M+E Daily

HITS Spring: The Metaverse is Just Getting Started, MESA and ICVR Say

Most of our business interactions during the pandemic became increasingly local while expanding globally at the exact same time thanks to new collaboration tools.

On May 19, during the Metaverse breakout session “How the Metaverse will Transform your Meetings” at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS), Sinan AlRubaye, chief experience officer at Los Angeles, California-based software development studio ICVR, and Guy Finley, MESA CEO and president, discussed the next step in creating truly compelling, immersive experiences at work, levering gaming tools and Hollywood sensibility.

Finley pointed out he’s heard of experiences in which executives at some very large companies have “been in goggles during the pandemic [and] have been in full VR gear.” But the experience they have had is “definitely not kind of the photo-realistic or more freeing experience that we think we offer from this side of the product,” he said.

“One of the challenges we had” initially with the MESA metaverse experience it introduced is that “nobody could download it … on their corporate laptop,” he noted.

But there was luckily “technology that allows those things to render up in the cloud and it allows you just to use an ordinary browser to sign in, sign on and have an experience like this,” he said, pointing to a demo of the metaverse experience that MESA recently started providing to its members.

Solving the Problem

“The good thing about being a content creator and a tech company is that you see both sides” of the equation, according to AlRubaye. “And so you kind of create tools to solve a problem that you already have from your pain. You’re not just creating for the sake of creation,” he explained.

Noting that he was a “big fan” of the Google Stadia cloud gaming service, he said that provided a path to a solution to MESA’s dilemma with its RendezVu metaverse experience.

“The reason why you need powerful machines is that these machines need to be able to render this environment with the movements in it in real time,” he said. “And not only that but have that action and feedback” users expect also, he noted. Then, “imagine this [with] hundreds and thousands and millions of players concurrently,” he added.

Google showed that you can play games in the cloud so that people without access to powerful machines could play also, he pointed out.

“It was revolutionary.” But Google couldn’t figure out the business model and figure out how to sell Stadia, he said.

Microsoft, however, took the same concept and figured out a business model and it was easier for Microsoft because it had the Xbox video game console, he noted.

Microsoft’s recently introduced cloud gaming service bypasses the need to buy a “game from the store and downloading [200] or 300 gigs on your console to run the game,” he said, pointing out: “If you are a gamer, you know the pain because the entire console is only one terabyte. So you download four games and that’s it. So it doesn’t really give you a lot of flexibility. Also, it takes forever to download a game and update a game.”

The cloud gaming service was “teased” by Microsoft on a “very small scale” as part of a beta program, he noted, adding it was “only a couple of months ago where they went full steam and said that it’s ready for everybody.”

Now, on a mobile phone, Xbox gamers can play just about any title, including Call of Duty, he noted.

However, “we don’t have that money; we don’t have those resources but we love that concept,” he said, adding: “We wanted to come up with a solution that’s similar to that but on the very cheap side….. We developed our own pixel streaming tool that does the exact same thing … [which is] front-end all this rendering in real time to the cloud. And it’s cloud agnostic. So you, as a client, if you have a deal with AWS or Azure or Alibaba or GCP, or whoever the hell you work with, you can use that.”

The MESA RendezVu metaverse experience available now “technically is a AAA game” that you would not be able to play on a regular PC without relying on the cloud, he added.

Agreeing, Finley noted that the solution “solved a couple of key issues” that MESA was experiencing, adding RendezVu is “almost like Zoom to the next level.”

Additionally, “now you can do it on the go” also because RendezVu is mobile too without a mobile app being required, according to AlRubaye.

Lagging Behind

The film and TV industry took longer to pick up on the possibilities offered by Unreal and other powerful game engines.

The technology used in director James Cameron’s film Avatar used a Unity game engine in the early stages, AlRubaye said. But it was nothing close to what exists today, he said, adding Unity rival Epic advanced the technology and its Unreal Engine is by far the superior option now.

Unreal has, however, “been in open source for eight years now,” AlRubaye said. Yet filmmakers, VFX artists and production designers “didn’t really get into it until the whole hype around” the Disney Plus TV show The Mandalorian, he added.

“Now you have thousands of people around the world using Unreal Engine every single day as their daily life work,” he pointed out.

The Future

The metaverse transformation is “happening in real time,” Finley said, predicting that, “as we go through and experience these new ideas, these new groups that come in [will] see it and say, ‘yes, I want that.’”

However, “ultimately the shiny dangly is going to wear off around all of this as we also emerge from COVID and finally emerge through the end of the year,” Finley predicted, adding: “I think the best stuff is still ahead of us. And it’s going to be so quickly transformational that we won’t be able to keep up. We’re literally just getting started.” Agreeing, AlRubaye said, “there’s incredible things coming up soon.”

To view the entire presentation, click here.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.