Leaving Web2
Connections are everything, especially in today’s globalized world, fused at the hip due to the incredible advancements that technology has given us over the last few decades. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and TikTok — these and others are the platforms that have brought humanity together (and sometimes ripped us apart, too), but as we leave the land of Web2 and move into a new realm of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), this ‘connectivity’ will be more important than ever.
To facilitate the coming of Web3 and the Metaverse, feisty entrepreneurs with a sense for the future have taken it upon themselves to build the ecosystem that is going to play a huge role in the coming years.
Helped greatly by Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranding of Facebook to Meta last year in a clever strategy to make one of the most successful companies in history a leading player in the Metaverse, this has expediated the popularity and take-up of it by companies and made them realize there’s a buck or two to be made.
Another player contributing to the Metaverse is VIVERSE, a virtual reality brand of the HTC Vive, which is the Taiwanese corporation’s effort to create fully immersive, premium-grade VR products for everyone with breath-taking graphics and lifelike sounds that was first presented at the 2018 Mobile World Congress (MWC).
Cher Wang is the CEO at HTC and VIVERSE’s Chairwoman and Co-Founder.
“Merging technology with humanity to unleash imagination”
— VIVE Reality
VIVERSE
A Metaverse ecosystem that connects people from different walks of life in a safe and data secure environment, VIVERSE provides an array of tools, services and platforms for individuals — while also catering to enterprises, developers and creatives — this self-contained Metaverse ecosystem is made up of its 5G products, Vive VR devices and other related initiatives designed to speed up the Metaverse.
Supported by partners that include ENGAGE and VRChat, VIVERSE offers several ways to access the Metaverse by providing accessibility to virtual worlds from non-VIVE and non-VR devices. These include smartphones through software tools like VIVE Connect.
VIVERSE offers the following platforms:
• VIVESPORT: VR games, apps and videos
• VIVEBYTES: a Premier NFT marketplace
• VIVECONNECT: a platform that links you to the Metaverse
• BEATDAY: an innovative music platform
• VR CHAT: create, share and play in the VR world
But that’s not all, as VIVERSE enables artists to reinvent how art lovers experience their work through VIVEARTS; VIVEBUSINESS, on the other hand, transforms how businesses operate within the Metaverse. There is VIVE Sync, too, which promises to be the future of meetings and other exciting stuff you can find out more about on the platform’s website.
For HTC Vive this looks like it’s only the beginning.
HTC Vive’s Founder is Phil Chen, a General Partner at Race Capital, a Silicon Valley software venture fund that invests in what matters for the future of humanity. Chen is also an Advisor and Founder of the HTC Exodus, the world’s first open-source crypto mobile phone anchoring the next internet with a distributed computing device that empowers the individual to own their private keys.
He was also founding Managing Partner at Presence Capital, the leading XR and Computer Vision seed fund that invested in companies like the Wave, Strivr, Tripp, Escher Reality (exited to Niantic), and Blue Vision (exited to Lyft). Phil’s track record in hardware is prescient where he led the 300M acquisition of Beats Electronics in 2011 and as a product manager launched the world’s first Android phone in 2009. From 2015 to 2018, Chen was an advisor at Horizons Ventures, Li Ka-Shing’s venture fund, leading the deep tech portfolio where he served as a board director for over fifteen companies globally including Improbable, Soul Machines, Kneron, Scopely, Sentient, Fano Labs, Amper and 88Rising.
Chen’s entrepreneurial story has been documented in best-selling books by Blake Harris’ The History of the Future and David Rowan’s Non-Bullshit Innovation.
He obtained an MDiv in Postmodern Philosophy from the Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California.
In an interview with CNBC in 2017, Chen had this to say about the technology:
“VR hardware is constantly improving, and virtual reality storytelling is something that transcends the hardware.”
Five years on, and with the Metaverse truly here, the storytelling aspect of it will be a major factor in the rise of its popularity.
Chen the seer has spoken.
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