Robert Gryn is a serial business owner that has actually constructed a sophisticated Metaverse scanner which he really hopes will certainly work as a portal from our physical fact right into the Metaverse.
It is obvious that the real world is starting to combine with the electronic, and that blockchain is acting as the moderator of fact in most of these inceptive metaverses. Gryn, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER of MetaHero, is doing his component to make that brand-new fact as actual as feasible, developing high-def 3D scans of individuals, things and pets that you might quickly run into in video games, online globes and NFTs.
After costs a years structure European advertising firm Codewise in Poland and also being included on a Forbes listing for the country’s wealthiest, Gryn left everything behind and relocated to Dubai while structure a service with which he really hopes to onboard the following billion individuals to the blockchain.
Privacy concerns
Gryn excitedly listings the prospective applications of his full-body Metaverse scanners for points like electronic style: “You‘ll be able to scan yourself in your underpants, for example — it‘d be very easy to try on not only digital fashion but real-world clothing,” he says.
But, this raises a serious concern. What if some privacy box is left unchecked or the system is hacked and I find my digital clone as the unwilling star of an AI-created adult video?
Is this my eternal form? I got scanned into the metaverse by @Metahero_io at Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit last October. #Cointelegraph article coming soon! @wdw_io #metaverse #HERO pic.twitter.com/ItPEjnMNw5
— Elias Ahonen.eth (@eahonen) February 16, 2022
Gryn recognizes the issue, admitting that “if ultra-realistic scans got leaked and someone manipulated them to be in some sort of pornographic scene, that would potentially be the beginning of the end for us.” For that reason, he stresses the importance of secure file storage and the use of security measures such as watermarks.
Storing and managing high-resolution 3D scans of thousands of people is no easy technical feat, and it can also be a nightmare of privacy and copyright laws. The tech raises plenty of questions: Who can be given access to scans, how can they be used and how do royalties need to be set up? There are no easy answers.
“We are going to have to hire small armies of lawyers to cover all global jurisdictions to figure out what we can and cannot do in any given jurisdiction,” Gryn says, adding that the management of “terabytes of new data on a daily basis” is no small challenge but one he is confident he will overcome.
Making the rich list
Originally from Poland, Gryn started out in an “eclectic kind of course” studying for a Master of Science in technology entrepreneurship at the University of Surrey in England from 2004 to 2008, where “each week, they would invite a local entrepreneur” to share their life story and answer questions about their business. One such presenter once told the class that of 100 people who want to start a business, only four actually do — and just one of them succeeds. Gryn recalls pondering how he could avoid the 96% fate of a “wantrepreneur” and strike out for real. After graduating, he continued with a master‘s in marketing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
He realized early on he was not cut out to be a corporate drone, during an internship at mobile network company Orange, where he received an employee number and access to the group‘s intranet on the first day. Browsing the boring corporate intranet all day, “it was very obvious to me that I don‘t belong there, and I don‘t want to belong.” As he began his second day, nobody came along to give him work, and during lunch, “I decided just to bail and never ever allow myself to be part of this corporate type of structure,” he recalls with a laugh.
With the exception of his two-day stint there and another minor internship, Gryn’s initial work was just one of his very own business ingredients as chief executive officer of Codewise, a advertising firm which he established in Krakow, Poland in 2011. Using innovation to assistance take care of the brand name advertising of different customers, the company has actually rated amongst Europe’s fastest-growing business for 3 years in a row.
Each year, he keeps in mind surfing the Polish version of the Forbes magazine when they launched a yearly listing of culture‘s wealthiest, where he would “always be looking for someone young that made it in a country that does quite the opposite of facilitating entrepreneurship.” Later, undue bureaucracy and a post-communist mentality which he says is prevalent in Eastern Europe influenced his decision to relocate to Dubai which he considers more business-friendly.
He made it, building the firm into “a 250-person IT company in the advertising technology space.” At age 31 in 2017, he was featured as the youngest self-made man on the Forbes list of richest Poles with a fortune estimated at about $150 million.
But Gryn was not quite happy, describing that he felt as if he were living “in like a golden cage that I had built and the door was open.” He was suffering from burnout by 2018, and “I wanted the company to be out of my life,” he recounts.
In 2020, he sold the company in order to start new.
Discovering Crypto
After moving on from the company he had spent a decade building, Gryn saw crypto as the rabbit hole most worthy of his newfound time and money.
“I had always been crypto-curious, but to go fully down the rabbit hole you need quite a bit of headspace to wrap your head around it.”
He came to an interesting conclusion. “Crypto is probably the most important technology of modern mankind that will level the playing field in every single possible imaginable aspect — namely giving people financial freedom,” he proclaimed.
As he continued exploring the industry, he found most crypto projects to be “very crypto-centric,” and difficult for those outside of the industry to comprehend in any practical way. As he saw it, it didn‘t all need to be related to DeFi or even to money. Seeing the idea of cryptocurrency as still unapproachable to most, Gryn felt strongly that not enough was being done to “bring in the next billion people to crypto.” A task he reasoned would be best accomplished through the gaming and entertainment sector.
For Gryn, mass adoption of “crypto” is about building “a more equitable future” for the next generation, he explains — convincingly enough, considering he brings up his newborn son as an inspiration for helping create a better tomorrow, something he says can pretty much only be done with technology. Brainstorming on a way to combine his capital, network and background as a gamer, he came to the idea of MetaHero — a project allowing anyone to create a 3D avatar of themselves in the Metaverse.
Mysterious ways
Unlike many entrepreneurs who brag of the endless hustle, Gryn describes himself as possessing a natural laziness inherent to all humans. At Codewise, he used unconventional business methods such as renting out office spaces which he could not reasonably afford in order to force himself to keep the business growing. One time, after signing the lease for a new space, he looked at the company balance sheets and thought “holy crap, if we don‘t double our revenue and profit, there‘s no way we can pay for this office,” he tells me.
“I’m type of a business owner that simply goes all out — places on my blinders and simply shuts out all the anxiety and unpredictability and simply goes all out.”
Another approach for success is one he calls “conference-driven development,” in which “you book a very, very expensive conference or trade show a few months in the future — and then you promise to deliver X, Y and Z and even if that seems impossible, you make it possible.” This was evidently the instance for Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit, where, with me demonstrating, Gryn introduced his scanner to wonderful excitement and awe after only months of growth.
“I figured out quite early that if I put myself in the position where I have no choice but to succeed, then I will succeed,” he states with transmittable self-confidence.
The scanner
He called his pal “the Polish Elon Musk” Mariusz Król, Chief Executive Officer of 3D printing and scanning firm Wolf Digital World, and recommended a collaboration whereby to check our fact right into the Metaverse. Król’s firm has actually been “working on 3D photogrammetric technology for eight years,” and the business owners laid out to construct a scanner made from 200 Sony cams, 1,500 meters of electrical wiring and 20 computer hardware. When the group showed their scanners, which are each efficient in 150,000 scans each year to Sony, they were surprised, as “they didn’t even know that something like that could be done with their own equipment,” Gryn remembers.
Here’s exactly how it functions: The checked thing, whether a human, cow or item, is positioned in the facility of the scanner. The lights beam from every instructions to equally brighten every surface area while the numerous cams catch a synchronised picture from all angles. These are after that entwined with each other by high-powered imaging software program in order to produce a practical 3D picture that can be put right into any type of electronic area, whether social networks, a computer game or the metaverse. It may be a best method for a entertainer to produce a natural character in which to do at an Animal Concert in the Metaverse, as an example.
“We‘re going to build the largest database of 3D scanned people and objects in the world,” Gryn explains, regarding his vision. He sees this as an important step for the building of the Metaverse, adding that creating a hyper-realistic “in-game character that resembles a human, with blemishes and everything” is a difficult and expensive task. “Once you build a database of hundreds of thousands of scan items and people, the use-cases for that are so limitless that sometimes it boggles your mind,” he says excitedly.
Over four days at @dxbontheblock, we scanned over 300 incredible people, transferring them to the metaverse. We’ve also captured their impressions and opinions about this unique experience, to show all those who couldn’t be with us at the meeting what it’s like to be checked. pic.twitter.com/ydYqs3aRks
— Wolf Digital World (@wdw_io) October 27, 2021
As much as he recognizes, no similar 3D scanner exists unless “perhaps there‘s a more advanced one somewhere in a top-secret basement in Hollywood.” Especially notable, according to him, is the scanner’s rate which implies “we‘re able to do scans so quickly that we‘re able to capture practically any animal and import it into the Metaverse — say, your dog”, Gryn explains.
Metahero scanners are meant eventually to be available around the world, with scans payable in Hero tokens which were launched in July. The tokens exist on BNB Chain in large part due to high fees on the Ethereum network. While some have gone to investors, a portion is earmarked to provide incentives for people of various walks of life to be scanned as bonuses, in addition to the potential royalties they might earn from the use of their images.
“1% of the total supply or hero token is dedicated to paying the first 100,000 people $1,000 equivalent in our token to get scans — you get paid to get scanned,” Gryn boasts.
Though Gryn envisions a future where mass adoption of the Metaverse could see people earning their “livelihoods just based on their 3D avatars that they can monetize in various ways,” he admits that the future is not quite yet not when it comes to realistic Metaverse avatars.
This is because today’s Metaverse applications do not sustain the high-def readily available with Wolf Digital World‘s scanner. For this factor, “we‘re building technology to allow you to scale down quality because 16k is not going to be supported for the next maybe 5 or 10 years,” he states.
“10 years down the road, the Metaverse will likely be almost indistinguishable from our everyday reality — something that you log on to and have your own space there, your NFTs, your artwork, your apartment.”
