Today’s guests are bringing in the ultimate metaverse technology aimed at empowering the world at scale. In this episode, Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger sit down with the Founder and Inventor of Ozone, Jay Ess, and the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, Dom Rodwell. They are bringing in 3D and graphics technology in the metaverse space like never before. The goal? Making it more accessible for consumerization as we step into the future of digital cyberspace. Learn all about the exciting things they’re doing with the platform by tuning in to this episode.
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Listen to the podcast here
Jay Ess And Dom Rodwell Of Ozone – The Ultimate Metaverse Technology Empowering The World With At Scale
This is Dom Rodwell Chief Strategy Officer.
I’m Jay Ess CEO of Ozone. The platform that is empowering the world with the ultimate metaverse technology at scale.
We are here in The Edge of NFT, the show that empowers you by keeping you up to date with the best projects in the NFT space. Keep reading.
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Stay tuned for this episode and find how Ozone has left no stone unturned in developing an internet-scale metaverse for everyone.
Also, why system thinking and resilience are the cornerstones to support our guests.
Finally, learn how to get dibs on early access to NFT LA 2023 by visiting 2023.NFTLA.live. We are set from March, 28th to the 23rd, 2023, and it’s going to be the can’t miss Web3 event of 2024. All this and more in this episode.
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This sponsored spotlight episode features Jay Ess, Founder and Inventor of the Ozone Metaverse along with Dom Rodwell, Chief Strategy Officer, focusing on product strategy and go-to-market. Ozone is building the fastest and easiest to use platform for designing and creating metaverse experiences. Whether you are an individual, a brand, an IP owner, or a DAO, they have got a solution for you. Jay and Dom, welcome to the show.
Good to be here.
Thanks for having us.
Thanks for joining us. We had the pleasure of chit-chatting a bit about some of the amazing features, elements, and plans of Ozone here before the show, and I’m excited to jump in. We feel like it’s important for our readers to get some background on the genesis of this project. Let’s do it. Let’s jump right in. Give us the scoop on the birth of Ozone.
I used to live in Silicon Valley for seventeen years before moving to Colorado. About the end of 2015, I was crossing Castro Street, Downtown Mountain View. For those who know it, it’s a mile down from the Google headquarters. I thought that the internet interface has not evolved since it was invented as hyperlink-based. Why isn’t it like a video game? That was the genesis question.
After a few weeks of thinking through this, I called my oldest friend and best friend in life, Alexis, whom I have known for many years, who is our Cofounder and CTO, and ask him about web technologies. Does he know about programming? We met up and he liked the idea of building a 3D interactive web platform. I remember early on, we met at Hacker Dojo in Santa Clara, and we were looking at different technologies like the Unity engine or the Unreal Engine, and we decided that we should build our own to make it web-native. The rest is history.
It was more of a hobby when we started. Eventually, we decided to do that in 2019. We incorporated in the UK because we found an Angel investor in the UK. He was super excited. Paul Gordon, a big shout out to you here. We have been pushing hard to build the platform. In 2021, we have invested heavily in building the blockchain infrastructure and released our token raise, NDT, and flow blockchain integration, which we are very happy to talk about.
People have been circling the metaverse for a long time and doing things in there, whether it was in the gaming space or things that are tangential to it like second life and these things that have evolved over time. It’s so interesting to understand the fabric of the history there, which goes to dates back a long time. You guys are part of that. It’s very cool to hear some of the elements of that story. Thank you.
We have happened to learn a lot about this core infrastructure of the metaverse through the show, but also one of our investors has been working on building vivid, real-life metaverse experiences. Another one of our friends works on concerts. I got to say, there is a lot to what you guys are doing. I want to unpack it step-by-step with you so that everyone understands what it means to be trying to compete with Unreal. This is not, by any means, a small fee that you guys are tackling here. Let’s break it down step-by-step and let’s start with the graphics technology. What does that look like to start with?
I will speak a little bit to that and try not to get too technical for our audience. Here’s the short version. 3D technology along with this dream of a metaverse like Jeff mentioned is nothing new. However, it’s been notoriously very burdensome to access, interact with, and most importantly, deploy. Getting people to see 3D in real-time was pretty much impossible until a few years ago, which is why most of the 3D we see is in video format.
Think about Pixar and all the Disney animations, where our love and our kids grew up in all that. We watched the movies. There are technical limitations to that. It’s to test the graphics technology, how big the files are, and so on. In 2012, new technology made its way to the web called WebGL, and it stands for Web Graphics Library. This is the first time ever a 3D model was able to be rendered and put on the web.
What’s very interesting is it’s only several years ago, but back then, the only thing you could do was a cube. Literally, you could only put a cube on the website and if you put the second cube, then the website crashes. WebGL has come a long way. We are supporting the latest WebGL 2.0 standard. It is a web standard. That’s set up by the W3C, World Wide Web Consortium.
In coordination with our partners and friends of the Khronos Group, which set all the standards for 3D graphics technology, we have been building on that. Our system is based on WebGL at the core. That’s the graphic side. What we have done at Ozone is we also have a very extensive web technology cloud that enables all the handling of the data or information integrated with the 3D technology.
That’s super helpful. I’m not a technologist and I understand what you are saying. I think that’s a start. I’m sure our readers will appreciate that as well. There’s also this marketplace and a platform so anyone can build or have their own metaverse. Can you break that down for us?
It’s not like a lot of the metaverse projects. The whole intention from the start, whereas that it was metaverse is the service. I use this phrase early on and I’m not sure if it’s entirely accurate, but if you think of it almost a way as the AWS has metaverse tooling. The intention is to provide all of the underlying toolings and the user interfaces with the methods by which people can build their own spaces and worlds. To put that in context, Ozone split into a number of key components, but there are a lot of them but the main ones are districts. The districts are the foundation of the Ozone Universe if you like and there can be an unlimited number of districts.
One of the critical things that the team set out to do is deliver as Jay mentioned. It’s a platform that could truly operate internet-scale rather than be constrained by some of the limits that you see in some of the other existing metaverse platforms. It doesn’t mean there aren’t technical challenges, and you’ve got to push the envelope and all of that thing.
Districts are the foundation element and Ozone is launching the Initial three districts and they will probably be a few more that Ozone manages on behalf of the communities there. Each district can include one parcel akin to many of that. It’s a metaverse platform that you see out there, and indeed they are going on sale for our genesis land sale. There’s not a hard and fast limit on how many land parcels can exist within a district, but there are additional districts.
We are going to have about 5,000 in each and we are going to sell a small subset of those in the initial land sale. They are two core components that we have got to the platform, but around that, as I mentioned before, we are building a whole set of tooling. There’s an NFT marketplace that enables users obviously to buy and trade land parcels, but there are additional layers of components on top of that. Some of which we think that our approach to them is quite unique.
There are accessories, which are NFTs. They are tokenized digital assets so they could be things such as vehicles, pets, and buildings. There are throwing things that you might want to decorate and style your land parcel. The layer on top of that is what we are calling Power Ups, probably because everyone understands what a Power Up is.
Power Up are NFTs, but they are tradable assets, which inject a land parcel with additional features. Those features could be custom lighting, ticketing, or commerce. We have got a huge pipeline of things that we are intending to roll out, and indeed, some of those Power Ups are going to be delivered in partnership with other organizations.
The Ultimate Metaverse Technology: That was the genesis question: Why isn’t the web like a video game?
We can’t say what those things are at the moment, but you can imagine some Power Up is giving you access to music from specific providers. It’s a wealth of possibilities in the architecture that we put together. A lot of our ability to deliver that level of composability and interaction between assets is very much. Thanks to Flow and Cadence and the fact that we have chosen to build on that platform.
It feels like those integrations are so critical to have all these elements dialed for this platform. We are talking to people that are asking about Web3 and why are we so long Web3? Why are we long NFTs? Why do we care about this? I always go back to the evolution from Web1, Web2, to Web3. There was a moment in the mid-’90s when nobody had a website as a business and nobody visited websites. It was there, but you didn’t do it. A decade or less later, everybody did, you either had a presence or visited a presence. The same with Web2 with the social presence.
To us, even though it’s still so early in Web3, the train has left the station. It is the same thing. Everybody will either have a presence and/or interact with other presence, or presence is in the metaverse period. That’s what we see on that horizon, but to enable that in this layer that you are building is critical. It’s essential and there are a lot of people trying to go at it from different angles. Those integrations, taking the care and being so deliberate and thoughtful about building out each of these pieces is going to be a distinguisher between Ozone and many other folks that are trying to do this, but maybe not tackling all these different elements. That is so critical and people miss that.
I 100% agree. I’m not one of the founders of the company. One of the things which sold me on what the team is trying to deliver as they are very closed-focus on consumerization and building a platform that is accessible where all of the benefits of the blockchain disappear under the hood. It’s super easy to onboard people. It’s super user-friendly to use this composability that we are trying to deliver with these tools. The common thread throughout my career is a continuous fascination with the consumerization of advanced technologies. It’s well-aligned with what we are trying to do here.
I don’t know about you guys, but I want to get a sneak peek at what’s going on here. When you talk about consumerization and builder, who are we talking about? We are thinking about how we have a builder track at NFT LA. We are seeing an array of definitions of who builders are to someone need to have an Advanced Calculus and Advanced Computer Science degree here to be a builder, or if not, what is the definition of your builders?
Look at the early internet and the 2.0, and then the Web3 space basically. Our original target is we call them the pioneers and we’ll show you a sneak peek of the upcoming website. We are rolling it out. It talks about the pioneer. Maybe Don can build up on that some more.
In terms of who these users are, there’s a range of them. We are not going to deliver all of this overnight. We have got a very clear roadmap internally and we shared a large portion of that externally. Our delivery of these tools is of course going to come in phases. One of the advantages that we have is that we already have a fully functional 3D engine that’s integrated with Flow. These are working. We’re spending on Flow Mainnet. There are very few other platforms that can claim not to do that necessarily, but to be able to deliver the kinds of 3D experiences and flexibility for users to design things that we can.
As with any early platform, a lot of our early users and builders are going to be fairly comfortable in the space. We are under no illusions around that, but we were very keen to very rapidly. My belief is that through the next years, despite the market conditions, we are going to see a wave of consumerization and adoption. We could debate the reasons for that forever, but we are going to quite rapidly see some of these tools become a mass market. That’s driven by the blockchains like Flow, which make it very easy and simple. A lot of this complexity is around wallets at the price and the security there. There are counter-arguments that we made around ease of use that reduces security, but it’s going to drive adoption.
I will say to that effect, some of these builders are assessable to others in the community like on Discord and whatnot. Say someone is excited about your metaverse experience, but they don’t have the chops to do it on their own. I’m sure they can find friends in your Discord and our Discord to help them build whatever they are looking to create, and these are opportunities for builders in this space to be part of your ecosystem.
I want to echo this very strongly because Tony Parisi, the father of 3D web wrote a Medium article called The Seven Rules of the Metaverse in which he made a very strong statement that the metaverse equals the internet. The metaverse is the new internet. For all our audience out there, I would say every time you think of the word metaverse, replace it with the word internet. Does it make sense? If it does make sense, it works. If it does not, it’s not metaverse.
That’s a good point. I fully agree with that. In fact, that aligns with something I was thinking about before we came on. If you talk to people about smartphones, their Instagram app, and everything else they have got on their smartphone, no one mentions the internet. Years ago, it was all about, “Are you going to go on the internet?” For 90% of people out there, it never crosses your mind that that’s what you are doing. You are engaging with the app and the tool that you are using. The metaverse going to be presented the same. In some respects, the metaverse becoming an un-useful label for some of this stuff. It’s both generic and means many different things to many different people.
I do want to add for the community to know that you don’t need to be a programmer, developer, or mathematician to build on the Ozone system, which cannot be said about other engines. We have this concept of a no-code development platform and also we want to roll out the SDK for the development community. We see this moving like the web. There are some drag-and-drop tools for mom-and-pops, kids doing projects at school, and nonprofit organizations. Anyone should be able to own this new 3D space.
It’s like a new website. That’s what it is. It’s the replacement of the website. At the same time, there are more advanced tools for game mechanics and programming. Things like physics, custom shaders, and more advanced where there’s a whole new creator economy that we see blossoming in the metaverse as well as services, which are already showing up all around the world.
Give us a sneak peek, guys. We got to get our eyes on what we are talking about here.
I will show you a couple of things here. We are going to be making some more roll-outs. For the land sale, you can see my background is the Di5trikt Zero, which is one of the first two districts we are going to roll out. In this case, it’s a Cyberpunk district and there are parcels there. What you going to see in this image is there are many parcels available.
One thing that’s cool about our parcel system is the different configurations. Think of websites or how you’d set up a different server for your web infrastructure. Think of that like parcels. If you are a small, not commercial metaverse creator, or you want to get a land in the metaverse like buying a domain back early on. You can come in and buy one for $300.
If you are a major IP holder or an entertainment group that has a bunch of artists in their portfolio and want to bring them in and make a venue. Working with a few of those, and we’ll make some announcements, we have some mega metaverse worlds. For commerce, entertainment, and shopping overall like accessories and so on. You need a bigger parcel, more room, and functionality like eCommerce, custom lighting, animations, and things like that. In that case, you’ll get bigger parcels. Dom’s background is the FlowZone. The word zone comes up by him. Do you want to talk a little bit about the Flow district?
The Flow district got a completely different aesthetic there. It’s named almost to Flow, the blockchain that we are building on. It’s got that more green futuristic feel to it. It’s got a similar number of parcels to Di5trikt Zero, but it’s going to have some unique features to it. I’m not sure if Jay mentioned it. I think he did, but all districts have community spaces within them that aren’t owned here. It can’t be acquired by the users of those districts and people looking to buy lands.
Those community spaces are run by the owners of several districts. In the case of the first three, they were owned by Ozone. Within the Flow district, we are looking to run events around developer events, other things the Flow community, discussion, and showcases. There are a lot of nice features that Ozone has gotten already supported as a platform. Things like screen-sharing, special audio, all of the stuff that makes up interaction, and those kinds of real-world use cases are really nice.
There is a community hub in every district, and they can be more civic spaces. We want to show you a sneak peek of the Flow community. This is a very early version. This is far from being completed, but you can see it running into a dump point. We are glad to have paid it forward. It is what we did. Without knowing we would be here because when we began, we wanted to make the web like a video game. It’s that hobby project back in Silicon Valley.
The Ultimate Metaverse Technology: 3D technology, along with this dream of a metaverse, is nothing new. However, it’s been notoriously very burdensome to access, interact with and deploy.
We are sitting here at the doorstep of the next generation of web computing and we are here to help. We are here to serve and make it easy for folks who save basically time and money. That’s why some of our commercial partners come to us. They want to get into the metaverse, but the options are limited. Our system enables us to do things like this. This is our sneak peek at the Flow community hub. This is an environment that is, in development, we prop this up now to share you guys have a fly mode where our full integrated avatar system.
It’s always good to describe what’s going on to the reader. We are in a colorful metaverse environment. There are urban elements buildings and tall structures. There are also some natural elements like trees. He’s jumping in and out of walking and flying mode which is fun, which gives you that feeling you are dreaming or something. Spreads his arms and legs out like a Superman type of thing. When we first entered the scene, there was a couple of sports car-type vehicle. I was very tempted like, “Let’s get in one of those and see if we can get one of those in our driveway.”
It’s the metaverse. We can have flying cars now. It’s all virtual.
For me, this is sharper and the transition of the gentleman in the suit as he’s moving is cleaner and faster than I have seen in other metaverse experiences of late. The buildings are not pixelated in a way that is distracting. You feel like you are hanging out on a different planet or a solar system.
That’s not reflected over a screen-share. Out of the box, it already works on the mobile web with no download. It works on a PC or Mac, but it’s also completely VR-ready. If you put on an Oculus and jump in there, it’s all fully immersive.
We have switched environments. How did that happen? This is a different land.
It’s the website. All our properties, everything goes on or does is web-based. Contrary to existing graphics platforms, which have you download an application, we are web-based. This is an expo center. We have used this space for exhibits, conferences, artists, galleries, and so on. Showing you another environment and a couple of cool features we have, not just the podcast, but we have every owner of the land has what’s called Admin Privileges. When you buy land on the Ozone Metaverse, you get access to it, which will come later. You’d be the owner through your wallet as an NFT, and we let you do things like this. This is a hidden control panel. For example, you can change the sky, and in real-time, go into a different environment.
We went into what looked like almost an underwater scene. You look up and you can even see some coral and stuff like that, but it’s the sky.
Hopefully, some folks will be able to see some of this. It’s on OzoneUniverse.com. I want to show something to Josh to explain to you how easy it’s going to be to build on Ozone. You go to the marketplace and you buy an asset then you come to your world. Let’s say, this is my world. Now, I want to place a bridge here. I go to my wallet and I can bring whatever asset I bought, like a bridge. By clicking on it, instantly, I customized the bridge in my world.
As you are going through those assets, Eathan was captured by the tree because we have got a Living Tree project. Can we throw a tree in there too?
Of course. Let me go in here. I go back to my plant collection. All the assets are organized in categories, but here are some trees. We have here a willow tree. We have the more fantastic pink tree.
What type of file format does that tree need to be in to be able to be put in that environment?
Here are more trees in the sky. Now the whole sky has trees. There is a new standard that’s been set up by our friends at the Khronos Group. They are in charge of all the 3D technology, graphic standards called a glTF. This has been introduced a few years ago. We have been using glTF ever since it was basically introduced in 2016, and it’s come a long way. We are the second generation. We have spent thousands of hours creating our custom glTF pipeline to have a very exclusive process that gives us these results. We have an uploader, which we haven’t shown yet. We’ll introduce it with the creator economy where creators can upload any 3D file, FBX, OBJ, or glTF. We will server-side, do the optimization, calibration, mint it as an NFT, and deploy it on a marketplace.
You can think of us like Sketchfab or Unity Asset Store. It’s a 3D assets store on the Flow blockchain. It’s what we are going to be introducing before the end of 2022. It’s already coming up. We can be able to take in any models and update them to the latest and greatest optimize the model, which is glTF because that’s what we use.
Josh opened up the can of worms there with the trees and all that, and I have got all kinds of technical questions, but we need to finish talking about some other things in this episode.
Can I throw one more thing? One of the things that you’ll see on the new website in terms of a preview. The other thing that we are introducing is what we call Liquid UI. There’s a completely new user interface that will be overlayed and replace all the controls that you saw Jay playing which is amazing. It’s like a fluid glass UI that morphs depending on what you are doing in the space and based on the context that you are in. We feel that that’s new and unique. No one’s taking an approach like that.
I’m not in this world so I’m fascinated with the Twitch world where people are watching while they play a video game and talk about it. You can tell about the grandpa perspective on that, but it’s interesting. We are doing a show now and you are opening up your metaverse. There are platforms where we can create a show on a website where we are all in stationary positions. This is not far down the line where there’s an integrated platform where you are all in the metaverse and you are recording your shows while you are all dancing with some Michael Jackson moves or going on a rollercoaster together or whatever.
You got me going down a rabbit hole. We envisioned like you got this DJ in the background, you got this visual artist mixing up in the metaverse in real-time based on what the community wants and what they are voting on. This can be an incredibly cool type of real-time experience that can be created with this type of technology.
Let’s get into the community support aspect of things, especially as it relates to Flow, VLT integration, and how the conditions have influenced all of this. What do you have to say on that topic?
To Josh’s point here, the live DJ and live event performances are definitely a great use case. One of our early projects was the Burning Man. We did the virtual Burning Man in 2020. It was way before the blockchain. We had the live streaming from Twitch that’s already on the platform. Spoiler, it would be one of the Power Ups. What’s cool here to transition into Flow is this composability component. We want to take NFTs and use NFTs for what they can truly be. It’s key to the future of digital cyberspace. We are starting to think of everything as an NFT literally. We can only do that, thanks to the Flow blockchain. It’s essentially endless access to NFT minting and so on.
The Ultimate Metaverse Technology: The team is trying to deliver a very close focus on consumerization and building a platform that is accessible, where all of the benefits of the blockchain kind of disappear under the hood.
We are super excited to be part of the Flow community. Wherever community-focused organization, we have been decentralized from day one. We have never had offices. We operate in an efficient and decentralized fashion with all of our contributors. Ozone is more of a lifestyle, not a job. The W word we don’t choose. It’s the work word. We don’t work. We contribute.
To send a shout-out to everybody out there, we are very open to collaborations and input. DAO is a big one. We are aiming at supporting the metaverse. We have already about six DAOs confirmed to come on board, own their land, build the community, and base their headquarters in Ozone platform in one of our districts. The Emerald DAO, for example, the first DAO on Flow blockchain, which is awesome is going to be in the Flow district. We have a couple of others from Miami. About 4 DAOs based out of Miami coming into the Cyberpunk districts. We are getting more confirmations every day.
Otherwise, when it comes to this land sale and the market conditions, we were looking at this. As some of you know, we’ll have the Ozone token, which is one of the very first fungible tokens in Flow. It is 1 of the first 6 fungible tokens on the Mainnet of the Flow blockchain. The market then crashed and we are not here to sell market conditions. We are here to build the future of the internet.
Honesty, for us, as a core team, the market affects investor discussions, sentiment, and so on. To be very blunt about it, we don’t care because we are here for the long-term. What we decided to do is to say, “How can we turn this into a positive?” Here it is. We are going to launch the land sale and we’ll do limited drops and releases of the land for the Flow community, Flow token holders, and BLT token holders.
The value we are going to honor for those tokens is from before the market crash. Everything was five times higher in value. Flow token was $5, and now it’s $7. Starting July 2nd, 2022, you’ll be able to go to the Ozone metaverse and buy $1,000 worth of land for 200 Flow for example, and the same for the Block2 token.
This is already implemented. The decision has been made with analysis to the Dapper Labs team when we did the AML. We are very excited about putting this best foot forward. What’s interesting is now, that it opens great community support for other ecosystems, too, because we can sell NTFs on the Flow blockchain with any currency.
I will leave it at that. That’s a little bit of commercial support. We want to help people recycle their token value somehow. If you have some Ethereum that’s crashed I don’t know how much, you can go on the market, swap it for Flow, come buy the NFT, and you’ll get five times your current value that’s in your wallet.
Obviously, we cannot do that for all parcels, but we want to sell this first job. We go here from the community and do whatever we can to support. That’s on the commercial side. On the technology side, for some of our partners like Edge of NFT, some of the DAOs and brands we are working with, we help with the technology development. Not only you can own the NFT and your land, but we can also help you with the build-out of customs for commercial applications and so on.
Being empathetic about market conditions and understanding how those influences elements. You want to have a successful sale, but we are thinking about what’s the value you are adding or providing to the community or could provide over time recognizing how long you are on what you are building. You are putting every ounce of blood, sweat, and tears you got into it, and sharing that with the community. That’s very cool. We don’t see a lot of projects do that, so kudos.
The initial launch is a flat rate for all land parcels. Two weeks after purchase, you’ll find out what size land parcel you get. It could be from small to very large. All land parcels also have a chance of getting a bonus artifact, which is an accessory. It could be a vehicle, plant, or pet that can come with Power Ups. It’s funny rare parcels also get bonus tokens when the TG occurs.
We are sitting at the doorstep of the next generation of web computing. Click To Tweet
That’s so cute but they also come with responsibility. You’ve got to walk in a few days.
It’s about making it fun. One thing we always talk about with my co-founder Alexis is it has to be fun. We want to have this as a culture for our company and our team. That’s why we don’t use the W-word, but also for the community. We want to make it this shopping experience. It should be shopping and browsing.
This first one is for the lottery as Dom said, “You spent $250 and you may get $5,000 worth of land.” We asked, “Who knows?” We don’t even know that at all, because we are going to have all that trend demise by an algorithm. We are very excited about supporting the community this way. I do want to say, in addition, in the community hubs, we are going to be featuring artists.
For all artists out there, please reach out to Edge of NFT, reach out to us on our Twitter, or come on to our community, but there will be lots of space available to feature artists. Whether it’s a 3D image, a sculptor in the real world, you are a 3D artist, or any artist or nonprofit organization. We invite them to reach out to us. We are going to introduce a grant-type program where people can go and automatically submit their stuff. We are here to prop up the community into the future of the web which we call metaverse.
Speaking of community and giving value or giving back is so important to us. Everything we do, give back as part of the projects that we work on. It sounds like Ozone has a very similar DNA. Everything we have talked about so far that there’s this value equation and it feels like you are constantly looking to give more than you take. We have heard about DAOs a little bit from you, but you are also donating to DAOs and other organizations as a part of the entire Ozone ecosystem. Could you tell us a little bit about that side of the business to give back elements?
NFTs are true ownership. Enabling true ownership of this new digital cyberspace seems like a great value from our viewpoint. It’s a great way to help. Through these partnerships, artists reaching out, and DAO relationships, there are airdrops that we can do. We have a budget allocation for lands and communities also for nonprofits and things like that. We will be doing also some land sales where part of the sales and revenue and the profits will go to different organizations, and we want to take more suggestions. Please, if you have any ideas of how we can support you, come into Discord, reach out, and let us know.
The other thing that we are looking at at the moment is we are doing a load of work on the economics platform. There’ll be mechanisms like leasing, renting, and so on for owners of the land. There will also be some taxation systems eventually, so owners of districts can raise funds to cover the costs of running their spaces and so on.
One of the mechanisms that we are looking at and are keen to do is allow districts and landowners to funnel some portion of their revenue that they make from the platform to young up-and-coming 3D artists who can help us shape. The kinds of artists that perhaps from underprivileged backgrounds might not get a chance to do that work, and to be able to bring them into the Ozone ecosystem, become part of the team and, eventually, maybe join some of the other communities we have got on the district.
Very impressive, guys. I’m so excited to be in the mix on the ground floor for everything you guys are building. One question we like to ask leaders in the space that come on the show before we move on to the next segment is, what inspires you when you look around at what’s happened in Web3 and metaverses got for way beyond the last few years? Where do you pull your inspiration for what you are doing in this space?
We are standing on the shoulders of giants. A lot of folks have done a lot of the work before us and have come up with some of the dreams that have inspired us. We are here to build the tools.
The Ultimate Metaverse Technology: Despite the market conditions, we’re going to see a wave of consumerization and adoption.
I’d say the same. Originally, I left head first into technology several years ago as a fine artist. I think I have carried a lot of that ethos into what I do in tech. The thing that gives me the most satisfaction is building tools that allow other people to do things. That’s been common through weird diverse sectors like FinTech throughout my career. Particularly in space providing people with the creative tools and the ability to build spaces, express themselves, and build things that reflect their imagination is powerful.
We appreciate you spending the time and walking through all these different elements. There are exciting projects and their game-changers. Everything you are describing and communicating indicates that you guys are well on your way into the category of game-changers, and we appreciate that. I’m excited to see where things go from here.
As far as the show is concerned where we go next is our second segment, called Edge Quick Hitters. We’ll do a little bit of an abbreviated one because we did go so deep dive into Ozone, which is very important, but it’s a set of questions that we ask to get to know you a little bit better. We are looking for short, single-word, or fewer responses, but we may go a little bit deeper if we hear something that we want to dive in on. We are going to do three of these and we are going to have each of you guys answer them and we’ll take it from there. Question number one. Dom, what is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
I’m pretty sure it was a Spider-Man comic book. There was a little comic store in my hometown. I grew up and I had thousands of secondhand comics. I used to go there when I was 6 or 7 with my dad and go through them all and pick out the one. The one that I wanted to do. It was the cover that made me choose which one I wanted rather than it being the next series. I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.
The following question is, are you like my four-year-old way? Did you dress up in like Spider-Man pajamas and run around pretending you are a Spider-Man?
Probably.
That is an Avengers hat you are rocking, right?
Yeah.
We have to say because it was so cool. We had Gareb Shamus talking about his project. He’s the original Comicon founder and he’s knee-deep and Web3 now doing cool stuff. He was out at VeeCon in Minneapolis meeting all these people that are lifelong comic fans, attendees of Comicon, and Seth Green, and all these other people that were so excited about having him there. He’s a super humble guy and everything, but what he created was this massive community and gathering. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Let’s shift over to you, Jay. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
For me, it’s simple. It’s great because I got some more time to think about it. It was a chocolate croissant at the local bakery down the street. It was cool because it has this little sugar icing with the vanilla. I’m not going to say when that was but it’s in the ‘80s. Let’s keep it there.
Where were you living?
That was in Morocco of all places where my family was originally from.
That’s one of the best pastries on the planet.
It’s always about this level of the show where we do start getting a little bit hungry. We’re thinking about that snack now.
It’s always about the food.
Question number two, and we’ll go back to you, Dom. If you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, and experience that’s for sale, what would it be? What do you have your eye on?
Eventually, it would appropriate a small house near the sea because I used to live in this city and I miss it. I also live near Manchester in the UK and it was pouring rain outside. I’d like to live somewhere warmer near a beach.
Sarasota is nice this time of year. Come check it out. Jay, how about you?
I think talent is the thing I’m mostly like interested in. Services that can help drive the vision forward.
That’s one of the most unique that we have heard.
The Ultimate Metaverse Technology: We’re definitely here to prop up the community into the future of the web.
Question three, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be? Dom, we will give you the go-ahead on this one too.
I’m not sure they would want any. One of the things that I’m good at is systems thinking. I’m good at looking at complex things, deconstructing them, and understanding how will the component parts need to fit together. While that’s quite a dry business-oriented answer, it’s been useful to me.
It’s critical. That talent is not particularly common that being able to think that way to deploy critical thinking in a systematic way. That’s gold.
It’s been very helpful for us as well. I appreciate Dom’s input and everybody on the project. We are a truly decentralized organization. There are so many skillsets involved to make this work, but it’s true that systematic thinking and strategy have been key and very amazing. I don’t know where it comes from, but mostly for the youth out there gone into the workforce in this new age, we live in. Flexibility and agility are key.
Ability to pivot, like you should be able to make a decision and change your mind without letting your ego come in and block your true potential. Also. working under stress is very important to learn how to manage stress. Be flexible in your decision-making, be willing to change, and learn how to manage stress.
We got to follow that up. What’s your biggest advice for operating under stress? Do you have any tips?
You do this with software like deadlines and management. If you want something on Thursday, set the deadline for Tuesday. Always have that as a buffer. This is a new thing I have been saying and I hear people keep repeating it. To me, perfection is the enemy of greatness. Iterate. It’s okay. Don’t stress yourself out because it has to be too perfect right now. Things take time, so give it time.
All of our relationships with failure and quitting or stopping doing something are complicated for most of us as we grow up, through school, and all these different things we experience in life.
We are prepped. We draw this image of what success looks like, and then if we don’t get there, we tell ourselves we failed, which is not always true. There was a song that says, “You don’t have to get first, but you have to know how to finish the race.” Cut yourself some slack. I’m trying to tell this to us on the eve of our launch. You can only imagine all this stuff going on the backend with engineering, which is blowing us up here but all is good and it can only get better. That’s the thing that helps.
That’s a gem. That’s Edge Quick Hitters for us. Thanks so much for sharing there. Thanks again for sharing everything with us on the show and taking the time out in such an intensive time period with the launch coming and everything to share with our readers what’s happening. We want to make sure that they know where to go to follow this amazing project and everything you are doing. Where should we direct them?
Our OzoneMetaverse.io is where it is. The land sale will be deployed on OzoneMetaverse.com. You’ll find us on any social platform. It’s Ozone Metaverse on Discord and Telegram. We are working on ramping up the community some more. We have been deep in engineering. We are looking and hiring folks who are into community management. A few executive positions are as well open as we are securing more funding, growing, and looking at the next phase of our post-launch journey. Everybody is welcome.
Check them out there, and we are on the street, we have a fun giveaway as well with some plots of land in Di5trikt Zero. We’re super excited about that. Very grateful, guys, for you to make that possible for our readers. Please keep an eye out on our socials for details on how to have a chance of winning one of those plots of land.
We have reached the outer limit at the Edge of NFTs for now. Thank you for exploring with us. We have space for more adventures on the starship. Readers, invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes right now, rate us, say something awesome, and then go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. We are also happy to announce for the first time on the show the dates for NFT LA 2023. That’s March 22 to 23, 2023.
It’s bigger, bolder, better, still as intimate and integrated with the art and entertainment industry, and there were so many other elements. Don’t miss it. Check it out. Go to 2023.NFTLA.live to get on that white list for early bird tickets, and you won’t be disappointed. Thanks again, guys, for sharing this time with us.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you, guys. Looking forward.
Important Links
- Ozone Metaverse
- 2023.NFTLA.live
- Dom Rodwell – LinkedIn
- Unity
- Unreal Engine
- WebGL
- World Wide Web Consortium
- Khronos
- Flow
- Ozone Metaverse – Discord
- The Seven Rules of the Metaverse
- Ozone Universe
- Sketchfab
- Unity Asset Store
- Liquid UI
- Dapper Labs
- Gareb Shamus – Previous Episode
- Telegram – Ozone Metaverse
- OzoneMetaverse.com
- Twitter – Ozone Metaverse
- Spotify – Edge Of NFT
- iTunes – Edge Of NFT
- Discord – Edge of NFT
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