Ep 10 – Avatars, Profile Pictures and Digital Twins

You may have already noticed your professional contacts and friends changing their profile pictures to their digital twins avatars or NFTs they own. As you get more involved with NF T conversations online you will come across the acronym PFP which stands for profile picture.

Catalysed by the pandemic, Zoom calls, virtual meeting spaces and virtual events became the key way we were able to communicate and network with our peers. If you work for a company that uses Microsoft Teams, you would have already created your digital twin to show up for meetings. "Digital Twin" is as it sounds - an identical digital rendering of yourself that you create with the software program before entering the virtual meeting space. It is intended to look as you do in real life, so your colleagues can recognize you within the virtual space. In the metaverse space the acronym IRL stands for in real life. There are also software programs that let you create your digital twin and turn up to zoom meetings in this animated format. This is something that your colleagues may be experimenting with and could become popular over time get at this stage. It requires more technical skill. But if you have the time to explore that, please go ahead.

An avatar is different. Your avatar can be whatever your imagination desires. It is your alter ego. You can create an avatar that doesn't necessarily have to look like you, that can represent what you aspire to be. For example, your avatar could have a confidence and a swagger that you may not feel in real life. Yet in a virtual or gaming environment, you feel empowered to take on this persona. That's the beauty of avatars. You can design your avatar to look however you want to and it doesn't even have to be human. Furthermore, you can design multiple avatars and be different characters or personas across the different virtual environments that you choose to participate in.

Avatar creation is a major element of the Metaverse as it is the starting point of how you show up in a virtual realm. It is your identity in that space. If you wish to take that same character across multiple virtual worlds, you will be looking for avatar creation companies like Ready Player Me who offer interoperability.

We are all individuals and want to express our uniqueness. What we wear and how we accessorize is the most immediate way to show others who we are. Knowing the power of this, the fashion industry from luxury brands to fast fashion have thrown themselves into the Metaverse with the creation of digital fashion. They have joined forces with avatar companies to sell digital fashion and accessories for you to buy in cryptocurrency as NFTs to dress your avatar. Several companies have popped up designing digital fashion that you can even place on your selfies on Instagram. So the concept that we understand currently of an influencer working with a physical clothing brand is evolving and may disappear in time. Digital fashion is more sustainable and much more open to creativity.

While you may currently be thinking to yourself, I have never played a game like Fortnite or Roblox, so why is this important to me - one word, "Metaverse". As I've mentioned in earlier episodes, the Metaverse experience will become the way we interact online. You probably have already created your digital twin on Facebook and are using that in your posts or you have created your memoji on your phone and are also using that.Facebook changed its name to Meta because it intends to bring us a whole new way to experience connection with friends and family and that will be virtually.

Your favorite brands are already investing in the Metaverse by designing experiences for you within virtual games and worlds. So if you wish to engage now or in the future with these brands, you will be connecting your digital wallet to these virtual worlds and enter them as your avatar, to join their concerts fashion shows, product launches, events or any other number of offerings. It might seem fantastical now if you have never had any exposure to any of this, but for anyone in business this is a particularly exciting time for experimentation, creative expression and represents a very real financial opportunity. This is why brands are embracing the Metaverse and rushing to explore what they can do now. It is evolving and changing day-by-day. And I'm sure your feeds are inundated with new announcements from new brands and new Metaverse, companies popping up to set up these virtual worlds for you to enjoy. It may seem overwhelming, but this is creativity exploding and the creative industry getting behind it.

As I've said it in my intro to this podcast series, we are on the Metaverse train and it is hurtling to the future. And it's really fascinating how it's all tied up in this concept of identity and how you represent your identity online to the world.