Speaker 1: All right, all right, hello, Futurists, XR community, tech fans, artists, and anyone joining us today. My name is Celeste Lear, and I am an immersive VR event designer and producer. I do music and sound direction, I also DJ in VR as an avatar and in real life. I'm also a VR community builder, and definitely self-proclaimed activist on various levels, and I've spent the last three years on a quest to create and also to discover the best special events and parties in the metaverse. I feel very enthusiastic about these revolutionary new ways to gather. And because of this, I just wanna tell the world how unique, fun and unifying this experience can be when it's done right. And I've been really inspired and consistently pretty blown away by all the innovation, the artistry, the incredible technological advancements that are allowing us to do this and just really psyched to be a part of the various strong and supportive artists and business communities that are springing up on various VR platforms like Altspace VR, Sansar, VR Chat, Tribe XR is a personal favorite of mine. Neos is really, really cool. The coolest like user interface ever. All Ethos are friends of mine. Nowhere is a up and coming app. Virabella and the people behind these platforms And so many of us joining into this new facet of society, I like to say are kind of like pioneers. It's an exciting time for sure. And if you are listening right now, you are probably curious about how all this works from an insider perspective and perhaps how you can potentially join in the future. So one of my favorite quotes is, the best technology is the kind that brings us together. And I know that something a lot of us are very passionate about is finding ways to keep the metaverse more community oriented as in our metaverse in favor of equality, accessibility for all, fairness, safety, and privacy. For the community first and commerce second, but bridging those two together in a really healthy way and moving in the direction of wellness, education, a positive mental and physical health for people and promoting the arts, which is one of my big passions too. So the COVID lockdown helped to steer the public eye more into possibilities of life, what it might look like working and playing from home more. The world is changing so fast and the ease of use and desire for a variety of virtual event platforms is in growing demand. So many predictions are really coming to fruition as we see more of an exodus from into the XR entertainment world. And along with this comes a percentage of metaverse explorers who appreciate more activist-oriented and education to community events, combined with social aspects like festivals, music, things like panel discussions, things like meditation classes, art galleries. I've seen so many of these. And again, we all get to enjoy it from the comfort of our own home. The project I'm gonna be introducing to you here today and that you're seeing pictures and video of is the Act Now Virtual Reality Experience. And this is in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. And it's a really terrific example of not just a large scale event production in virtual reality, but also for community building, for education, for teaming up with a major organization, and some applicable context of how metaverse events can and are changing the way that we get together, the way that we exchange information, relate, express ourselves, and also gather in a more sustainable way. So I wanna give you guys a little bit more about my history. So just to start, so again, my name is Celeste Lear for anyone that's just coming in. And I'm an entertainment and event industry professional with 15 years of concert festival, nightclub, conference production experience, including immersive technology. I'm an expert in designing and executing successful, exciting, cutting edge events, both in physically and virtually in virtual reality. I've also worked very extensively in the music world as a music and sound director, a music producer, a sound engineer, and also a DJ. I've been a DJ for many years. It's been an amazing, amazing history to get to go through. And the precursor to the Act Now experience, which you see pictures of here, was that I was part of a team that installed high-tech international multimedia installations, including a video mapping experiences on architecture, and many of which were for the United Nations and UNESCO. So that was a bit of the history of how this most current project got started. So I am just going to dive right in. I'm going to show a little bit more of the the this video is pretty cool that we are team piece together. So how did the act now VR experience happen? How did it get started? Okay, well, always just starts with an idea and a bit of inspiration and some creativity. And sometimes you have to be really resourceful. And sometimes you have to go out on a limb. And oftentimes, you just have to push with all your might for months and months on end to get someone to listen to your crazy idea, right. So, um, that's kind of how it started. Um, so I had been a partner and working with Chris Cricitelli, my partner at Dreamland XR, which is a fantastic company that's based out of Vegas, but they do events, they do hybrid events and virtual reality and real life. Chris is great to work with. And so, yeah, it kind of just started with the inception. So the girl you're seeing right here, her name is Mia, and I'd worked with her on some of these physical locations that we would go to and set up these video mapping and projection experiences. I worked more as like a co producer and also music and sound director. And one of the experiences we were planning on doing in real life was in 2020. And it was supposed to be in Dubai, during the World Expo at the Al-Wasl Dome. And And the experience got cut short, or it never happened because of the COVID pandemic. And so we were waiting, waiting, waiting. And then I had been into virtual reality since 2019 and actually got my gear in 2019. So it was like perfect planning for the pandemic. But I came to Mia and I said, well, you know, we keep getting delayed, but there's a way that we could actually do this video mapping and projection experience in at the Expo Dubai 2020 simulation of it in the Al-Wasl dome. And so yeah again some of this footage I want to show you is a digital twin recreation of an actual dome in Dubai and this dome is actually here's a real picture of what it looks like. It's one of the world's largest, if not the largest, dome for video projection experience. It holds, I believe, about 5,000 or 6,000 people inside. It is considered the beating heart of the World Expo 2020 in Dubai. It was built and designed by a team of just phenomenal engineers. And yeah, so we pitched this idea to build this digital twin of the all wassail dome. And we, we made it happen. And wow, it felt really good. You guys, it was really incredible. So I'm just going to show you some clips and footage of what we did. And you can kind of get a sense of what it looked like. So it took many months, many, many months of pushing to make this happen, and a lot of teamwork and partnerships. And so we We are working on the act now campaign which is also kind of introducing a bit of activism into the metaverse, which is something I feel like is going to help us keep you know more community and something like a positive common positive vision of affects us all that we can that we can work towards. It's one of the reasons I feel very passionate about working on this particular project. So the concept again was this digital twin. We had had to have approval from many different people, including United Nations specific members. And also we ended up teaming up with UNESCO. And so for those of you that that don't know UNESCO. UNESCO is the branch of United Nations that it stands for education, science and culture. So it's the division that handles education, science and culture. And so one of the concepts we pitched to them is that we can help people learn about cultures around the world by designing different experiences that takes them to a simulation or a digital twin. So the first one, of course, you're looking at right now is Dubai. So we go to the Middle East and we did our best to work with our team of world builders and designers to make sure that we had accurate cultural representations of what life might look like when you're in the middle of Dubai, including looking at the beautiful visuals from the dome that we just saw And also like some of, we had like hand drums that people could come and pick up and play and palm trees. We also worked with some expert content creators to make sure that we got some really beautiful, very inspirational moving video imagery to go along with the Act Now campaign. So when you look at some of these images, you're also looking at pictures of some conflicting things things that we are you know our society struggles with like climate change and warming oceans and things that are affecting everyone so we we the design team wanted to incorporate the video and the audio so that the user had an experience that felt that was evoking empathy that that made them feel a sense of the wonder of this planet but also a sense of the urgency of what we're looking at the Act Now campaign, again, is the United Nations campaign for individual action on climate change. And there's 17 different sustainable development goals that they want us to now start helping people understand while they're coming into the metaverse. So one of our other challenges is going to be on how we can convey some of these really positive goals, these 17 goals into these world building experiences and how you can come in and learn about the SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals. One of the reasons I think that the United Nations was interested in working with us is because, and this is something that I feel pretty strongly about after three years of working in the metaverse, is a sustainability factor. So we actually presented this as a method for people to gather in a more sustainable way, because if you think about it, we had around 6,000 people come and attend this event in alt space, and these are all people that could have potentially had to have flown or traveled somehow to Dubai to have the same experience, which is quite a lot of carbon emissions. So events in in the future, I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of these hybrid experiences, where people can come in and basically get a simulation of experience that it's never as good as real life, like, let's all admit that it just can't happen, but it can be very creatively designed. So the footage you're seeing, we actually had a team of avatar drone videographers that did a great job of flying around, videoing the experience. And yeah, so back to the concept of sustainability and metaverse events. In the future, I think people will have to travel less. And let's admit that's a good thing in a lot of respects, okay, because if we're looking at the metaverse technologies as ways to take people off the roads and let you stay home more, it's going to be less stress, it's going to be less expensive for you, you're not going to have to buy as much gas. Maybe even things like car insurance wouldn't be as expensive. I mean, we're just looking at like the big picture here and how this can all play out in in more positive ways. I like the hashtag white mirror. Instead of looking at all these like really negative apocalyptic outcomes for technology. Let's really look at the useful ways that technology can really help us and basically give us these new next level tools for creation, for gathering, for partying. Like I'm a total party animal and those of you that follow me, now I have a YouTube channel called partying in the metaverse that I will go and document different experiences, just hanging out with people and going to see DJs and live music. And yeah, it's just a great way in the future, even staying home one more day a week, and just hanging out in the metaverse and doing things in metaverse, it's going to take a lot of stress off of our planet and our ecosystems. That's a big reason that I am behind this technology. And I'm doing my best to tell people through my perspective on, you know, how, how this could work. Here's a little demo I'm putting together, like a presentation on around sustainability, and the metaverse, and spend trying to spend a couple months on this to make sure that I can come at this from all aspects. Because while we know that there's going to be some really positive effects from reduction of global emissions from travel, it's still going to be a tremendous amount of electricity to use on, you know, the gaming consoles to be running these these fast computers that for VR and also some of the mining that happens to get to the different, you know, make the microchips and the components that go in the technology that we're using. So I'm truly trying to weigh everything we should always do diligence to like go as deep as we can, like the background of where this equipment's coming from. But yeah, just a little bit about how I think that this technology is going to revolutionize society on many different levels. Really good. Something I also wanted to touch on a little bit for those of you that are interested is producing large and medium scale events in the metaverse and the unique set of challenges that that actually poses and believe me, there is a lot. Okay. So, um, my team really had to put many months of strategizing and work into making this event happen on so many different respects, um, having to do with the, the world building, the way we built the world, the user experience, and also a big one is staffing. Okay. So this wasn't just an event you come into your, you are actually greeted by trained professionals that are going to give you the rundown of the Act Now campaign for the Sustainable Development Goals, what that means, like why you portaled into this world, what are you going to do while you're here. We actually did our best to gamify some of this so there were some activities that people could play and keep themselves occupied but still learn about what was going on. So yeah, the staffing was was it's definitely tricky because if any of you know if you're in in virtual reality you have something called instancing so the way instancing works for those of you that are not aware is there's only so many avatars that can actually come into one instance before the processing just gets really crazy on the servers and so what has to happen is the engineers being their brilliant itself, made it so the instances roll over. And so that happens is you set how many avatars are going to come into one instance, we set ours, I believe at 40. And then after 40 avatars come in, it rolls into another instance. And then it that goes until another 40 avatars come in, and then it goes to the third instance, and so on. But what we also have to accommodate for is making sure that we have our greeters available and trained professionals and also we have camera people and photographers in there. So we are hopping around between the instances and the way that happens is that we have a user interface. We like working on AltspaceVR for a variety of reasons. And one of them is that they have a very user-friendly interface. And just know that our next event is going to be on February 20th at the Uluru Kata National Park in Australia. So we will be taking you down under. We will have like kangaroos and we'll have the Ayers, formerly known as Ayers Rock. We also are building a stage and we're going to have some speakers, musical performances, like maybe some cool Aboriginal didgeridoo music and we really want to kind of transport you to the culture in the Australian outback. And so that's the goal of our design team. We'll also be working on transmitting information about the sustainable development goals and UNESCO and everything that they're doing so that you all know what's happening. So again, yeah, I am DJ Celeste. And seriously, it's always awesome to talk a little bit about what I'm doing in the metaverse, as you guys can see. I'm really enthusiastic about this. I feel really honored that I get to do this kind of work right now, and I just want to thank you again. So yeah, everyone have fun out there. Be safe, and I'll see you soon.