Let’s monetize the metaverse. Creative Dock launches the Metaverse Business Starter

Social media VR may be the next big thing, but few companies know how to approach it. Here’s our guide to getting your business started in the metaverse.

Author: Jan Strmiska

Update May 5: we have new avatars. And legs ❤️🦵

Quick shortcut. You can get to our metaverse via this link. And here, you can download the Spatial.io app for iOS, Android and Oculus Quest. You don’t need a special app for your computer, metaverse works in your browser

This is the metaverse of Creative Dock:

How to make money on metaverse?

In this text, you will primarily learn how to set up a presentation in a virtual space and how to navigate it. But if you think a simple presentation is old-school, you’re not wrong. Yet, it seems to be the only thing that works today. It’s just that, so far, it’s the only thing that works. So how is metaverse different? First and foremost, it’s not just an ordinary website “on steroids”, but a combination of the following.

1/ Lifestyle visuals.

2/ Unprecedented connectivity that enables unprecedented interactions with customers, but puts a strain on companies! Companies will therefore inevitably have to deploy AI to represent them in cyberspace. Otherwise, it would be a completely asymmetric and dysfunctional relationship (and therefore, uninteresting to users).

3/ Gamification, which may end up being the most important element.

4/ Simplified and accelerated money handling (= payment) thanks to NFT. Contact-less mobile payments and free WEB2 services are already a thing of the past in this respect. It will be natural to spend on everything and it will be extremely smooth.

5/ Hyper-complex marketing. In recent years, the retail industry has been talking about multichannel marketing — there are many sensations that impact the customer’s senses, and together they compose information that eventually convinces the person. Oh, and in metaverse, it’s going to be a leap up several levels, too. Ubiquitous AI (indistinguishable from humans) can surround a single user with an essentially infinite number of bots/agents/elves that create a perfect information bubble around them. An imaginary friend, a virtual girlfriend, a teacher, a “random” neighbor, but also a colorful texture can whisper… The power will be in the complexity and 100% control over the users’ world. And decentralization might not help here.
So present yourself and do it in a playful way. The gaming industry and the principles of gaming are what’s pulling the metaverse upwards, after all.

Is there a way to make money on metaverse right away?

You can, of course, skip your traditional business and try to make money directly. Metaverse’s financial system is built on NFTs and there are many ways to make money from them. We at Creative Dock can come up and test a strategy suitable for your business.

How to make money on NFTs? By algorithmic trading

The possibilities of making money on DeFi and NFTs are endless, as many members of Generation Z already know. It’s the same as their trading of sneakers. One of the most popular pastimes of this generation is buying limited-edition sneakers. But that is done by the brands themselves via auction. That’s the game element. And why is this done? To resell them at right away after the auction for a higher price. Classic buy-sell spiced up with the mysterious black-box principle.

Well, it works the same way with NFT trading, just in a more robotic way and at a higher speed. The product is no longer important at all — that’s also why the stuff has no aesthetic value.

We can design a bot that uses specific algorithms to buy suitable NFTs for you. The assumption of interest can be calculated (yes, it’s a data-driven market for art that isn’t really art :-). Then you have a bot that posts in real-time on Discord to everyone around that you have something new. And other bots buy it from you in real-time because their algorithm feels like they’ll make a profit from it too. Yes, this is the fun of generation Z :-). Algorithmic buy-sell, Python, and mathematical modelling.

Today’s metaverse is not yet Web3, but rather something like 2.5 You can access it through a 2D interface, and a decentralization is also questionable. Photo: Shutterstock

How to easily build a presentation in metaverse

Back to the beginning, and let’s create a presentation. There are basically two basic principles of building your visual presentation in the metaverse. The first option is to buy a horribly overpriced plot of land in a “decentralized” world like Decentraland, Roblox, Sandbox, etc. and start building something there from the ground up. Just like when you buy a plot of land and build a house. So before it’s any good, you spend a lot of money and energy, and without the help of an architect, it can soon collapse. The other option is to use a platform that looks nice from the start and just populate it with your equipment. Analogous to something like renting a furnished apartment. Just then you move a few cabinets around, put carpets on the floors, paintings on the walls and you can start living there. You don’t spend hundreds of thousands on the land and just pay the rent.

Isn’t the world a bit too closed?

Yes, it is. Your visitors can only walk around your platform and no stranger ever wanders in. You have to bring people there from the traditional web or social media. And even then, they need to really want to be there. After all, every metaverse requires a login and you need a while to get around — and that’s a pretty big barrier for a casual visitor.

The advantage of popular worlds like Decentraland is that you can theoretically be approached by someone already hanging out there. Though the likelihood of that is basically zero for now anyway. Plus, even if you invest in Decentraland, you still won’t get users from, say, Roblox or Meta.
You just can’t freely walk from one metaverse to another. They don’t share any common physical properties, and if you buy an NFT skin or land for your avatar in one, it is of no use in the other world. Someday that will change, though. For example, more universal avatars are being attempted by Ready Player Me, a startup from Estonia.

That’s why we opted for a quick rental
Given today’s cumbersomeness and the uncertainty of the situation where it will evolve, we preferred to choose a quick “MVP”, i.e. “rent” in the world of Spatial.io, and we’ll see. After all, this world was created for the NFT presentation, so the pre-prepared spaces are already spectacularly stylish themselves. The architect is an MIT 3D user interface specialist who invented the first gesture-controlled 3D computer, and also the designer who created Material Design for Google. It’s driven by venture capital.
You can create a presentation like ours for free. And if you want, you can pay an extra $25/month for features like controlling visitors’ user rights or even automatically translating visitors’ speech between more than 70 languages (subtitles appear above the speaker’s head).

How to use Spatial.io?

You can get inside via this link. You can stay logged in and just walk around the space, but then you can’t run videos or open images. And here, you can download the Spatial.io app for iOS, Android and Oculus Quest. You don’t need a special app for your computer, metaverse works in your browser.

You can see our universe on your computer, but it’s better to log in if you want to watch videos, etc.

Logging in is just a click away, but then you’re faced with the main drawback of using the Spatial.io world. After logging in, you find yourself not in the world we invite you to (VENTURES by Creative Dock), but in your own “HOME”. How do you then get back to us?

1/ You can find us by clicking on this hyperlink with our world address again and you should be able to get straight to us, but this time logged in.

2/ Or leave your “home” by clicking on LEAVE in the upper left.

You can leave the space you are currently in by clicking on the LEAVE button.

LEAVE button takes you to your dashboard, where you can click on the SPACES tab and select the space you want to go to.

In the world of Spatial.io, you move around using the keyboard and touchpad/mouse if you came via PC/MAC. You can also use a mobile phone or VR set to navigate (only Oculus Quest sets are supported). VR FAQ here.

CREATOR TIPS: If you’re building your own world, you can upload things like objects, images, videos, etc. by simply dragging them to the desktop (or system). The only catch is that sometimes it can be difficult to find exactly where things have been uploaded. The metaverse is a three-dimensional world, so the view on a 2D computer can be deceiving :-) Once you’ve got the object in a suitable position, lock it. Otherwise, you’ll accidentally mess everything up right away. The video plays right in the window, wherever you upload it.

Unfortunately, if you’re just a user of someone else’s world, depending on the device you’re using, sometimes you can launch things just by clicking on them and a little magnifying glass will appear at the bottom. You click on that, and that opens the media window. It’s not exactly user-friendly, but so far the system can only do it that way.

You can also use the magnifying glass to click on PDFs or other documents.

Sometimes it also happens that the environment is corrupted and objects are not loaded. A refresh of the browser window will help.

You move between worlds using these spheres — portals.

You can also exit by clicking LEAVE at the top left, switch to SPACES, and click to jump to where you want to go.

Now for the fun part. You can meet other people in our metaverse. Just send them the link to sign up.

There can be up to 50 people in one space simultaneously. It actually works like a classic video call, but with more people and in a graphical environment.

Just turn on the camera and microphone on your computer. A real-world selfie video will appear in a circle above your character’s head.

Video over human is great and one of the reasons we chose this platform. Not just plastic avatars communicating with each other using unified gestures, but you see the face and expression of the real person.

A direct screenshot of the Oculus Quest VR set. The device records from one eye only.

In our metaverse, you can organize real business meetings. Share your desktop with a single click. Organize it where and how you want, including the size, and present what you want to others.

Users of the VR set and mobile phone can also use automatic translation of the speech of other visitors. It can handle 70 languages.

The Creative Dock presentation environment took us several days to put together. Of course, it takes more time to prepare materials such as shooting videos and preparing graphics. You can’t just type in the space, you have to have everything as a PNG image or 3D object. You can also upload almost any common 3D object format (GLB, glTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, PCD) that you create or download from a library, but we had a problem with textures there. For most of the imported objects, it didn’t load (that’s the yellow dog in the picture above). The manta ray flying through the air, on the other hand, is fine. You can try loading it by trial and error or read the explanation of how the textures work. And here’s how to upload objects to Spatial.io.

Using LIDAR (iPhones have it built in), you can even map your own entire environment, not just objects (like the interior of your business) with the paid version. But so far, it doesn’t look too good with such tools, so we decided not to use it.

Enjoy our meta-world and follow our social networks LinkedIn and IG. We will be hosting events in our metaverse where we can all meet “live”. We look forward to seeing you soon there!

The Creative Dock press release with business details can be downloaded here (in Czech).