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Thank you for your interest in this webinar “How can the Metaverse support inclusivity through language” hosted by Interprefy’s Platform Partner Manager, Jonathan Hudson, featuring guest speakers Danny Stefanic, CEO MootUp, and Tucker Johnson, Co-Founder of Nimdzi Insights.

The on-demand webinar is available below. Enjoy!

Webinar Transcript

Jonathan Hudson: [00:00:00] Yeah, the metaverse offers a radically new experience for the events industry from the creation of your own avatar, like many of you, will have done today. I particularly noted Tucker’s trousers that are very strong. The customized and immersive brand worlds, the metaverse is fundamentally changing the way we connect and interact with our friends, colleagues, and businesses across the world.

Jonathan Hudson: According to earth web, that was reading a little bit. The metaverse has a protected market size of over $800 billion by 2024. So it’s fair to say it’s slated to become the next big thing in technology. In fact, I’m sure Tucker and Danny will tell me that it already is. So it’s a great question. How do we engage without cultural and language barriers standing in the way?

Jonathan Hudson: And we’ll be talking about some of that too. I must say that today’s webinar is hosted on the meetup platform. They provide this provided this incredible metaverse environment. Morris and terrify are providing live [00:01:00] interpretation for you, which is far our widget above our, of our heads. If you can see that on the screen and we’re providing live interpretation in German and French Spanish.

Jonathan Hudson: So firstly, hello to coelom and Hugo who are providing the French interpretation. They’re fun. And Suzanne, the German and Irish, and Monica, the Spanish. Thank you in advance guys for your hard work on this. Before we get cracking, let’s do some introductions. So my name is Jonathan Hudson. I’m the platform partner manager.

Jonathan Hudson: Here at Interprefy. So let’s hand it over to Tucker. Do you want to go first and introduce yourself?

Tucker Johnson: Yeah, thanks for having me. My name is Tucker Johnson. I am one of the founders of Nimdzi insights, market research, and consulting and district company focused on language services. 

Jonathan Hudson: Thank you, Tucker, Danny, over to you, my friend.

Jonathan Hudson: Do you want to introduce yourself to the crowd?

Danny Stefanic: Yeah. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the platform as well. I hope you’re enjoying this unique way of running an [00:02:00] event. So I’m Danny Stefanic. I’m the CEO of MootUp and a long-time veteran of the virtual reality industry, for nearly 30 years now. 

Jonathan Hudson: Fantastic. Thank you, Danny. 

Jonathan Hudson: So the plan is today to cover three main topic areas for you. And the first one will be kind of the metaverse. What is it? Why is it significant? Why is it different from what we’re used to? We’ll also be talking about inclusivity. What does that mean in the metaverse space? What are the different facets of it that we need to consider?

Jonathan Hudson: And then our final topic is going to be around languages. How are they supported also? What are the cultural impacts of just putting languages into a digital space like this? And I know tuck has got some pretty great opinions to share with you on that particular subject. That are the three main topic areas.

Jonathan Hudson: Please feel free to use the questions area as well. We’ll try and cover some questions at the end of the session. So we’re going to [00:03:00] start off with a very important first question. So first of all, gents, what is the metaverse and why is it significant? Why is it different? So Danny, do you want to take this one first?

Danny Stefanic: Yeah, gladly. So the metaverse isn’t a new concept. It’s been around for a long time you know, way back in the nineties, even we’re building virtual worlds for the internet, but I think now it’s really come of age because there’s just so many, a convergence of technology and capabilities that have come together.

Danny Stefanic: But the real, the real definition or the real explanation of what the metaverse is, is this really, you know, a 3D virtual world. Where people can be co-present, where we can be together in the same experience and have shared experiences. And later we’ll, we’ll probably talk about how you can do that with different devices, but that’s really the gist of it.

Jonathan Hudson: Very cool. Thank you, Danny. Tucker, do you want to jump in?

Tucker Johnson: Yeah, I just like to add to this, I think to a certain extent we. tend to kind of freak out with this. Oh, the metaverse it’s [00:04:00] new. It’s happening now. And if I’m, if I’m not getting in there right now that I’m missing out and it’s been my experience that the metaverse is something that’s kind of evolving over time.

Tucker Johnson: I don’t think we know what the final format is going to be. I think you see us a lot, especially in with businesses, trying to understand, like how can I utilize the metaverse to better understand my customers? And better reach out and communicate with my customers. I think there are a lot of moving parts that haven’t really been settled yet.

Tucker Johnson: So it’s still very evolving, but very much building upon things that are already in place. Such as online community, social media gaming is a big one that has been around for a very long time. 

Jonathan Hudson: Fabulous. Thank you very much for that. I think one of the questions that a lot of people are keen to understand this.

Jonathan Hudson: Why is it so different? So why is the metaverse so different? You know, the traditional space, we know it involves avatars, but what else is different about it? 

Tucker Johnson: Well, one of the main things that I’ve noticed, and this is. It’s [00:05:00] not the metaverse isn’t the first thing… it’s not the first platform or modality or thing to do this, but it’s, there’s always online, like virtual real estate. So this meeting room is the same meeting room where we did the sound check-in. It was the same meeting room that we met in last week to kind of talk shop about this event that we’re coming up in.

Tucker Johnson: This it’s always been here, I’ve come and like lurked through the halls of this conference room when nobody else was here by myself. So it’s just an always online place, whereas before online events and still, to a great extent, online events are very much planned or planned out ahead of time.

Tucker Johnson: Here’s your webinar link. You log in at this time, you use these credentials and there’s not just like this place where you can come hang out. Now, what I think is cool about that is there’s a different, there’s a much lower psychological barrier to just dropping in and hanging out somewhere. Then there is to like actually sign up and intentionally go and do something.

Tucker Johnson: And it’s something that I [00:06:00] really started noticing with the recent rise and even recent or recenter, more recent fall of social audio. We were at some of us remember clubhouse and Twitter is coming out with space. Everyone’s coming out with it. They’re late to the game. And I think the party’s already over on that, but that kind of introduced us to this idea of these, these rooms that you could go to, clubhouse would have rooms that you can go to drop in, you can listen, you can turn your mic on, you can turn your mic off. It could be on a fly on the wall. And that’s what I’ve really come to, to like.

Jonathan Hudson: Yeah, it’s almost that the clubhouses of the world were almost a one-day environment. And yet we find ourselves in this incredible space where you’re represented in an audio and a visual and almost a cultural sense.

Jonathan Hudson: I have the ability to choose rockstar trousers when I was doing my avatar. And, you know, that felt like an important step for me.

Danny Stefanic: Yeah. I think one of the important aspects is that we’re moving to [00:07:00] a real-time web, right? So, you know, we’ve got lots of people streaming and we can watch streams.

Danny Stefanic: We can jump in and see things going live all the time. But you know, ultimately the metaverse has been around in isolated, virtual worlds in walled gardens at games for, for a long time. But what we’re looking at now is standards and interoperability that work across the entire browser ecosystem.

Danny Stefanic: So now people can jump in and be part of something that’s going on in real-time. So there’s a much more human interaction instead of organizing a webinar or a zoom call in advance. It’s more like, look, I’ll just jump into your virtual office or who’ll have a hallway conversation somewhere is more serendipitous and much more like real work environments, for example.

Danny Stefanic: So I think. That’s the shift, the monumental shift that’s happening. And we’re really only at the foothills of it right now. And we’re really just at the beginning. So I think the estimates you’ve made about the revenue size are actually small when we start to account for virtual goods [00:08:00] and NFTS and all the stack of other things that you know, are opening this ecosystem.

Tucker Johnson: I think that’s an interesting thing. Well, it was just to add to that. You mentioned, you mentioned interoperability and I think that’s key. That’s going to be huge. And so I’ve when metaverse I, well, when Zuckerberg redefined, rebranded as Metta, and that’s when everybody kind of started paying attention to those, I know Danny, you guys were doing really cool stuff way before that, but you know, when all the headlines came out, I jumped on the bandwagon.

Tucker Johnson: I said, all right, we need to check out this, this metaverse and see what potential applications there are for Nimdzi and being a consulting agency we need to be able to tell our clients, like, is this something you need to get into? And if so, how, like, what do you need to know about the metaverse? Because they don’t have time to do all that research.

Tucker Johnson: That’s why they, that’s why they work with us. Right. So jumped in headfirst built my own little Nimdzi metaverse. The Nimdziverse and you can, you can reach, I think it’s, [00:09:00] metaverse.Nimdzi.com, but it’s built on a different platform and it was just kind of the first platform I came across, piloting it out. So that was, my experience with that.

Tucker Johnson: And it’s persistence-based. Check it out and read our case studies over there and everything. But what I really liked about this MootUp platform as we were preparing for this is that I can log in with my Google accounts. Right? So you’re talking about this interoperability, right? It’s coming to me on my terms.

Tucker Johnson: I don’t need to create a completely separate account. I don’t need to wear a VR headset. And I think that is a crucial thing that we need to talk about is there’s this misconception that in order to enjoy the metaverse or take part in it, you need to have a virtual reality setup and you don’t well, in some cases you might, but companies like MootUp out there.

Tucker Johnson: I mean, the smart ones are making it interoperable so that you can dial in from your PC and still kind of see the 3D world if you’re not experiencing it with the controllers and everything so [00:10:00] much, but it’s interoperable. You can access it on your PC. You can access it on mobile. You can access this with a VR headset.

Tucker Johnson: I think the next stage of interoperability is the metaverse and online world and online universe. Let’s just say filled with multiple worlds. The next thing that I’m kind of waiting for is how am I going to create my persistent self in the metaverse or even, is that even something that I will want, we’re talking about persistent spaces that are always there.

Tucker Johnson: You can visit any time. How do I have the same avatar that I can use across these different worlds they can use and MootUp? I can use it in VR chat, I can use some spatial.io. I can use it in Fornite if I want. Right? And I think that’s, that’s what I’ve got my eye on to see, to see who wins the standardization war.

Tucker Johnson: Right? Where are we going to standardize the assets, the avatars, the models, and things like that? 

Danny Stefanic: Yeah, that’s a super interesting topic, certainly. [00:11:00] You wouldn’t imagine going into a business meeting or maybe work, with some game-based character holding, you know, some weapon or something you know, at the negotiating table with you know, panel.

Danny Stefanic: The future could be very interesting. But I think the standardization of models is good. But I think we’d stayed you’ll have different habitats for different sites. Just the same as you might have a different profile picture on a gaming website than you do for LinkedIn. But, what someone suggested in a recent talk was having traits that follow you across. Maybe your eye, color, maybe aspects of you that, that flow into all those versions that, that resonate without having to, you know, have the same avatar identical across all the systems. And I thought that was a really smart approach. 

Tucker Johnson: Yeah and that brings up an, sorry, I’m just jumping all around here, but that brings up the question of, to what extent does your avatar, should your avatar represent [00:12:00] yourself?

Tucker Johnson: And I think that’s a question that we are coming to, that we will have to come. As a side society, are we going to see situations where it’s there are fo paws, there are things that we shouldn’t do with our avatar if I wanted to have a female avatar, but I actually IRL identify as a male. Is that cool?

Tucker Johnson: Is that not cool? Is there such a thing as virtual blackface? I don’t know. These are things that we have to come up with as a society because it’s going to come up, it’s going to come up and some people are going to learn the hard way and I hope I’m not one of them. 

Jonathan Hudson: It’s so true. I think that ability to express yourself in this, in this virtual space that we’re in is incredibly important.

Jonathan Hudson: Danny, we were laughing when we first spoke, weren’t we, about the ability to choose a beard for your avatar? You know, these simple things, well, let alone, if you’re a wheelchair user, for example, or you know, that there’s all manner of things to consider that you might [00:13:00] want represented or indeed might not want represented in the metaverse.

Jonathan Hudson: So this idea reminds me of Blade Runner almost more human than human. And how do you have this persistent self in the metaverse and do we think we’ll get to a stage where you, where you almost start to accessorize and buy things in the metaverse? I did read somewhere that I think it was somebody paid $4,000 for a Gucci bag in the metaverse, do you guys see that being.

Danny Stefanic: Oh, certainly. And then look at it, now, how many friends do you have online versus in the real world that you see? So how much of the expression of self is in front of others that you might be concerned about? So the way that we express ourselves and the way that we’re seeing. I’m going to use some, some very materialistic terms here, but like, you know, a fancy watch or car or a house, you know, only a certain number of people get to see that, but online your avatar and your three-dimensional room and what you’re wearing, all of these things have much greater viewership, just like they do, you know, watching your [00:14:00] Instagram feed or anything else.

Danny Stefanic: So that the value that people are willing to pay to be unique and, and to be liked is significant in the virtual realm.

Jonathan Hudson: Yeah, of course. Fascinating. 

Tucker Johnson: I would say, like, where are you doing that? Anybody who’s been a member of a game or a free-to-play online, massive multiplayer online game. And it’s customized their sweet armor sets before they go and, you know, paid the extra five bucks to get the matching shield and all that stuff. There’s already transactions taking place in virtual worlds online with quote-unquote virtual assets or even virtual real estate. You see, you see that in the news to people that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for quote-unquote virtual real estate.

Tucker Johnson: And, and then we get into the question too, of blockchain NFTs. And that’s a whole quagmire that I frankly try to. I’d prefer to avoid today because this is the wild west out there. And I don’t think that the future of [00:15:00] NFTs is what a lot of people think the future of NFTs is going to be. But then again, I’ve been, I’ve been frequently wrong before, and also there’s this, this concept of well, yeah, we’re already doing it, yeah it’s going to happen. People are going to be spending money in the universe, buying virtual things. And I think it’s one thing to acknowledge. This is something that is happening, or this is something that will happen, or this is something that people like doing. And it’s a separate conversation to have about: is this sustainable?

Tucker Johnson: Is this something that can last because these online virtual, you know, economies are, are being created, but these economies aren’t don’t have. You know, decades or centuries of controls and regulatory bodies that have evolved in the real world to control monetary policy and all of that stuff. So they’re just, it’s people are making a lot of money, but people are losing a lot of money and here in the US anyways I understand they’re starting to [00:16:00] step in and regulate NFTs and all of that stuff, but as usual, government’s going to be 10 years behind when it comes to regulating and overseeing technology, because most of our senators can’t even log into Facebook without third grand niece’s help. So we’ll see. 

Jonathan Hudson: I think it raises an interesting point around the technological requirements that you need to access the metaverse.

Jonathan Hudson: You know, we think about language and we’ll come to that as, as we talk more, but in order to access language and in order to access the metaverse fundamentally, do you think you should need a VR headset? Obviously, you don’t need it for MootUp, which is great, because it means it’s more accessible.

Jonathan Hudson: But what are the kinds of technical barriers and requirements do you guys envisage people needing, you know, both today in the future? What are the basics here?

Danny Stefanic: I’d like to speak to that. I mean, the use of VR headsets, is very empowering and it can do some pretty amazing things. But let’s face it not many people have [00:17:00] the millions of people do, but their average usage battery life is like an hour, for example. Unless you’re using something with a cable and quartered into another computer, but it requires equipment. And that’s going to be solved over time, but what I’ve seen is this and, and I, I started the virtual reality association back in 1994 so I’m a huge advocate for VR, but what I’ve seen is companies and people on the wrong side of what I call the VR chasm. Essentially they are looking at the opportunity as VR only. And until we get a critical mass of people, understanding and utilizing and problems being solved in VR, we’re not going to have the addressable market to make it really take off.

Danny Stefanic: So it is growing and it’s growing organically. It’ll continue to grow, but if you’re building something now and you want to include people from education and sector from government, from enterprise, you need to be cross-device. So the same experience should work on mobile phones, tablets, laptops, [00:18:00] Chromebooks.

Danny Stefanic: And work in VR and AR. It says any, anybody that says they have a metaverse platform and it doesn’t support AR or VR, they’re not, they’re not speaking truth. You know, there has to go completely across devices. And I think that VR chasm, a lot of people have built VR companies and now jumping back across to try and build a bridge.

Danny Stefanic: But I think the web itself is that. Right at the standards, we have in the web that allows you to use that like WebXR, which is a standard in all browsers now, allows you to use those high-end devices, then you don’t even need to install an app. So this is really a beautiful solution to the device conundrum.

Danny Stefanic: But you know, I’ve got to say, when you put a VR headset on and you’re in this environment here, everything is life-size the memories you create and the influence it has on you. Pretty impressive. So you go away feeling like you’ve had a real experience but that’s probably another 20% on top of the 80% would change, which is having people present.

Danny Stefanic: Unlike a [00:19:00] Zoom meeting or other webinars where people are just resigned to the text chat, you have real people with avatars, able to connect and communicate with each other and the audience is no longer invisible. So, VR definitely adds a huge layer of immersion and experience, but changing it to a first-person experience rather than just watching I think is the main shift.

Tucker Johnson: Yeah. And I’ll back that up too. Cause you know, I went out, I got my headset right here. I’m not using it right now. Cause I’m presenting and it sounds like so someone to myself, I can only speak for myself. Right. But before I dove in and had the headset and went and got cussed out by preteens in VRchat and had the whole virtual reality experience, I was thinking to myself, well, what’s the big deal? Especially if I can log in and walk around with my avatar on a PC? And I’ll tell ya, you understand what the big deal is once you actually experience it. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, [00:20:00] but there’s something, it makes it feel more real. And therefore it makes those experiences that you have in there feel more real.

Tucker Johnson: Like just before these people are coming up and give them giving me handshakes and you know, so-and-so’s requesting to hug you and say, oh, well, all right, well, at least we’re asking for consent, but it’s, it’s like, okay, this is weird, but it’s marketing something in my mind. I thought the poke button on Facebook was super weird back in the day.

Tucker Johnson: Well, and it was weird and they took that away. But I remember back in the day, when I thought, you know, liking something on social media, it was kind of it’s like, why, why am I doing this socially? Because social media was so, so new. So. It does, it does make a big difference. And going back to the interoperability, I like what you’re saying about the different levels.

Tucker Johnson: Like it needs to be accessible in a virtual area and via PC and mobile and all of this stuff. And, you know, going, going back to kind of the accessibility component of our conversation today, [00:21:00] internet bandwidth is a big blocker for a lot of people. Because one thing I learned about this headset is it can really suck the internet bandwidth from my router.

Tucker Johnson: So people in areas that have slower internet speeds or less access to broadband, they’re going to appreciate those other methods that aren’t using as much bandwidth. And I think one thing too would be to even take it down to the level of offering an option that is audio-only perhaps for events because I think, you know, I joked or not joked, but reported on, I would say the rise and fall of social audio.

Tucker Johnson: And I would say that, let me, I would amend that to say the rise and fall of social audio in super developed places because there are places like Africa where it’s taking off like wildfire, just because it, you know, lesser, lesser bandwidth is required. It’s more accessible to more people. Everybody has a phone that they can log into, even though everybody might not[00:22:00] have a PC. So, you know, going across platforms not only makes it more accessible to like the usual suspects, but it also really makes it accessible to a whole group of people, a whole class of people, I would say out there across the entire world that typically wouldn’t have access to such fancy events, you know, in the metaverse.

Jonathan Hudson: I think it’s such a good point about how we engage a wider audience. And I know a lot of the people watching today will be from the events industry. So it feels right. We should, we should talk about that a little bit. So how do you guys think the metaverse is going to change the events industry over the coming years?

Jonathan Hudson: I mean, some might say already it already has, but how do you think the event space is going to change given what we’re now capable of doing today? 

Tucker Johnson: I think it already has. You said it right there. It’s already changing the events industry. That’s why we’re. Right? And for the good for the [00:23:00] better, I would say if your goal is to grow your audience, grow your participants as much as possible, but that usually is the goal for an event organizer.

Tucker Johnson: Then the metaverse definitely helped with that. These online, events that we’ve seen pop up. We would not be, I mean sorry, Danny, but we probably wouldn’t be sitting here today if it wasn’t for COVID, you know, the three of us specifically talking about this because the COVID the, the pandemic over the last couple of years has really acted as an accelerator.

Tucker Johnson: I remember I was in San Diego, California when the pandemic hit when they started closing down everything. And the reason I was in San Diego was, I was about to go to a conference that had to get canceled with two days, notice I was already there.

Tucker Johnson: And then I had to figure out how to get back home. And so we went to these online events and those have become popular. You [00:24:00] see folks in my industry of the localization industry certain, certain organizations have really embraced that. But what I think we’re going to see a lot moving forward, we’re going to have to see this moving forward as more hybrid events. And I don’t care if that’s virtual metaverse or I don’t care if that’s just with a dial-in, on the Zoom type option, but the events industry has really been opened up to a truly global audience over the last two years. And the companies that tried to close that the event organizers out there that try to close those doors are soon going to find themselves struggling, in their businesses. Because people are going to expect the hybrid option and an online place like this. But very hybrid environment is a great way to offer that because it’s not that it’s just an additional layer. You can have the video feed upon one of these three screens. You could build a room with eight screens and you can have a video feed for each different track and you can let people sit here and select which [00:25:00] audio they want to listen to.

Tucker Johnson: The options are just, are just out there. I think we just need to figure out what does that looks like? What does the monetization strategy look like? The devil’s in the details of course because everything needs to make financial sense, for the event organizers as well. And I’ll just say one last thing too.

Tucker Johnson: In addition to adding those additional platforms, modalities ways to log in and everything like that, event organizers are gonna be needing to open it up to additional languages as well, because when you’re running a hybrid event than it is online, when, if it is online, then by default, it is open to about 7 billion people around the world.

Tucker Johnson: And most of those people do not speak the language that you speak, whatever that may be. So we’re gonna need to see interpretation, take bites machine technique, our speech to speech machine interpretation, I would argue has a very, very significant role to play just because of the sheer volumes. There are not enough interpreters in the world, living in [00:26:00] debt throughout the history of the world to interpret the amount of spoken audio that’s going on in one hour in the metaverse today.

Tucker Johnson: So there’s going to need to be a machine option, but there’s also going to need to be a human option because when you’re having an event like this, you’re going to want to make sure that your attendees that are speaking languages other than the source language, the event language are going to feel just as included and just as taken care of and just as taking just as cared about as the source language speakers.

Tucker Johnson: And with that, I’ll, I’ll stop my diatribe. Just interrupt me if I start talking too much. 

Jonathan Hudson: Tucker it’s all good. I’ll interrupt you if I need to, but I think the point here is important. It’s about the audience’s demands. You know, there, there’s an assumption that so many people speak, you know, business English and, and, and that’s not true for an enormous proportion of the world.

Jonathan Hudson: So obviously here at Interprefy, we provide remote [00:27:00] simultaneous interpretation and we can let you do hundreds, hundreds of languages, and we can provide live captions and we can really help people understand the content in their own language, which is super important for, you know, that’s a part of inclusivity.

Jonathan Hudson: But maybe it’s a question for Danny. The audience demands, how somebody runs a platform. How do you see that? What sort of things do you need to cater up?

Danny Stefanic: Well, I know when I think about it, we’ve got a lot more online events now than we’ve ever had. And a lot of them are presentations being spoken at by presenters, and it’s easy to lose attention span and engagement.

Danny Stefanic: And so you need to have a way that the audience. You know, a part of the experience, not just a passive observer and, and, you know, obviously we’re not all going to make events that are as exciting as a Hollywood, you know, smash-hit movie. So to keep people engaged and, and watch it. And hopefully what we’re saying today is keeping people [00:28:00] engaged as well.

Danny Stefanic: But I think what you really need is a combination of great content, great presenters, but also, the audience now is demanding an experience. They’re demanding some form of engagement to keep them attentive to what’s going on because it’s easy to open another browser tab. It’s easy to pick up your phone and do something else in the middle of an event, especially if they go on for many hours.

Danny Stefanic: So I think you’re seeing shorter event times plus much higher engagement expectations together form actually a really powerful way of improving communication. And it’s about time we did that. You know, if you can say what you want to say in 20 minutes, do it in 20 minutes, just because you’ve got an hour slot it doesn’t mean you have to fill out the hour. So I think, you know, we can have ways of improving that engagement and a number of different ways. We’re seeing event companies all across the board with different ideas and different, it’s almost like the camera and stage of evolution. There are all these event companies trying new things for engagement.

Danny Stefanic: I love it. And some are going to work some aren’t and some are going to [00:29:00] learn. But this is really the the exciting time for this industry. So, although it was already on that path, the pandemic really accelerated that and the innovation and in some ways the spend, you know, with some companies getting, you know, hundreds of millions, if not, you know some, almost half a billion of funding to, to, to investigate one being in the events industry means you know, that certainly is going to fuel that engagement experience side of things.

Jonathan Hudson: Absolutely.

Jonathan Hudson: I think we’re going to get into inclusivity a little bit more in a minute, but I just want to pick out, pick out a question from Monica and the audience, which is a great question. And she, basically says that we need the option to translate in all languages and we need texts to make the universe accessible to all.

Jonathan Hudson: Now, obviously providing live simultaneous interpretation through humans like we’re doing today. One, it requires fantastic scale and I’m very grateful to our [00:30:00] interpreters for that, for their expertise today. But how do you guys see that? Do you think we need to try and somehow provide almost an always on language service and the metaverse or?

Jonathan Hudson: One of the things that we see, and I get this from my kids is that the metaverse is almost carved up into language pools. So if you want to hang out in English, you go to this room and if you want to hang out in German, you go to that room. How do we balance this? 

Tucker Johnson: I think as I said before, and I’ll probably say again, the devil’s always in the details, right?

Tucker Johnson: So when you say we need to improve accessibility, I would say, all right, first, I want to have a clear definition of we, I want to have a clear desk definition of need. And I want to have a clear definition of accessibility. If we were actually having this conversation a one-on-one because the devil’s in the details.

Tucker Johnson: I would say that because the levels of accessibility that some people may expect may not be the level of accessibility that are feasible to provide and in a scalable way, [00:31:00] this is why I say speech to speech. Machine interpretation is going to need to take apart when we’re talking about accessibility, though, all whats, who are the languages that are left out from advances in AI, machine learning natural language processing, they’re the languages without large corpora of data.

Tucker Johnson: To help train those engines i.e the languages of lesser diffusion, the languages of the somewhat say the most, the most vulnerable communities out there, the ones that are in the most dire need of accessibility. And I think the extent to which that we can and there’s great work being done by different organizations out there.

Tucker Johnson: There’s like women and voice. For example, I was talking to their presidents not too long ago and they’re doing a lot of great work about trying to collect data, for these different languages. But that brings in a whole different as they say the details, right? This brings in a whole different debate about who owns languages because if [00:32:00] we’re going to be collecting data or creating data or harvesting data on different languages, which usually it looks like some form of bilingual written or audio if you can get your hands on it, bilingual content that you can use to train, train engines so that they can improve their output. Well, who owns that data and who has the right to it, who has the right to illegally, who has the right to it morally who has the right to its spiritually.

Tucker Johnson: There are, there are a lot of peoples out there that their language to them is sacred and it’s part of their culture, part of their community. And they don’t want a company, like believe Lionbridge was in the news, a couple of years back with the Māori language there, we’re working on building machine translation engines for the Māori people over in New Zealand basically said, ah, this is our language.

Tucker Johnson: We own this language. And there were suing. I don’t want to get, I don’t want to get called out for liable myself, check my sources, people on this, but you’ve also seen it down in Chile, I [00:33:00] believe with the Mapuche tribe. This is, this goes back decades with Microsoft wanting and Microsoft, and we would be smart to, to learn from it where they thought we’re going to go and we’re going to translate, we’re going to, we’re going to do the world a favor, right?

Tucker Johnson: We’re going to go and translate into all of these lesser languages of lesser diffusion. And sure, we’re not going to make that big of an ROI on it, but we’re going to do it. And what they ran into is different tribal leaders saying, no, you can’t do this. And actually trying to block the use for the publication of their indigenous languages by Microsoft.

Tucker Johnson: So… Raises a lot of concerns. Not, not a lot of concerns, I would say, I would say there are concerns that already are or should be raised, which raise a lot of questions and they’re questions that are not going to be solved today. You know, as you know, three dudes from developed countries talking about the metaverse, these are questions that are going to [00:34:00] need to be negotiated on the societal level.

Tucker Johnson: Like society is going to need to come together and, you know, your best, your best consultant is your customer. Right? And we had another way of thinking that is society and their reaction to it. And as a society, we need to figure this out just like as a society, our tolerance for machine translation has grown in the last 10 years.

Tucker Johnson: Sure. The output of machine translation has improved a lot as well, but today we just take, if we’re on Facebook or if we’re on LinkedIn, you know, any of these social media platforms that have an automatic translation function, then we are communicating, no, we are having relationships with people in different languages.

Tucker Johnson: They’re posting in Russian. I’m responding in English. We’re both using the machine translation and we’re skipping the, you know, the whole translation. We’re skipping the whole language barrier and jumping right to the relationship, [00:35:00] which I would argue. Relationships are the ultimate goal of communication and communication is the ultimate goal of language.

Jonathan Hudson: What it starts to play too. And if I just think about Monica’s question for a second, obviously I think there’s an ideal state where you can get every single language catered for in every event. And wouldn’t that be incredible, but one of the things that often we think about when we think about language is, the differences between accuracy and meaning and context.

Jonathan Hudson: One of the things that we know are, very valued interpreters bring to the table is it’s not just a translation of languages. It’s not just one word into another is what do you mean? And it’s, I think that’s the the value. And when we think about accuracy, we recently did an event for GlaxoSmithKline, which was about the vaccines and the development of the vaccines and those kinds of scenarios, accuracy is extremely important [00:36:00] and having a human interpretation of what does somebody mean and, and how does that manifest itself in a different language is really important. You know, you can’t kind of leave that to chance. Do you guys see that? Maybe it’s a good question for Danny when it comes to chat in the metaverse and, and how we handle languages.

Danny Stefanic: Yeah. I think we obviously have a lot of technology on these platforms.

Danny Stefanic: This platform is also used for learning and training simulations, where you go in and do virtual training with a virtual customer or a virtual patient. And you know, there are, I think, 50 different languages supported for text to speech and speech recognition. And in the platform itself, I Tucker I really like what you were saying about these different languages and the ownership of that.

Danny Stefanic: These are things I’d never even thought of that a community, a group that has a language is his attention attached to it in a way that they don’t want other people to take advantage of it. There’s just such a unique thing to think about. But I do agree. We’ve been [00:37:00] using the tools to translate webpages and since that’s been a standard thing, it’s incredible, the amount of extra content I’ve been consuming in different languages.

Danny Stefanic: It’s just been extraordinarily powerful for me, but you have to be a bit of a mind reader. You know, you read through the automatic translations and kind of half-guess what it’s like, it’s kind of like speed reading. You’re just skipping ahead and trying to make a mental map of what might happen to me and hope that you’re on, on target.

Danny Stefanic: In fact, even more recently, I’ve been watching a couple of videos about the war in Ukraine coming directly from on the ground there. And the translations are awful, they’re spaghetti soup. You know, it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t even guess at what it’s meaning with the automatic translation, but when you think about what people are saying there, especially the political leaders, what they say and the tone and what’s implied, the words are all super important to make sure those messages are clear.

Danny Stefanic: And I think, you know, I guess I wouldn’t want to rely on machine translation for [00:38:00] those very important messages that are going on, that cost lives. So, you know, it is a very interesting and complex thing, technology will certainly get better and things will improve. Our platform has a lot of support for those capabilities as do many others, but I think you’ve always got to have a sanity check to see that what’s coming through, your what I sometimes do with Google translate is translate in one direction then back in the other to make sure that, you know, it’s, it’s kind of making sense. Sometimes it comes out different. So you know, those sorts of things can be insane but at least wise to check- my little input on that.

Jonathan Hudson: No, it’s fantastic and I see that Mike’s put in the chart, it’s about transporting emotions, which is a very powerful way of putting it, isn’t it? You know, and that is one of the things that you can get from, you know, the interpreters because they’re hearing it in such a way and it’s animated and expressed in such a way, from the original source.

Jonathan Hudson: So are able then to convey that.

Tucker Johnson: Yeah. It’s a higher context form of communication. Right? Yeah, I just got done. I just got back yesterday. I teach a weekend workshop at the [00:39:00] Middlebury Institute in Monterrey, and it’s about account management and communication skills, all of that stuff.

Tucker Johnson: And I’ve got a slide on a called I don’t know, I came up with some fancy name for it, like the channel communication channel, modality, hierarchies, spectrum, something I don’t know, but it’s essentially the message behind this slide is we move as we move along this channel intimacy spectrum that I’ve defined.

Tucker Johnson: We move closer to our clients. So it starts with an email. Email’s very unpersonal right. It’s asynchronous. There’s no expectation of an intermediate return. And then you’d go to like a text, right. Text is, is still a written modality, but it’s, it’s going to someone’s phone is going through different channels. Those are a little bit more intimate, moving up to phone calls, moving up the video call, moving up to real life meetings.

Tucker Johnson: And I would argue virtual reality, virtual reality systems, especially if it’s mixed, where they can see my avatar and they can see [00:40:00] my face, my eyes and my, you know what I’m saying? That sits firmly between the IRL that in real life and video chat. So it’s helping people move up that, that spectrum. And as you move up that spectrum, what you’re doing is you’re increasing that intimacy You’re increasing that relationship, you’re increasing that trust with people. Now, if we’re talking about accessibility and we’re talking about languages, we need to bring in not, not just spoken languages as well, we need to bring, we need to have a conversation about signs languages.

Tucker Johnson: So when we’re talking about ASL interpretation, a platform like this would have a great opportunity to have a, have a screen next to us with an ASL interpreter. You also mentioned captions, live captioning services are another option for ASL, although the ideal to always strive for is the in-person live interpreter.

Tucker Johnson: Now, as we’ve mentioned, it’s been the Cambrian period of online events, which means they’re just [00:41:00] proliferating all over a place, evolving, going into different things. There are not enough ASL interpreters in the world to be signing, all of these events. So when I talk about these things like speech to speech translation in rehearsed, speech-to-speech interpretation in real-time, when I talk about things like using/ offering live captioning services, either in addition to or in lieu of in actually spoken interpretation, then I’m talking about to meet the needs of scalability.

Tucker Johnson: I’m not talking about the ideal that we should strive for. Because if you think about that, the reason I wanted to bring up the intimacy spectrum. If you’re taking someone’s first language, which is sign language, and then you’re only providing captions. You’re essentially taking them down a notch on the communication and intimacy spectrum.

Tucker Johnson: You’re taking them out of their native language and you’re making them read a language that is not even their native language. English is not the native language of lots of deaf, deaf, and hard-of-hearing people. So I just [00:42:00] thought that bears mentioning any, I am painfully and awkwardly aware of the fact that this event is not being a sole interpreted right now.

Tucker Johnson: So sorry for calling out the elephant in the room, but perhaps that’s a good thing because it will generate, someone’s going to be upset about that. It’s going to generate some controversy. I liked controversy because it motivates us as an industry and as a society, frankly to do better.

Jonathan Hudson: Danny do you think this is an area, you know, when we think about how inclusive is the metaverse right now, you know, what, what barriers are there, do you think there are technical ways we can think about delivering things like sign language through the metaverse in a better way that is more difficult when you think about a physical environment?

Danny Stefanic: Yeah, I’ve seen actually a few companies over the last decades, working on automated ASL with avatars or bots 3D characters that will do that. And there are some interesting projects. I’m not [00:43:00] familiar with any that have hit commercial sustainability, but that definitely lots of research projects lots of startups that are working on this.

Danny Stefanic: And so I think it’s great. And I think now the environment is right for that to happen. So, I’m pretty excited about the prospects of adding those sorts of technologies in, and I think the metaverse itself as a larger opportunity for people to provide products and services into the metaverse opens the, the market space for that to happen.

Danny Stefanic: So there is enough going on that these, there is an addressable market as well for all of these 3D events. So 3D bots that can do that signing would be, would be a useful feature. So, therefore, building a service makes sense. Beforehand, I guess it was just too fragmented to build something that would be useful for a lot of different events, you just have to build for one platform for example. A part from that, but there’s, there’s a whole stack of other things to think about including audience getting more audience access to these types of experience, obviously the [00:44:00] devices which we’ve covered, you know, being able to work across the whole scope of devices.

Danny Stefanic: And for instance, in Africa, where we’re a lot of people are just their phone is their PC, their phone is the main device. And for that, you also need to consider bandwidth. We’re probably used to, you know, having good bandwidth, but essentially what we’re looking at right now is a 3D web page. As long as the web page loads and if you do something with avatars and chat, is basically using next to no bandwidth at all add audio, then you’re using the audio bandwidth on top where we’re kind of like Clubhouse. And then if you want to add video on top, then you’re going to require a little more bandwidth. We have people using this platform on 3G mobile connections, just fine.

Danny Stefanic: Heck, we’ve had people using it on you know in flight and on, even on their Tesla dashboards. Well, not while driving, but you know, it, it should be accessible just about anywhere and the bandwidth you know, requirements should be somewhat like video does video allows you to adapt to the person’s bandwidth connection as well.

Danny Stefanic: But most of the 3D experiences, games, et cetera don’t. They [00:45:00] require you to have a big, powerful PC and a great funnel of bandwidth to your home. And those things are a little bit restrictive. But there’s new technology coming that’s going to, I think half the bandwidth requirement in video in the coming years. It requires chips in phones, but that will be extraordinary, right?

Danny Stefanic: We’ll be able to really reach a lot more people with video. So I think the combination of that, obviously, avatars, having many different you know, inclusive looks and the way that they can be done. And of course, language, I think that’s really important. As I said, we use text-to-speech. Our bots can be programmed to speak in 50 different languages and you know, you can even speak to them using speech-to-text. And I think we’re integrated with three or four different AI brains if you like. So, Meta’s Wit.AI and Google dialogue flow and Rasa which is an open-source one.

Danny Stefanic: So you can have a natural language conversation with a chatbot in, in multiple languages. And that’s, I can’t wait to see more use of that type of technology. We’re really, you know, as I said, we’re at the [00:46:00] foothills of, of what the metaverse is going to be bringing us, and yeah. So it’s like the internet all over again for me. 

Danny Stefanic: It’s like back to the hay-day. 

Jonathan Hudson: So we’re going to try and pick up some questions shortly. So if you’ve got any questions, pop them in the chat now and we’ll see what we can cover. But before we come to those, one of the things that I find fascinating is how the metaverse might start to embrace real things or reflect real things that there was talk of, of Disney building, a theme park.

Jonathan Hudson: There was talk of using the metaverse to augment airports. So people could find their way around how do you guys say this going? Danny, you told me a fabulous story about the other day about somebody dancing, but which you must share, you know, it’s an exciting time. 

Danny Stefanic: Yeah, I think that reflects inclusivity.

Danny Stefanic: I mean, we run virtual worlds and consumer-based virtual worlds and games for many years. And one story it really stuck with me is we got letter sent to our staff from one of the [00:47:00] players. And it was from a lady who was wheelchair-bound but it was an avid, you know attending of this social virtual experience.

Danny Stefanic: And she was saying, not only does it allow her to. To build relationships and, you know, be co-present with others. But the real thing that, that struck me was how much she said it was important for her to be able to dance with her avatar because she couldn’t, and this was the most empowering thing being able to log online, hang around with people, and dance together you know, made her life just so much more fun. And in fact, you can do that in here. If anyone wants to, you can just talk ‘dance’ in the chat here. Your avatar could do a, do a little dance, choose one of a hundred random dance moves. 

Tucker Johnson: Even if I’m on stage?

Danny Stefanic: Yeah, you can even do it while you’re on stage. Yeah. So, you know, these, these elements of fun, I think are important. Yeah. So I think inclusivity can go in so many different directions and cover so many different things, especially with the technology that we’re growing into now. [00:48:00] It could be. Yeah. I can’t even imagine where we’re going to be in five years’ time with how people interact and what they can do and how empowered they are that it’s going to be a pretty, pretty fun journey.

Tucker Johnson: And I would, I don’t know how we’ve gone through this whole thing today without talking too much about augmented reality, right? We’ve jumped straight from virtual reality and back and forth across that chasm. But I think the smart money, that’s just my opinion. I think the smart money is on augmented reality because that allows, let’s say half of your team has headsets, half of them don’t, right? That allows you guys to like, have a happy medium ground, or you can actually be interacting with the real world while you’re seeing virtual reality. And, you know, I was thinking, you mentioned Disney was considering creating some theme parks in virtual reality and, you know, I would say, and I haven’t thought this out too much, yet.

Tucker Johnson: So interested in feedback in the comment section, but I wouldn’t say if they were really concerned [00:49:00] about, you know, accessibility or that the smart companies out there, instead of creating a new theme park in virtual reality, they would recreate their existing theme parks in virtual reality. And in IRL in those named parks, they would add augmented reality components to those brick and mortar actual imparts.

Tucker Johnson: And they would be providing the same experience. I think the ideal on once we’re talking about a lot of ideals, we’re talking about a lot of ideals here, right? But the ideal is to try to bring that virtual experience as close in fidelity to the real world as possible. And I think companies are looking at this the wrong way.

Tucker Johnson: They’re thinking I don’t want to cannibalize event organizers. Like I, this was big. This was big. When we first started doing all of this I talked to a lot of event organizers and they were worried about if I offer a hybrid option, am I going to cannibalize my participants? Because why would someone spend $1,200 on a [00:50:00] ticket and book a hotel and fly?

Tucker Johnson: You know, spent thousands and thousands of dollars to come to my event. If I’m offering a hybrid option for 10%, that price. And I think that the organizers that are afraid of cannibalizing their existing customers are, already… it’s outside of your control, it’s outside your control.

Tucker Johnson: And I think the damage to be done by not offering a hybrid solution outweighs the damage done to some people that might choose not to spend the big bucks for an in-person thing. And at the end of the day, you know, your margins are a lot higher. I mean, economies of scale and volume and all that stuff, but your margins going to be a lot higher on adding that virtual component to it because you set it up and sell 10 tickets, sell 10,000 tickets.

Tucker Johnson: It’s the same cost for you. You’re not having to call the caterer and order more salmon because you just got a new batch of registrations for your event.

Jonathan Hudson: I think there’s the point to consider around [00:51:00] the environment as well, you know, one of the great things about saying that the rise in virtual events and hybrid is that we’re, no longer having to fly interpreters all over the world, you don’t have to put them up in hotels. You don’t have to feed them salmon, as you rightly say, Tucker, you know? I think these environmental factors are very important, particularly as we grow in these spaces and the metaverse becomes more prevalent than actually there, the associated costs and the impact of our events is, is lighter.

Jonathan Hudson: And that’s good. Very cool. If there are any final questions, we’ve got a couple of minutes left, do put them in the chat. I can see it’s a lot of dancing going on. I feel, I feel like this is now turning into some kind of nightclub experience, which is just brilliant. But guys, are there any final points you want to make as, as we start to.

Tucker Johnson: I was very distracted because I was looking at the dancing. I knew I shouldn’t have turned around. I was going [00:52:00] to say it’s been very hard ever since I found out I can dance. It’s been very hard for me to concentrate on this conversation as fascinating as it’s been. I just want to dance again.

Danny Stefanic: While we’re waiting for questions I do want to pick up on what Tucker was saying about augmented reality and I think, you know, the real thing, just like the metaverse is getting some action and interest what’s underlying that is a media type called 3D and you know, when, when the internet came along, we repurposed text images, video, and audio, and made them digital.

Danny Stefanic: But 3D as a media type is relatively young. It’s only been around as long as computers before that’s architecture and sculpture and so forth, but we’re at a tipping point now where that 3D is available as a media type in all browsers. So it can start to become a media asset all on its own, and that works across the spectrum of all the flat-screen devices, VR and AR.

Danny Stefanic: And what we’ll see is that media type being used more and more across these different devices. And as AR is definitely the bigger thing than VR, you know, this is what I call the race to the face. Essentially [00:53:00] somebody is going to produce these devices and we’re going to be wearing them rather than looking at our phone every second, we’ll just have stuff in our vision which is really helpful and useful, but it’s also a hundred percent attention ownership by whoever’s supplying that device and ecosystem. So it’s a pretty big race that these tech companies are on, but underlying that is the use of 3D technology to present information and present experiences. And that, that industry again, is that the foothills and that, that is the birth of this new media type is happening once in the history of mankind. And it’s only going to grow and grow and grow from that. And it happens to be a superset of all these other capabilities and other media types as well.

Danny Stefanic: So I think that’s really interesting too, to be aware of is there an extra question in the chat?

Jonathan Hudson: It’s mainly dancing by the looks of it. If you do spot any let me know. But I think we’re almost out of time. I think we better wrap things up. So, first of all, my thanks to Guam and Hugo [00:54:00] Stefan and Suzanne, Iris and Monica for providing the interpretation state very much appreciated.

Jonathan Hudson: My thanks to the Interprefy guys for helping put all this together, our wonderful project management team. And especially thank you to Tucker and to Danny for their time and expertise and energy and dancing today. Which has just been first-class. 

Tucker Johnson: I’m going to screw up your flow here. I know you had a whole outro thing planned, but thank you to the audience. This is, this is, I do a lot of live streaming. I’m not a super VR guy yet, but I do a lot of live streaming and I think this is what we’re going to be seeing as we move into the metaverse the audience, there’s not going to be any, and you touched on this, I think Danny there’s not going to be these events where it’s just me speaking at you in a webinar, right? The audience is going to be every much as much of a participant as the folks that are on screen. And I think the metaphor is helping accelerate that facilitate that.

Tucker Johnson: So I’ll say thank you to everybody [00:55:00] out there in the as well. 

Jonathan Hudson: Yeah, second it, that’s such a great point. So thank you all for watching today. Thank you for joining us. We hope you found it useful and inspiring and fascinating. So guys, thank you so much once again for your time. And we look forward to seeing you at the next event.

Jonathan Hudson: Thank you so much, everybody.

Danny Stefanic: Thanks, everyone.