TKS Session 19: Metaverse + Velocity Session 9
For session 19, we started off velocity with a recap on how to structure our weekly meetings so that we can get something out of each one we do. We were given a skeleton meeting setup that we should try to follow:
Introductions
Thank them for agreeing to meet with you
Introduce yourself
Have them introduce themselves
Ask your planned questions/topics you want to cover
Very end questions
Ask for other connections in the space that they may know
If you enjoyed talking to them, ask to see if they are open to you reaching out in the future
Be blunt and tell them what you want, what is the opportunity you are hoping to get?
Then, we talked a bit about the MotW, Stoicism. Stoicism is mainly not letting outside events/circumstances affect you, because those are out of your control, and there is nothing you can do about it but accept it and move on. This encourages you to focus on yourself and do everything you can to try and get the outcome you want. Understanding what is both in/out of our control helps us not let our moods or priorities get affected by other things, which allows us to keep making progress with our goals and keep moving forward.
This week, we also practiced the Wim Hof Breathing Technique. I found this breathing exercise to be much different compared to other ones. Normally when I do other ones I find myself getting bored and it starts to feel like a chore. But, for this breathing technique, I think what made it enjoyable was that there was both an engaging and challenging aspect to it. It was engaging because there was some music and a person talking to you the entire time. It was challenging because he would ask you to hold your breath for 30 seconds, 1 minute, and so on, so holding your breath became more and more challenging. I also found it a little relaxing after doing it so that was a bonus.
My intention for this session today was to really try to identify something I learned in this session and use it later in my life. I did that by using our discussion about how to structure meetings with people, which is something I am going to use later.
For the actual session today, we discussed the MotW for this week, which is antifragility. Antifragility is a few things like:
Being able to bounce back from setbacks
Not letting obstacles get you down
Being able to manage stress and chaos.
Staying calm and maintaining a clear mind
People with an antifragility mindset have these values:
Personal growth
High standards
Curiosity and learning
Having an antifragility mindset helps people make more impact, reach their goals, and allows them to keep moving forward in life and to keep going. In life, you will face obstacles, setbacks, stress, and chaos. But, if you can’t stay calm and you let those challenges get the best of you, then how are you able to overcome them and keep making progress? With an antifragility mindset, you are able to acknowledge that these challenges can be overcome if you keep trying and not let yourself be unmotivated by other things/people. Even if you don’t have an antifragility mindset, it can be trained by doing things like:
Setting yourself up for failure (by trying something new, for example)
Ask for feedback (try to get better)
Take a risk (biased towards action)
Commit to your goals (don’t let anything lead you astray)
People often don’t have an antifragility mindset because they are scared, don’t want to fail, or because of habits that have developed over the course of their lives. But, the beauty of antifragility is that the more you practice it, the more you are accepting and welcoming of those fears and possibilities of failure. It only makes those challenges easier for you mentally to tackle.
We then got into the actual topic of the session, which was all to do with the metaverse. The metaverse is something that differs from our reality that you can immerse yourself in and interact with. Some examples of this are AR/VR headsets, Apple Vision Pro headsets, Meta’s Ray-Ban Glasses, virtual online spaces, and more.
The market for the metaverse in 2023 was worth $49.6b, and it’s estimated that by 2032, the market will be worth $519.5b. This shows that everyone is going to take advantage of the capabilities of the metaverse one way or another, but there is still so much we need to work on.
Our first activity was to use an object scanner app to scan something in our real world and have it be made into a virtual space for us to interact with. I scanned a portable charging port by having the app take photos of the charging port at all angles. It’s unavailable for me to link it here, but to get an idea, it didn’t capture the entire object and it looked really awkward and mishappened. Two sides of it were actually pretty well captured, but the rest was all thrown off.
Next, we built a Roblox game using the Roblox Creator Hub. This activity relates to some of the shops and infrastructure that are actually currently being built/active in the metaverse.
Our last activity was to brainstorm and think of a different application for the metaverse, steering away from the consumer side of things that we looked at for the first 2 activities. Bianca Li and I thought about creating these glasses that would have a virtual interpreter appear in the corner of your vision to translate what people are saying, and this product would be for the deaf/hard of hearing people. Our main focus was to have its application in education because deaf children aren’t getting access to the interpreters and resources they need, which causes them to fall behind in class, not understand the content, and even score lower grades than their hearing peers. But really, these glasses have multiple applications for deaf people to experience their entire world in a whole new way. To present our idea, we had to make a short 1-minute presentation consisting only of pictures. Here is our presentation:
And that was the end of our session. It was really cool to see how much the metaverse market is predicted to grow in the next decade as well as explore all of the applications this technology has in a variety of fields!
