Tom Graham on Metaphysic’s hyper real metaverse content and virtual avatars

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Blockware Capital for Investment Pitch Media and the Crypto Coin Show. And today on Blockchain Interviews, we have Tom Graham, co-founder and CEO of Every Anyone and Metaphysic. Tom, welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. So much to dive into in the metaverse space. I know you

0:21have quite the insight and I'm excited to hear what are the next stages in how the metaverse is becoming becoming our next reality. So, let's just dive straight into it here. I would love to start with a little bit on on your background and knowledge in the metaverse and what led you to starting Every Anyone and then we can dive into the details. Fantastic. So, to set the scene, I guess

0:44um Chris Ume, the creator of deep Tom Cruise, which maybe lots of people have seen on TikTok, the kind of hyperreal deep fakes of Tom Cruise, uh and myself um and some other co-founders, we created the company Metaphysic basically to build the technology, the AI models to create and automate the process of making hyperreal synthetic content at scale. And so, the

1:07hyperreal part is it's like deep Tom Cruise, it kind of looks real like it was shot with a camera. Um and the synthetic part is where, you know, the AI models do all of the heavy lifting of creating the content with very little human inter- intervention. Uh which is like really different than CGI, which is like heavily human kind of curated and then

1:28the software used to create CGI is, you know, human-created software. Whereas, you know, we build we're using kind of GANs um and deep learning algorithms to automate the process of making that like really realistic uh content. So, that's Metaphysic. Um you know, that's that's our mission, that's our goal. And then, we were thinking um how do we kind of scale

1:51this idea of hyperreal content in the metaverse to every person, every internet user on Earth? And how do we put individuals at the center of controlling who they are in the metaverse? Because when you kind of have your data, my face, my voice, everything that makes me me in the real world, you take that data and then you get AI algorithms to make personalized

2:14interesting content and when it's out there in the metaverse, I feel that I should control who I am. I should control that data and whoever, whichever content platform or metaverse platform or render environment, game, etc., but you know, I'm appearing in as my hyperreal self, I want to kind of be in control of that process. So, to that, we created um our web3 platform

2:35called Every, Any, uh sorry, Every, Anyone and the website's everyany.one. And basically, anyone can come and create their own hyperreal synthetic avatar. And then, you know, today you mint that as an NFT um and we kind of manipulate the latent space um of the big model to kind of um you know, we can transition genders, you can get older, you can get younger, facial expressions.

3:02That's kind of like the level of interactive content that we can do today. But it won't be very long before you'll be able to be that avatar, be yourself in a hyperreal sense in deep Tom Cruise quality content um in metaverse platforms um as they pop up. Uh and everything, I believe, is probably tending towards hyperreality in the metaverse. Wow, very interesting, Tom. Um I'm super

3:27fascinated about this and I feel like this is leading into, you know, you see in the sci-fi movies like holographs of of people, you know, a phone call and it looks like they're actually there with you. I feel like this is the next version of of, you know, NFTs uh in the metaverse are a basic level right now and we really need to get that depth in there. And I feel like the

3:47metaverse overall needs to continue to grow in terms of, you know, the quality and the bandwidth and and how it can support something that is hyperreal and super good quality. Maybe you can talk about where you see the metaverse at right now and and where Metaphysic is at with it. Yeah, perfect. So, one thing that I find fascinating is um that, you know, we all

4:09have a everyone many people on Earth um billions of people have kind of a Web 2 internet experience and we do a lot of things online. Um and then, you know, I think that the metaverse will be the visual layer of computing on top of our current internet experience, you know, the next 10, 20 years. More or less everything that we'll do, you know, instead of

4:29e-commerce going to buy something at a shop, I'll be trying it on inside the metaverse virtual shop with my hyperreal face, my body and I can see exactly what it looks like. Um so, I think that the metaverse will eat the Web 2 internet from that point of view. Um but that means that it has to be billions of people worth of deeply personalized, hyperreal, high

4:51production quality content. And that, from a technical point of view, you can't have individual people doing the creative or like the hundreds of people that build the like relatively realistic world inside Call of Duty or some kind of um really awesome game today. Um or the, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on making the CGI for a movie to make like

5:11special effects. We just don't have um the ability to create content like that for billions of people and still have deeply relevant personalized experiences in this highly visual metaverse. So, I think the metaverse will, you know, there'll be a lot of gaming, more gaming than there is today. There'll be a lot of cartoon, hypercreative avatars, but

5:31there'll be this large section of the internet which is also in the metaverse where we'll just have to be ourselves, our hyperreal selves. Um work, parent-teacher interviews, trying on stuff in shops, uh pretty much lots of things, you know, online banking or something horrible like that. But um that So, from a technical point of view, um, we can only go from data we collect in

5:53the world around us, which is like hyperreal by default, right? And then directly into AI models that automate the content creation process and the interpolation of that data into virtual environments and render um environments, game uh engines and stuff like that to create the virtual experiences. Um, and they will, uh, you know, kind of like just automatically, it's

6:17easier to create hyperreal content at scale than it is to create curated creative high production value content. And so, that's, um, the first reason that I think the metaverse will be hyperreal. Just technically, it's an inevitability, I think, of scale. And then, um, the other one is that places that you turn up to as yourself, um, uh, in your everyday like work, um, Zoom

6:41calls, etc. We're doing this, um, you know, with video. Um, you know, it's just more appropriate to be yourself. And we spend a lifetime building our identities and being happy or unhappy with who we are. And, um, you know, I'm always I don't know which like colored unicorn avatar I want to be, you know? It's a Like I I'm a big gamer and I love, um,

7:02uh, like this concept of recreating identities. But, um, if you're a single mom with two kids and you just have to go to this, uh, parent-teacher interview in the metaverse or work, um, it's probably you're not going to spend a lot of time reinventing a digital version of your identity. Um, and it may not be appropriate anyway. So, it's kind of, um, the mundane part of the internet

7:25future, which is going to be hyperreal. Um, and then the concept for every anyone is can we use Web 3 and NFT, um, and the technologies and the advantages of those to put individuals in control of their own data, which is kind of like your hyperreal virtual DNA, right? what makes up the ability to recreate you synthetically? Um, And can we allow people to really have

7:48consent and knowledge when other third-party content platforms create you as an individual inside their environment? Do you really know what you're doing? Are you in control of it? Yeah. And great point there and and that was going to lead into my next question. You know, when deepfakes first came out and and we saw the Tom Cruise video, it was like a red flag for everybody.

8:08They're thinking, oh, now and anything can be faked on the internet, you know, any video might not be real. Um so, how do we use the technology of blockchain and NFTs and whatever other AI you're using to solve those problems of impersonating others and having things go wrong and and having your data being taken over by other people? Because we're kind of pioneers in the

8:33synthetic media deepfake space and Chris, my co-founder, who's really the leading kind of AI synthetic media artist, and you know, he thinks of himself as a VFX person, but really he's an incredibly gifted data scientist, you know, from a computer science point of view. That's you know, with our with our vision, that's what Chris is doing. From a creative point of view, he's an amazing

8:56AI generative artist. Um so, he has been there in this community leading it for since the very very beginning. And this is kind of the DNA of Metaphysic and Every Anyone where ethics and ideas around consent and empowering individuals to be in control of synthetic media when it's created in a hyperreal way, that's really built into what we do. And so,

9:20um that is behind basically creating a conference series called Synthetic Futures, behind the which talks about and creates content around that, ethics in synthetic media. Also, Every Anyone is really the backbone of that. Sorry, I've totally lost my train of thought. I'm super jet lagged in LA. I'm No problem, Tom. I'm curious, you know, you mentioned

9:47about the influencers and creating this hyper real content. And I want to know like what are the next stages from where we're at with decentralized metaverses, you know, in in Decentraland or Sandbox and and the quality of of graphics that they have and and the gameplay that it's currently at. What are the next stages in getting this technology implemented into the

10:07everyday? Yeah, absolutely. So, today a lot of kind of metaverse experiences, content experiences are very um uh pixelated, low resolution, game, relatively simple game engine based. And increasingly people are rolling out really sophisticated versions of that at the full extent of what game engines can deliver. Um so, in order to bring that bring the

10:34hyper real into that because humans are such good computers at understanding uncanniness or something is off with a CGI face and voice, you know, we're really just so good at understanding that. Um finding ways to bring AI modeling and those techniques that we use in deepfakes into um game engines or other content experience render platforms, etc. Whatever people

10:57are using. That's one of the core tasks of Metaphysic. So, we build the tools, the integrations, everything that a content creator um kind of needs in order to work this stuff into their content experience. And so, then, you know, on the Everyanyone side we're creating that positive economy where you as an individual it's really easy for you to have

11:23control over your data and consent to being inside that upcoming personalized content experience. And I I I remember the point that I was trying to make before the question that you asked which is around like how do we stop people from doing bad things because we've been in the middle of this from the very very beginning. Um basically I think that creating that positive

11:45economy is the best way to crowd out the nefarious and you know ill intent of creators who are doing things like deep fake pornography, doing things without people's consent, misinformation, deep fakes for political purposes. You saw the one with Zelensky and Ukraine. We do a lot of work behind the scenes as an industry. There are only a small number of people

12:12companies etc. in the industry and we all work together really hard to kind of create awareness and debunk or pre-bunk these kinds of malicious uses but creating that positive economy where you actually have an avenue to be in control and it's not you know like a third-party content creation company that's like oh yeah, we just didn't know that we didn't that we

12:34had to like ask people's consent to make hyper real versions of them but we collected a billion users data already so like what are you going to do? Like that that I think is really important to try to just create a paradigm where there is a way to do it right and still have individuals empowered and not kind of disenfranchise them in a in a way that's

12:52like really profoundly intertwined with our physical reality and who we are. Yeah, well said Tom and and I'm glad that you reverted back to that. That's valuable information and I want to talk a little bit more about you know every anyone and the name says it right there like getting anyone and everyone involved in this. Can you talk about the stage on on how people can get involved

13:14in this right now and and help contribute or help it move forward? Awesome. So we're just launching it now and you can go to every.any.one. There are the best way to get involved just to join our community on Discord or Twitter. Um and that is just um spinning up today. And so, then what we're going to do is um about um 10 weeks from now, about 3 months from

13:39now, you'll be able to come and create your own hyperreal synthetic likeness as an avatar and mint that as an NFT for free. And the idea is that it's locked to your wallet. So, you can't kind of like sell yourself or sell your virtual DNA, but what you'll be able to do in the future is um create uh subsequent NFTs where it's maybe a um kind of a mix-up of your visual DNA, but

14:06say your favorite performer, like maybe it's Lady Gaga and it's like visually Lady Gaga and she has consented, you know, to I'm not saying that we have a partnership with Lady Gaga, but hypothetically, the celebrity, the talent person um has consented. And now they're allowed their fan base to use their visual DNA and create themselves in the style of

14:26Lady Gaga and maybe it's a limited run of that. So, then as the technology progresses over time, any of these characters that you have which are hyperreal versions, it's original content kind of personalized deeply towards you, but it's maybe you in the style of David Bowie or you as a mash-up of uh Lady Gaga. As the technology develops and the render platforms and the content

14:47experiences are more hyperreal in the metaverse, you can be any of these characters um going forward um and we build out the support and the different uh experiences over time for that. You can be any of them at the level of like fidelity and hyperreality that you get out of Deep Com Cruise in the future. Um so, we think that it's an amazing way to scale fans

15:08towards and audiences towards people um with uh who are celebrities or, you know, who have fan bases um and it could be also, you know, any uh any movie character from any period in time. It could be Tom Cruise from Mission Impossible 1 or Top Gun or it could be Elvis Presley from the early period because bringing people back from the dead is obviously

15:34possible. So that will be the kind of the the future of how we build up this kind of library of people that we want to be based on ourselves and then we can use them anywhere in the in the metaverse. The very first thing that we'll do though though is um create a collection of people that don't exist. So we're going to launch in about 6 weeks from now

15:54an NFT collection which is our core community collection designed to reward our community, bring them together and it's 10,000 um hyper-real avatars of people which are totally fictional. So the models can kind of uh infer people that don't really exist but they're still hyper-real and you can see that on the every.any.one website. You can see some examples and

16:18we manipulate the vector space to change people's gender um to kind of change age, you age, you de-age, you smile, you can move around and a bunch of other kind of vector space manipulations inside the model that will allow people to play around with and that is kind of that the these are like the prototypes more or less for these hyper-real avatars and so

16:39we hope that that will be the the mechanism to bring our community together and then shortly thereafter you can create your own hyper-real likeness. Amazing. Incredible technology Tom. I'm really excited to look into this when I'm able to create my own avatar and I will check out the NFT drop as well. I will leave the links to every.anyone and Metaphysic in the description box below

17:01for the viewers who are also interested in this technology. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about all things metaverse and and AI and I'm really excited to see this in action. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on and all the best uh in the near future. Fantastic. Thanks a lot for having me.