first place but really passionate about this topic and uh yeah appreciate everybody being here once again um so starting off most of you recognize this image um you know buzak all of that yes um but oh my discord keeps popping up and wanting to do something sorry about that everybody here we go yeah so everybody knows this image we all know zuck um and what we're doing here is you know what's going on here is an example of a closed metaverse right this is an example of a metaverse that is totalitarian it's autocratic somebody controls it and that's not what web3 is all about so you know this example of a metaverse is one example and but unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it a lot of people are being introduced to the concept of a metaverse via this whole transactional system that's happening over the facebook transaction um so um i wrote an article which i called uh nfts the trojan horse into meta and uh this is a qr code if anybody wants to check it out after this uh after this talk and what i said in that article essentially is when people enter meta especially if they get the chance to buy nfts that's going to change everything for them because people are going to enter this space they're going to see people wearing wearables and they're going to buy one off chain and then they're going to realize that they don't actually own that item then they're going to go and buy another piece on chain and actually own it as an nft go through that process and actually you know receive an understanding of what true ownership means in web3 so let's break that down a little bit further um so here's a little screenshot of decentraland the central land is you know like i mentioned a company that i work with i think they're a great example of an open metaverse you know somebody who has the right philosophy in terms of what the metaverse should be um you know they're really about interoperability they they're thinking about an omniverse they're not thinking about a metaverse they don't want control if you see decentralized any place that you go if there's an nft if there's a piece of art if there's a piece of virtual fashion you can click through and go to wherever that brand wants to take you they're not trying to keep you in a closed ecosystem they're open to letting you explore web3 which is really really important so you know here's a little screenshot to give you an example but uh yeah what i what i call this is the virtual fashion opportunity it's what i uh mentioned very briefly a moment ago but um you know when you come into decentraland let's say or any metaverse that you know is virtual fashion um ready let's say um so sandbox you know uh cryptovoxels or decentralized pretty much right now you walk in you walk into an area and you see a whole bunch of people all around you and you look like this you're a base character you don't look very cool you're wearing a hoodie and a whole bunch of other people look exactly like you and it's a bit of an experience you're like why do i look like this and everybody else looks like this so you know you have that moment of realization where you have this you know fomo a real human emotion a real human feeling we feel this fomo a little closer cool uh you know you feel this fomo and uh you see all these people how do they get these cool things that they're wearing and uh you know the way that they do that is by buying nfts so you know you go from very quickly from this to something like this this is my avatar into centreland and you know if you're going to go through that process of going from this to this you actually have to buy several nfts so in the process of doing that you have to learn how to transact on mana on decentraland you know layer 2. you have you know i bought this pair of artifact shoes you know on openc with ethereum right if you're new to the space you would have to figure out how to buy ethereum how to go about buying those shoes and then even something like an airdrop if you want to receive an airdrop you have to have a wallet so it's like getting these setup steps and really letting people do these introductory elements to web three and allowing this whole virtual fashion this really exciting moment to facilitate that so when more people come into a space like this they end up like this so uh that's why i really like you know differentiating on versus off-chain fashion you know and this is again it's an issue of ownership right when you own something and you buy it on the blockchain it's yours in perpetuity and it's provable if you buy something in a video game and that video game crashes it's gone and most of us understand this also a lot of people's kids understand this you know the newer generation right now they're very like you know cognizant of ownership and digital ownership and uh you know zuck and everything that he's doing is great for awareness i think a whole bunch of people are googling the metaverse for the very first time ever which i think is a good thing but once they start to interact in this ecosystem they're very quickly going to realize the difference between on and off chain and fashion anything any type of digital asset and i think that's really important um so what's going on right now in the realm of digital fashion you know just to wrap this up and give you guys a little bit of an idea some places to go some people to check out what's going on right now and what do i think the future will look like um my personal opinion of course um so i'd like to mention a couple different brands um just so you can see a couple different you know levels of fidelity different use cases a virtual fashion so this is oraboris they're a brand based out of the uk um they've you know they've shown in london fashion week um they're actually uh you know uh investee of outlier ventures they've done very well in the space um and they look at themselves as a virtual couture house so you can see this versus the decentralized wearables we were looking at earlier this is super high fidelity this is made in unreal engine you know this is like really really high end but as it stands right now uh a wearable of this quality would not be easily wearable in somewhere like the central end or something like an ar filter it would be tricky so you know that's kind of where we're at right now i think a lot of the artwork and a lot of the creativity has uh you know you know already passed the technology which is interesting because the technology has to keep catching up which i think is actually quite exciting um to give you another idea we actually have daria who's one of the founders of dress x here um but dressax is an incredible virtual fashion company um they you know popularized the idea of a meta closet or a meta wardrobe and i think something really interesting is you know where we stand right now and where we exist right now in time you know our options are relatively limited but through apps like you know through technology like ar or you know through various metaverse solutions that we have right now we can still interact with virtual wearables and companies like dressax make that possible so this qr code right here is actually to their app and i have to say as somebody who works in the space i think they have some of the best virtual fashion ar capabilities on their app on the market and you know they do make nfts a lot of their work is on chain some of it's off chain but i think they really exemplify this like cd5 area that we're at right now so highly recommend checking out dress x um and glad dario's here too thank you for joining again another dress x moment as well this is a collaboration between dress x and the fabricant this is another manifestation of a virtual fashion as it stands right now that i just wanted to mention which is superimposing images on existing photos so you know like i showed you if you have something that was created in unreal engine even if you even if you know you couldn't make it an ar filter or necessarily bring it into crypto voxels you can still superimpose it over images so this is a collaboration that they did actually with google pixel um and i believe that they were free i don't know if they're still available but oh they still are available oh no they're not no they're not um but uh but they were they were available for free so if you were so lucky you would uh maybe have one of these awesome outfits um so and then just to give you a little bit of an idea another thing that i always like to mention you know when i'm talking about the virtual fashion conversation and the one on the left doesn't seem to want to load right now with the internet but what's happening in this image which is usually a video usually is that these pants are blossoming with flowers oh here we go slowly but surely the internet's a little uh grouchy on us today but what i want to talk about here is you know virtual fashion just as a concept allows us to go beyond the realm of reality so you know when you're going into these spaces and when you're seeing people in these virtual worlds sporting virtual fashion it doesn't necessarily have to be realistic or possible even so i think that's a really exciting phenomenon so you can see these pants from artifact they literally grow flowers that's you know it's incredible so you know as we're looking into this virtual fashion space and as we're developing forwards especially as the technology keeps catching up you know we can actually see things like this on our avatars in the metaverse but like i said you know the tech and the creativity are really kind of like fighting each other at this point because the creativity has kind of superseded the the tech so it's quite interesting um and then here's a video is the video going to load is really a question um i'm gonna say probably not just given the wi-fi um but i will send this in an email to everybody who's here after this because they gave me access to that i won't have access to your email i'll just be able to email you so hopefully that's okay oh oh here we go okay we willed it into existence this is something i wanted to talk about again mentioning dress x but this time you know this is the boson protocol um when we're talking about the future of virtual fashion especially in the metaverse one thing i like to talk about is metacommerce so you know e-commerce has been something that really revolutionized the fashion industry it was a big shift but metacommerce is now you know facilitating transactions in the metaverse and i think virtual fashion is one of the big you know use cases of that right now so here's a little video fingers crossed that it loads but basically what i want to show you is the boson protocol and companies like them are trying to enable oh here we go it's loading amazing uh they're trying to enable uh seamless shopping experiences within the metaverse so you can see as we're entering this little pop-up store you're walking up to a you know a kiosk and you're clicking buy and then i think in about six clicks you're going directly from decentraland to purchasing this virtual item as an nft so the idea is you know this is where we're at right now but the idea is as we keep progressing further you know and as we start spending more and more time in the metaverse it'll start being easier and easier to interact and to transact in the metaverse so as you can see in one click interoperable he went out to a website and now they've claimed their items so that's kind of the process that i want to see a lot more of or that i hope to see a lot more of in vr solutions ar solutions mixed reality solutions and that's a little taste of maybe what's coming up next um so yeah um i really appreciate everybody taking the time today to join us i'm trying to figure out how to get to my next slide since this is a youtube video so please excuse the technical difficulties but yeah the last thing i want to talk about today just before i leave you all is something that i'm working on quite a lot it's taking up a lot of my time and that's decentraland's upcoming metaverse fashion week so you know as it stands there have been different you know fashion week solutions let's say we love using the word solution in this space um but you know there have been a lot of people who've tried to you know bring together fashion designers and you know throw an event but i personally think that this is one of the first times in history that uh you know especially a medivh solution especially an on-chain metaverse solution has brought together about 100 brands from around the world both traditional and digital and presented them in i think it's over a dozen different means so to me that's very exciting so as you can see we haven't even launched our press release yet um but this event is already getting written about in places like vogue business you know business insider hypebeast just did an article on it the other day and what we really hope to see here is a whole bunch of people for the very first time entering the metaverse and trying it out because the central land is free to use so we really want to see people coming in and seeing amazing use cases getting things for free getting things from brands like dolce gabbana potentially for free and having that experience in the metaverse having their first experience in the midwest be extremely positive and if we can do that we hope to onboard a whole bunch more users into this on-shade ecosystem um so decentraland metaverse fashion week is going to happen uh march 24th to 27th announcements going out i believe in either yesterday or in these coming days so yeah i hope that many of you can make it out again it's free you just need a computer um with an internet connection and you can join us but uh yeah if you want to check out some of the other features of virtual fashion i highly recommend you check out uh metaverse fashion week and uh yeah i want to thank everybody for taking the time out of their day to come and hang out with me um another qr code please excuse the random white qr codes i promise i'm not trying to hack you that makes it more suspicious um but yeah you can follow me on twitter at davidcash888 and yeah appreciate everybody's time i'll uh be around for questions or if you want to ask me anything or pitch me your metaverse startup uh i'd love to hear about it so i appreciate everybody taking the time thank you are we good for time should i do some questions are we about about a time let me see nice actually we do have time for a couple questions i think um does anybody have anything that they want to bring up if not i'm happy to head on down and answer some people irl 101. yeah we got one um where would that mic be at that we want to pass around the audience if that's an option boom well uh thank you for thank you for speaking today i guess my question is focused on you brought about the topic of operability of fashion nfts i feel when you as a fashion label as a fashion designer if you're trying to sell your digital fashion do you have to create separate pieces all together that match decentralized resolution per se and do you have to do this separately for every single virtual world uh i think i think you do that's that's my assumption so in the near future how do you see this being solved would there be a single avatar that's operable across all fashion nfts would these virtual worlds work together would there be one virtual world that will kick out all competition like how do you because it's not practically possible to create separate resolution specifications for every single version of the world that's a really great question um you know right now it's not very easy you know when you do a collection especially an nft collection and you want something to be interoperable you know when we use that word right now that means you know air dropping a whole bunch of nfts you know at this point you really need a decentraland sandbox crypto voxels all those three separate wearables and then if you want an ar filter it's probably just going to be an unlockable off chain realistically most of the time what a lot of companies are doing and i know that the people at ready player me and a few other companies are really working towards this but they're trying to integrate um you know at least some metadata data in their smart contracts that you know when you when you go into some of these ecosystems it'll already preload any nfts that you may have bought from them but in order for that to happen you know we really have to all work together and there has to be a lot more cooperation especially in the metaverse space um so you know like i said the mentality of the of the the meta mentality you know of one brand owning it all really won't work if we want to facilitate that we really need to you know push for this open metaverse and collaborate and and really you know have portals in between different metaverses and let each metaverse have their own verticals and their own things and if you know i love seeing during decentralized medivh fashion week you know we're having apps like spatial who are reaching out saying hey can we throw an event at the same week because it's metaverse fashion week and i'm like yes i want to see a lot more of that so i think if we do see more of that there is a chance that we can reach that interoperable you know wearable place very soon so two-parter uh can you speak to any like sort of motion tracking i'm thinking of models i'm thinking of like performances with costumes and how in decentraland you have like up down left right you know so that's my first part of the question speaking to the motion tracking and the second part is what about fashion for non-humanoid forms okay okay great questions there um first of all i will say in terms of motion tracking i would say the people who are probably doing the coolest stuff right now are the people at yahoo and yahoo's creative studios um so they actually have full motion tracking you know tech in almost all of their studios um i know i've worked with their uh crew in la and they're doing some really cool stuff um but i will also say you know um decentraland for metaverse music week this happened in november december of last year um if you saw the paris hilton performance um that was entirely motion tracked and ported into the centerland um so you know it's still possible it's very new it hasn't been tested it's not available to the full public yet but i will say in the next year or two you definitely will see things like that rolling out on a higher scale especially as people start getting you know haptic gloves and things like that and more people start interacting within this space i think now it's just such a niche audience of the people who are doing that are in some way you know connected with the metaverse solutions or with the platforms so uh yeah that's a great question and then uh the other one i can shout out another company i'm working with but uh if you go to brighthall.com um i know one of my colleagues just wrote an article about um metaverse clothing for dogs so there you have it [Laughter] it's not that out there any other questions before we wrap this one up if not i'm happy to meet up with you uh after this appreciate everybody taking the time going once going twice okay thank you guys so much appreciate everybody's time uh happy east denver take care