Your Own Avatar with Ready Player Me
If you’re not sure what an avatar is, it’s just a 2D graphical image of a user or the character the said user has chosen as a persona online or within the Metaverse. People have been using them — on platforms like Facebook and Twitter — for years. That out of the way, whatever you think of them, they’re not going away. In fact, with the rise of the Metaverse and Web3, the uptake is going to be exponential in the next few years. Taking advantage of this certainty is Wolf3D, an Estonia-based startup founded in 2014 by Haver Järveoja, Kaspar Tiri, Rainer Selvet, and Timmu Tõke and its Ready Player Me, a game avatar platform for the Metaverse that empowers users to create a 3D avatar with a selfie and use it in 1000+ compatible apps and games in three easy steps:
1. First of all, take a selfie or start out from scratch
2. Customize your avatar, choosing from hundreds of customization options for your avatar.
3. Finally, export your avatar to use in the Metaverse
Apart from this cool feature, what else does the Ready Player Me platform allow users to do?
Explore virtual worlds in VRChat, for one. If that’s not enough, you can also join meetings in MeetinVR, as well as stream to your fans using LIV. Yet there’s more: Ready Player Me enables owners of NFTs to wear their assets across hundreds of games and apps across the Metaverse.
Your Passport to the Metaverse
— Ready Player Me
Having spent seven years building the perfect avatar system, the platform lets developers integrate Ready Player Me into their apps and games using the platform’s free avatar SDK, which is compatible with Unity and Unreal Engine and works great on the web, mobile and desktop platforms.
Of the four original Co-Founders of Wolf3D, CEO Timmu Tõke, CTO Rainer Selvet and COO Haver Järveoja are the ones steering the ship to make Ready Player Me a success.
Things ramped up a gear in December when the team secured $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Taavet+Sten, the co-founders of Wise and Teleport, with participation from Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub, Samsung Next, NordicNinja and Konvoy Ventures, among many others involved.
The money, however, hasn’t seemed to change the ethical considerations of the startup. In a company post published on the startup’s site in February, Timmu Tõke stated:
First, let me make this very clear: Ready Player Me is for everyone. We will never be a priced-out, exclusive community only accessible to a few. Our goal is to build an avatar platform everyone can use across the Metaverse. Creating an RPM avatar will remain free forever. NFT adoption will be a matter of choice — no partners or end-users will be pushed to adopt. For those that opt-out of the NFT path, we will offer other types of virtual goods and ways to make an awesome and unique avatar.
That’s nice to hear.
Tõke believes NFTs can help the Ready Player Me community because it helps developers monetize and creators of NFTs make their virtual assets usable in the metaverse, while — at the same time — could be a great way for the startup to monetize its IP.
And they’re onto something because plug-and-play, interoperable personal avatars that can be used across many virtual experiences is where we’re headed and it’s what users want.
I want one already!
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