https://smartmfg.io/creatorfi-3d-creators-and-the-quest-to-win-in-the-metaverse/
The Origin
If we had to guess, let’s imagine walking into the Metaverse. Let’s imagine the sky above our virtual residence is red, the room next to our door is designed with gaudy art galleries. People are visiting the ticketed golf courses with their NFTs and locals passing through for a seminar or concert. The Metaverse has become a consensual, global hallucination discussed daily by millions of investors, gamers and game developers, 3D creators, and digital artists. Unimaginable complexity, lines of light travel virtually in the space of our mind, constellations, and clusters of graphical representation of our state and affairs in 3D — the story of Metaverse is the story of 3D creators and modern architects. The changing dynamics of communicating and interacting both influenced and responded to the creation of an extended world that enables the coexistence of virtual and real places. As it is increasingly shaping real and virtual life, the culture of 3D images and visuals is gradually leading us into an interactive world within and into a digitally-driven, creator-enabled economy. This is the beginning of CreatorFi — a term casually referring to enabling creators, industrial designers, and all makers to own, market, sell, and authenticate their digital assets.
The Metaverse and what it means for 3D Designer/Architects
Even if its originator may now struggle to envision the extent and scope of the word “Metaverse.” Super-charged and recontextualized by Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement, the term “Metaverse” means different things to different people, both in particular and general. We may have to choose an intriguing definition to counterbalance the fuzziness of these definitions.
There is only one Metaverse. It is the internet but upgraded and enhanced by spatially organized experience and information to deliver 3D content and real-time interaction. This definition looks roomy enough to capture the creativity of 3D designers. Again, the Metaverse is the internet adapted to provide dimensional 3D experiences consistently. 3D content is not
essentially limited to a specific experience, unit, or idea, but an assembly of multimodal media united by 3-dimensional characteristics.
Globalization and post-capitalism influenced mirroring and architecting the real world in 3D. In particular, significant advances in information technology, the fourth industrial revolution, and automation further developed the globalization of 3D designs and architecture, eradicating the needless character of cultural identity and physical place. 3D designers started experimenting with new 3D designs that propelled dramatic, bold statements within the virtual environment. These post-urbanism 3D worlds and architectures are vital, designed to celebrate their client’s magnificence and impress their audience, but often at the expense of a centralized system.
Centralized platforms became the only available options for 3D creators and their clients to connect. After several days in the studio, weeks and weeks of advertising their crafts, creators are at the mercy of the new intermediaries — using algorithmic recommendations and ads between users and creators while keeping a huge part of the revenue to themselves. This is where Metaverse comes in.
CreatorFi, powered by the Metaverse and fueled by NFT, will create new monetization avenues and innovative business models as 3D creators continue to inject and invent vitality. More importantly, it will remove all intermediaries, crush the blur lines, and allow creators and users to create an ecosystem where assets can be traded to drive the diversity and productivity of the virtual space.
The Metaverse is created for 3D Designers and Architects
The notion of place is at the center of Metaverse’s promise. We “visit” many websites every day, but our understanding of “place” hasn’t changed. Unlike many internet products, the Metaverse exists to accommodate growing 3D-first environments. Imagine a world where feelings (of everyone involved) will be different — more valuable yet deeper, more imaginative, and visceral. That means creating a virtual world with unique architectural logic or principles OR implementing and experiencing a new 3D environment in already-existing locations. New standards are expected to be created in 3D form since immersion is essential.
NFT is currently the universal currency in the Metaverse. Creators can use this to create transparency and purpose-driven communities while earning more. Original creators earn royalties from the subsequent sales of their NFTs in the secondary market. For instance, after the original architect sells their NFTs, the buyer may then sell these NFTs to another buyer in the secondary market. This is where the original creator gets the royalties. Whatever the mechanism or protocol of royalty sharing, the earnings, and creative potentials are boundless and borderless.
Power to the Architects and 3D NFT Creators
We are on the cusp of terrifying and exhilarating moments. The Metaverse will change the state of 3D content and its context, including the interplay between content creators and their users. The creator economy will redefine our ideas of “mediums” and “spaces.” One of the drivers of this excitement is the opportunity for creator-led and collaborative content. Over the past few years, we have seen what we call the “create-to-earn economy,” led by 3D designers, architects, artists, and performers as individuals, but also as a community of experts and technologists developing new services and 3D assets around Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
But while opportunities and new business use cases for creators are growing, the disruption has been pronounced because the governance of value creation and revenue generation has been shifted to the creators. Creator communities are populating the Metaverse with amazing models as a foundational layer for a successful metaverse from create-to-earn, learn-to-earn, and play-to-earn models.
Without a doubt, architects and 3D designers significantly contribute to the realization of the Metaverse. The demand for meta-architecture has recently outgrown the supply, creating new opportunities for architects and 3D artists to design and participate in this new virtual world. However, we shouldn’t restrict Metaverse to just videos, text, or photos. Instead, new platforms and marketplaces that allow people to author 3D content will emerge. This could also be NFTs, audio, or interactive 3D content. Creators will monetize their 3D assets and gaming experiences — therefore, they can buy, sell, and trade their 3D digital assets on in-game worlds. Another benefit of this creator economy is the ability to tap into the diversity and profitability generated by their fans. Through this, the Metaverse will have many niches and unique worlds explicitly created to engage with fans, allowing them to make money while the creators make money too. As various technological trends converge to build the Metaverse, societal emotions and social trends are also converging to empower artists and creators.
Though the Metaverse isn’t there yet, the freedom, earning potential, and power it gives to architects and 3D creators are incredible early expressions of the future of CreatorFi. Given the amorphousness and nascency of the Metaverse, it is tricky to quantify its market cap. But safe to say, it’s enormous. Architects and 3D creators will make digital realities a plausible interface and game-center for real-world activities. Beyond our present imagination, experiences, goods, and services — from work meetings to concerts and school graduations- will be unlocked.
The Metaverse has unique strengths but just one vulnerability in its singular position. Building an extraordinarily engaging and aligned community is possible in the Metaverse; creating and selling your 3D assets are seamless, but existing NFT marketplaces are yet to crack the code of interoperability. They have enabled a create-to-earn economy but have failed to build a long-tail of commercially viable opportunities by making 3D assets interoperable across all metaverses. It has contrived a creator-focused economy yet left both creators and users feeling walled and restricted. The Metaverse has caused friendships and relationships to bloom and blossom, just as it has closed the door against flexibility and virtual interoperability.
The Interoperability of 3D assets in the Metaverse
Though Metaverse has, to an extent, matured from any skepticism and criticism, it retains the problem of interoperability. However, unlike the real world, the various Metaverses are all walled-in: they all use different formats, and there is no way to share assets across each one. For instance, you cannot move from one Metaverse to the other wearing the same clothes. This is the biggest pain-point today in the growth of the Open Metaverse, where if you buy a pair of Adidas shoes in one Metaverse, your avatar can still wear them in another. Now you can’t.
Interoperability is Metaverse’s driving force. Let us use the internet as an example. Our internet has different layers that enable diverse networks and devices to interact. Our identity travels with us in the real world when our bodies move within spaces and across locations without any issue. We can even transfer our assets and belongings from one location to the other without any need for significant changes. Hence, continuity ensures in the real world, which keeps us and our assets intact when we move. For a world that merges our physical socio-cultural interaction with digital identity, some of these elements need to be incorporated. Such incorporation would make 3D digital assets interoperable, and the virtual worlds will become part of a bigger entity.
Interoperability of 3D NFTs will create cross-metaverse bridges and enable users to retain their possessions and avatars when they move between metaverses. Indeed, possessing digital assets or having virtual experience will be more appealing when we can move into another metaverse seamlessly. Interoperability is crucial for creating a seamless and open metaverse.
Smart MFG: Solving the 3D interoperability problem of the Metaverse
Smart MFG aims to solve this by launching the first 3D NFT Marketplace for interoperable assets across Metaverses targeted to digital 3D Modelers, 3D NFT Makers, physical makers, 3D Concept Artists, and Gamers. Being on the marketplace would aid them to personalize and showcase their digital collections in virtual reality galleries, authenticate their work with a tokenized certificate, set their prices, run auctions, and collaborate with other onboarded creators across all platforms.
The benefit of adding interoperability to the 3D assets is two-fold: creators have the opportunity to sell their NFTs, not once, but many times to be used across all Metaverses; and gamers increase their liquidity opportunities by having a lot more assets available to lease, buy and play, thus increasing the Play-To-Earn economy and their earning potential.
Overall, Smart MFG seeks to create an alternate universe in the Metaverse, not just a flock of 3D communities that are accessible by only their members.