Robert Gryn is a serial entrepreneur who has built a high-tech Metaverse scanner which he hopes will act as a portal from our physical reality into the Metaverse.
It is no secret that the physical world is beginning to merge with the digital, and that blockchain is serving as the arbiter of reality in many of these nascent metaverses. Gryn, CEO of MetaHero, is doing his part to make that new reality as real as possible, creating high-definition 3D scans of people, objects and animals that you may soon encounter in games, virtual worlds and NFTs.
After spending a decade building European marketing company Codewise in Poland and even being featured on a Forbes list for the nations richest, Gryn left it all behind and moved to Dubai while building a solution with which he hopes to onboard the next billion people to the blockchain.
Privacy worries
Gryn excitedly lists the potential applications of his full-body Metaverse scanners for things like digital fashion: Youll be able to scan yourself in your underpants, for example itd be very easy to try on not only digital fashion but real-world clothing, he says.
But, this raises a serious concern. What if some privacy box is left unchecked or the system is hacked and I find my digital clone as the unwilling star of an AI-created adult video?
Is this my eternal form? I got scanned into the metaverse by , where, with me bearing witness, Gryn launched his scanner to great fanfare and amazement after only months of development.
I figured out quite early that if I put myself in the position where I have no choice but to succeed, then I will succeed, he says with infectious confidence.
Gryn scans himself, launching the scanner at Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit . Photo by Elias Ahonen
The scanner
He called up his friend the Polish Elon Musk Mariusz Krl, CEO of 3D printing and scanning company Wolf Digital World, and suggested a partnership through which to scan our reality into the Metaverse. Krls company has been working on 3D photogrammetric technology for eight years, and the entrepreneurs set out to build a scanner made of 200 Sony cameras, 1,500 meters of wiring and 20 computer units. When the team demonstrated their scanners, which are each capable of 150,000 scans per year to Sony, they were amazed, as they didn’t even know that something like that could be done with their own equipment, Gryn recalls.
Heres how it works: The scanned item, whether a human, cow or object, is placed in the center of the scanner. The lights shine from every direction to evenly illuminate every surface while the hundreds of cameras capture a simultaneous image from all angles. These are then spliced together by high-powered imaging software in order to create a realistic 3D image that can be inserted into any digital space, whether social media, a video game or the metaverse. It might be a perfect way for a performer to create a lifelike avatar in which to perform at an Animal Concert in the Metaverse, for example.
Were going to build the largest database of 3D scanned people and objects in the world, Gryn explains, regarding his vision. He sees this as an important step for the building of the Metaverse, adding that creating a hyper-realistic in-game character that resembles a human, with blemishes and everything is a difficult and expensive task. Once you build a database of hundreds of thousands of scan items and people, the use-cases for that are so limitless that sometimes it boggles your mind, he says excitedly.
Over four days at @dxbontheblock, we scanned over 300 incredible people, transferring them to the metaverse. We’ve also captured their impressions and opinions about this unique experience, to show all those who couldnt be with us at the conference what its like to be scanned. pic.twitter.com/ydYqs3aRks
As far as he knows, no comparable 3D scanner exists unless maybe theres a more advanced one somewhere in a top-secret basement in Hollywood. Especially notable, according to him, is the scanners speed which means were able to do scans so quickly that were able to capture practically any animal and import it into the Metaverse say, your dog, Gryn explains.
Metahero scanners are meant eventually to be available around the world, with scans payable in Hero tokens which were launched in July. The tokens exist on BNB Chain in large part due to high fees on the Ethereum network. While some have gone to investors, a portion is earmarked to provide incentives for people of various walks of life to be scanned as bonuses, in addition to the potential royalties they might earn from the use of their images.
1% of the total supply or hero token is dedicated to paying the first 100,000 people $1,000 equivalent in our token to get scans you get paid to get scanned, Gryn boasts.
Though Gryn envisions a future where mass adoption of the Metaverse could see people earning their livelihoods just based on their 3D avatars that they can monetize in various ways, he admits that the future is not quite yet not when it comes to realistic Metaverse avatars.
This is because todays Metaverse applications do not support the high-definition available through Wolf Digital Worlds scanner. For this reason, were building technology to allow you to scale down quality because 16k is not going to be supported for the next maybe 5 or 10 years, he says.
10 years down the road, the Metaverse will likely be almost indistinguishable from our everyday reality something that you log on to and have your own space there, your NFTs, your artwork, your apartment.
