Will interoperable avatars be essential for the open metaverse? | Timmu Tõke
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Back in February, Ready Player Me launched an experimental trial where players can use generative AI to craft their own avatar outfits in a variety of games. That combined the explosive trends of generative AI and user-generated content, and the New York company hopes this will lead us to the open metaverse.
I did a fireside chat about this topic Timmu Tõke, CEO of Ready Player Me, at the SXSW 2023 event last month in Austin, Texas. Tõke has been leaning into 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 being used in more than 6,000 games.
And those avatars are interoperable. Back in October, Ready Player Me released its Avatar API that improved interoperability for cross-game avatars. The aim is to let users take their cross-game avatars — and the economies that develop around them — wherever they go in the metaverse, whenever that comes together in a big way.
While some big companies are taking a walled-garden approach, Tõke wants to see the open metaverse happen. Ready Player Me could be a defacto standard if its products win in the market. But the API is part of an effort to come up with standards in both games and the metaverse. It took a year to get done.
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