Will interoperable avatars be essential for the open metaverse? | Timmu Toke

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In February, Ready Player Me launched an experimental trial where players can use generative AI to create their own avatar outfits in a variety of games. It combined the explosive trends of generative AI and user-generated content, and the New York-based company hopes it will take us to the open metaverse.

I did a fireside chat on this subject Timmu Tõke, CEO of Ready Player Me, at the SXSW 2023 event last month in Austin, TX. Tõke has been addressing these trends – as well as the broader trend of personalization among a new generation of creators – for a long time. He started the company (now based in New York) in Talinn, Estonia in 2014. And nine years later, the company's avatar platform is used in over 6,000 games.

And these avatars are interoperable. In October, Ready Player Me released its Avatar API which improved cross-game avatar interoperability. The goal is to allow users to take their cross-game avatars - and the economies that grow around them - wherever they go in the metaverse, whenever it comes together in a big way.

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While some large companies are taking a walled garden approach, Tõke wants to see the open metaverse happen. Ready Player Me could be a de facto standard if its products win in the market. But the API is part of an effort to provide standards both in games and in the metaverse. It took a year to do it.

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One question is whether the biggest companies in the industry will support the Ready Player Me API, or whether they will all go their own way or adopt a different technology as the standard for avatar interoperability. So far, Ready Player Me has Web3 partners like Spatial and VR Chat, and it has enterprise customers like Verizon. But it would be nice to see more triple-A game companies join us. Someone has to stop the metaverse from being a tower of Babel.

We talked about these things and more, including ideas for how the Metaverse might come to life, during our talk at SXSW. Here is an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi and Ready Player Me's Timmu Tõke at SXSW 2023.

GamesBeat: Please tell us more about yourself.

Timmu Tõke: I'm the CEO of Ready Player Me. Ready Player Me is a cross-game avatar platform for virtual worlds, for the metaverse. We see people spending more and more time in virtual worlds with each passing year, with each passing decade. That's why we started the business nine years ago. The Metaverse is not a single application or a single experience. It is a network of thousands or millions of experiences and worlds. It makes sense for you, as a metaverse user, to have an avatar that travels with you through human...