I talk a fair amount about it on social media, but the truth is that Twigital is the brainchild of my partner, Jesse, who will also join us today under the Twigital PFP there.
Now, we fully understand that this process and photogrammetry in general is probably new to many of us in the space, so please ask all the questions you would like.
Just request to be a speaker, and we'll bring you on up.
But, Jesse, to kick this off, though you've been in the Hedera public space a lot in the past, you have been working a lot more in the background lately.
Can you start off just telling us a bit about yourself and your journey to this point?
Sure. Thanks, Brandon. My name is Jesse. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Twigital.
I have been working in the Hedera space for a little more than five years now, originally with Hedera Forum.
Some of you may remember that. Brandon and I hosted that as a community effort to really get news out and keep Hedera top of mind in the cryptosphere.
And that was really fun. We did that for a few years, and then we sort of, you know, we got so close to the information that we wanted to start building something.
And this is an idea that we've had for a few years, and we're really excited to be launching this.
The reason I'm so interested in this is that I'm an architect by trade, a building architect, not a systems architect.
I'm shifting now more towards a systems architect, I suppose, in my day-to-day, but I have an affinity for the world of design and objects and really people and how they relate to those objects and how they can be meaningful.
And so that's how Twigital sort of came to be, and I'm really excited to be here today and share more about it.
Good stuff, Jesse. So, now, I've talked about this a little bit in the past, and, you know, there's people that kind of get what Twigital's trying to do right off the bat, and there's people that struggle with it because it is a new concept.
Now, I got it right off the bat, but like I said, you know, this was your original idea.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the idea for Twigital?
Yeah, so Twigital is really the combination of a few emerging technologies.
Of course, everyone knows about Hedera and distributed ledgers and tokenization.
I assume most people on this call are somewhat familiar with those topics.
And so we had been studying that for years, as I mentioned.
And the other thing is, in my field in architecture, and we also design and build furniture for many years,
being able to document objects is really another emergent technology that is set to transform how, just generally, crypto aside,
in the very near future, if you want to document an object that's important for any reason,
whether it's a product you make, or maybe it's an artwork that your child has made,
or maybe it's something that's important to the family, it could be an antique, really anything.
You won't just take a picture of it and put it in a flat environment.
Because the computing environments that we're going to be spending time in are going to have the spatial quality.
So rather than taking a picture to capture a 2D image of something,
if the object is important to you, you'll make a digital twin.
And that will be fairly commonplace.
In fact, I think we're closer to that than many people realize, especially with Vision OS coming out, Q1 of next year,
which is fast approaching.
So with that in mind, we're thinking a little bit more spatially.
And then we're wondering, you know, with all the advancements with Hedera and tokenization,
specifically HIP412, shout out to all the people who contribute in the background to this technology,
all the community members.
We now recognize that NFTs don't need to be JPEGs.
They can really be anything.
And I've seen such great things from the Hedera community, obviously with music and a bunch of other file types.
So what we're focused on is these 3D asset file types, of which there are several.
And so Twigital, as far as we know, represents the first application that allows you to create that 3D asset from a physical object
and then mint the corresponding file to take the form of an NFT.
So essentially you can tokenize just about any class of objects.
And the big breakthrough for me, I think, is there's a lot of people who have thought about this in some capacity,
but for us it's really about allowing the objects to represent themselves as themselves on Ledger.
So there's no connection to any, you know, any tag that's affixed to an object or any barcode or UPC or anything like that.
This is a one-for-one NFT of your object.
You're sort of wrapping your object and tokenizing it in such a way that the object itself
can act as an autonomous agent in the spatial computing environment, wherever you decide to put it.
Whether that's a marketplace or a website, this will become more common.
And I hope that was somewhat clear.
I tend to ramble a bit about the topic.
No, that's perfect for these kind of spaces.
Now, one thing, you mentioned the NFC tags or RFD tags that are often used for digital twins.
Now, this can be used for things that you might not be able to put something that's adhesive on it.
We'll say, like, a really expensive sculpture or something like that.
So this might be a good way to represent it.
Or it could be another layer on top of it.
So if you have high-end retail products that have an NFC tag within it,
this could be another layer of authentication on top of it, right?
Yeah, there's been great work.
I love the near-field communication device ideas.
I mean, there's so many different ways, I think, that this can be done.
Twigital just represents another layer where there's nothing in between the object itself and the ledger.
The object represents itself as itself in the form of the NFT on ledger.
This is where it will be headed.
Absolutely. Now, we do have a couple people up here.
We know them fairly well.
I see Earthlings is up here.
Is that Patrick behind you?
Thank you for bringing me up.
I know your Twigital project seems so well, of course.
But I saw this space and I had to join.
And that meant that I had to do some homework as well because I never did a deep, deep dive.
So, I've got a list of questions, but I'll have other people go first.
But I'm very curious because when I just – I tried to download it, by the way.
That's my first question, but I'll ask that later.
Why don't you shoot your first one to us and then we'll go to King Solomon and we'll go from there.
Because that's an important one.
I tried to download it, but is it like only downloadable in the U.S. or something?
Because I even typed Twigital in my phone and it didn't show up.
I've tried many ways, even sending the link to my phone, trying to get that.
I think this is a good question.
Jesse, do you want to take that one to start?
So, first off, we found out very early on because Twigital is so new, just the concept and the word, when folks were searching Twigital in the U.S. store, it was auto-correcting to digital.
And so, you actually had to click, did you actually mean Twigital, below that search bar.
So, for some of you, that might solve the problem.
The other issue is these are just language issues and it has to do with how it's released in the U.S. store.
However, Twigital will be available to those in Europe and everywhere in the world, I would say, you know, today.
It just takes some time to work through the process of populating in the U.S. store.
So, please, if it has been a problem in your area, that should all be resolved today.
Yeah, that's probably the issue.
I just have to wait and I think because I did get another app that started with Twigital and was something else.
So, I'll try later again, but in the meantime, I just watched the explanation movie.
That gave me even more questions, but I'll get back to that later.
And before we get any further, we're going to be going to King Solomon next, but we do have a contest going on for Twigital.
Some of the objects you photogram, just like anything else, it's an art, right?
You have to learn how to do it.
There are some objects that are easy and there are some objects that are a little bit more difficult.
I've seen people trying to do coins.
You've seen we've been able to do coins really well, but we have to put it on a stand and things like that.
You have to kind of learn how to do some objects.
I would focus on objects that are kind of matte finish, that are fairly large, that are 3D, things like that.
That's why we did this contest to do jack-o'-lanterns.
For the season, they twigitize fairly well.
I've actually pinned that contest to this space, so you can go and check that out.
If you have one sitting on your front porch, it can be a pumpkin, it can be a carved pumpkin, a jack-o'-lantern, whatever.
Just go out there, download Twigital, take the pictures like it says in the instructions, walking around it.
I mean, the ones that I've captured, all I do is put it in my driveway, I take a few dozen pictures, trying to get as low as possible, going directly on the pumpkin.
I go up about 45 degrees, I catch another dozen or two dozen pictures, and just hit twigitize, or hit mint my Twigital, and they've been turning out really well.
So give it a shot, and you have a chance to win some HBAR.
Now, that's not being done by the HBAR Foundation, that is being done by Twigital, but I just wanted to highlight it.
And with that, Ryan, King Solomon, what do you have for us?
Yeah, just happy to be up here supporting, obviously, a good 24 hours now.
I'm curious, and I'm assuming we've got Jesse behind the Twigital account, so it's nice to be up on stage with Jesse again.
Haven't talked to Jesse forever, since consensus, I think.
Yeah, curious what some of the interactions and reactions have been within the first 24 hours, and like I said, just kind of happy to be up here to support.
Yeah, great to talk with you, King.
It's nice to hear your voice again.
As Brent maybe missed just at the beginning, but Brandon mentioned, I've really been just kind of head down working on this.
So not removed from the community, but just focused and trying to keep a singular focus.
So I've been here working on it, and the first 24 hours have been great to see.
We've received just a ton of messaging, a ton of questions, and it feels like kind of a relief for us because it's been, you know, several years in development.
And to come to a point where we're able to share it and start communicating and start sharing what we've been working on in a more meaningful way with the community is really important.
And I'm so proud that, you know, because we come from this community, that we're introducing another app, a Web3 app built on Hedera that's completely unique in all of Web3, but also unique to Hedera.
And that Hedera's native services really support the operation of the app in a way that I'm not sure you could do on many other ledgers.
So I think it's a really unique thing for Hedera, and I hope that the community will appreciate it.
We worked really hard to make the app, you know, to put the user first.
And so when you download it and start using it, although the process of creating a digital twin might be new to you, you know, we're trying to introduce that as well at the same time.
But we've taken time to design the app so that it's a really good user experience.
And our hope is that we're going to bridge people's interests in their daily lives to this Web3 community in a way that has never been done.
Up until now, I think the majority of people's interactions with Web3 or DLT or crypto is generally built around financial products, speculation.
And, of course, there are a bunch of different utilities as well.
But this is really something that people can use.
It's completely free to use right now.
And we can't wait to see what's important to people and what they digitize and what they tokenize.
I did not get a chance yesterday to download the app, but that's on my to-do list today.
And I know that we've got a couple pumpkins left here to carve, so I do plan on twigitizing a pumpkin or two today and uploading it a little bit later before all the trick-or-treating festivities go.
And happy Halloween to everybody, by the way.
And, yeah, looking forward to seeing everybody's twigitals surrounding Halloween coming out today.
I think that's going to be pretty cool.
Yeah, 3,500 HBAR up for grabs as well.
So a nice contest for the top three submissions to earn some HBAR.
Yeah, that is, I mean, as I said, you know, that is one of the things that is pretty easy.
So I think, you know, you go out there, you go into a shaded spot and just walk around it, taking some pictures and hit MidMind Twigital, and it works out pretty well.
Do you have a question or comment?
Sorry, I may have to drop off in a few minutes, but I just wanted to share this and also ask a question.
One of the aha moments for me seeing Twigital was when it was sort of demoed that, you know, you could take sort of this very detailed 3D representation of, for example, a luxury item.
Where, you know, the fabric or the leather itself kind of, you know, acted as the fingerprint for the item.
So whereas, you know, some of these luxury brands may embed something, you know, in the product or have some type of mechanism like that that may not, you know, withstand the test of time.
So this sort of representation really would capture the authentic, you know, an original and lasting impression of that item.
And so I was kind of wondering, is this something where eventually down the line there'll be some sort of API where, let's say, a luxury brand wants to adopt the technology.
And they can, you know, write off the factory floor, kind of take that representation of it, tie it to the physical object and have it travel with the item or something like that.
And then any other thoughts on those types of use cases and how they may emerge would be appreciated.
Yeah, this one's definitely a good question for Jesse.
Now, I did pin another one, another tweet to this space because I had did exactly this, right?
We use Twigital to capture a handbag.
We know that there's a lot of authentication issues with handbags.
There's a lot of fraud, counterfeit issues with that.
But we definitely see that being used for anything that can be easily identified, you know, using one of these 3D assets.
And leather is like a fingerprint, you know, like you said.
So, Jesse, do you want to take that one?
Thanks for the question, Ray.
I really appreciate that.
And, yeah, definitely this is something we've thought about really since day one is it gives makers of anything, especially the ability to, at the point of creation, whether you're a small business and you're hand making something or if you're a large business.
You know, Twigital is the end of the manufacturing process.
And this will happen for a lot of reasons.
But mainly, as I said at the onset, this is going to become very common practice, just the documentation of objects.
Photos will be, you know, in 10 years we'll think of photos like black and white photos or something.
Like we can't believe we only had two-dimensional depictions of things because it'll become that much more accessible to people.
And Twigital is a good example of that.
You can really make beautiful, forensically analyzable digital twins just with the hardware in your pocket.
And this hardware that we are all walking around with consistently evolving.
So this is going to be a practice that people become more familiar with.
The process of digitizing these objects in a 3D fashion will become more familiar to people.
And so that's the first step.
And then absolutely the APIs will be available to commercial clients who wish to install a Twigital capture at the end of a manufacturing line, for instance.
And in that way they can make these digital twins, these tokenized digital twins, and they'll issue those with the product in the form of a receipt.
And that will work very well for the buyer of the product and the manufacturer of the product for several reasons.
Chiefly among them, I would say you're doubling the value of your physical item instantly.
Because now you've created this autonomous agent that will act as a marketing rep for you in spatial computing environments, for instance.
If you're the manufacturer of it, it's a way to have digital persistence with your branding.
And if you're the owner of the object, well, now you can use this digital twin as a facsimile for your physical object to display it in a game or in a marketplace.
Maybe have it authenticated.
There's a bunch of things you could do.
So now you've doubled the surface area, if you will, of the reach that a physical object might have.
And that's going to be more important in the years to come.
And so we're early, but it will become much more commonplace.
And that's our goal is really to drive towards a day when digital twins accompany the physical objects of importance to you and gives you a lot more freedom to do a lot more things with it.
Patrick, what do you have for us?
Yeah, I want to go into that matter a bit, dive into that a bit deeper.
Because we want, well, my dream actually is for products like Twigital to go to the public, like retail, everyone in the world using it.
I can see this even used by kids, something that I want to dive into as well.
But I don't know if we have the time for that.
But we want Web2 users to onboard, of course, massively.
But if I have to explain this to anyone outside of the Web3 space, to someone in Web2, how do I explain to them that this physical twin is attached, let's stick with the handbag, to the leather handbag?
So is there a label inside?
So how do you explain that, that if you have this digital 3D item, how do you transfer it to someone else who wants to buy this item from you?
Because we need to be able to explain it to Web2 people, of course, if we want to sell it to that market as well.
And I'm sure you can, of course.
But how would I explain that as easy as possible?
So I'll start off with this one because I actually have an example of this.
So like I said, the leather on a handbag is like a fingerprint.
So you can take the digital twin, inspect it, and even dings and nicks on the buckles, the bronze buckles, you can identify.
And I've actually done that.
And I had an example out at Hello Future Live where we had a bunch of these tokens that we were going through the Twigital process with.
And I was putting them on because, again, to capture a flat object like that, you have to kind of put it on a stand.
So I had these little oak stands, and I had Manson Lehman, the founders of Hedera, signing the stands.
And I had a bunch of them sitting there, and I was going through the process of making these into 3D assets for people.
And one young lady said, oh, I lost.
I don't know which one's mine.
And in fairly short order, I was able to take the 3D version of hers, kind of look at the signature over the wood grain, and identify which one was hers pretty easily.
That's what we're talking about when we're saying there's a lot of ways you can identify these assets.
And it kind of stays linked, and it kind of stays with that asset through its lifecycle.
But I'll let Jesse kind of go into some more depth on that and maybe talking about the Web3 marketplaces and using these as value transfer mechanisms as well.
Yeah, really good question.
And all of that stuff will come, of course.
This represents the first product implementation, proof of concept, if you will.
It's taken a while to develop it.
I think people are ready to start using it, but there's certainly a lot more work to do.
One of the ways you can share these and sort of tie them to the physical object is with the Twigital certs, the certifications that you can get.
So once you make a Twigital or you use Twigital to document your object, I should say, you get a certificate that you can easily share via text or on social media right from the app.
And that is something that sort of acts as the receipt.
And so that will serve to help people understand exactly what you're working with, what you have.
And it gives a little thumbnail there and a timestamp and, of course, a lot of pertinent information.
So if you want to let somebody know that you have a digital twin of this object, the certificate is a great way to do that to get started.
All right, and we have another one of our gaming teams up here.
I think it's Basil from Legends of the Past.
Well, congrats on Twigital.
I have two questions for you.
The one that is related to pretty much what we do in terms of intellectual property.
So how does Twigital handle the IP, the intellectual property rights for the digital twins that is created on the platform?
Is there any way to make sure that the people who use it has the proper right to create a digital twin?
Yeah, that's a good question.
And I think, you know, this is something that will unfold over time because this is, you know, we're sort of pioneering in this space.
There are other examples of products being digitized in this way, in a 3D way.
But, yeah, it's not something that's clear cut.
I don't think there's legislation that's come down one way or the other definitively on how people can use the objects they buy.
What is more likely to happen?
And if you read through Twigital's terms and conditions, you'll see that we're very explicitly telling users that you need to have the right to create a digital twin.
And depending on how you'll use it, you know, that's where I see a lot of legal work to be done.
And who owns the rights to those images?
And the way we think about it is there's just a lot to unfold there.
But what eventually we'd love to see is standard legal agreements that you can attach to these files, depending on what your intended use case is for them.
And so for a great many objects in the world, we don't need to worry about this.
So for artifacts and things that are historical in nature, of course, these are things that are very much ready for this process right now.
And those legal problems don't apply.
And then for all of the things that you might make or have a claim to, you know, your children's artwork or anything like that, which, of course, wouldn't also have any commercial implications.
But it's a very interesting legal topic and one that I'm sure will develop.
I would recommend, you know, for creators of physical objects, whether they're small businesses or large enterprises, you know, this is a technology that they will need to become familiar with and need to address at some point.
And for us, you know, the best way to do that is to take control of your products by creating the digital twins and issuing these as receipts.
And then you can set the terms on what those files come to represent and how they should and could be used.
And those templates, that legal framework, that thought process, I think, is unfolding now.
So it's best for the lawyers, but we're certainly following it.
Yeah, I do understand this.
And I have a follow-up question.
Maybe you guys have already talked about it.
It's because I joined late.
But by hearing what you guys were saying about the handbag earlier, well, this, you know, gives me a very good, you know, like utility, not from the retail, not for retail investors, but more for brands, for like luxury brands, so more for business-to-business opportunity, where, you know, scarcity, uniqueness, and craftsmanship is important.
So my question here is, could 2GTOL, I don't know if it's on your roadmap, but be used and as a level of anti-counter fake measures for luxury brands that want to, yeah, to prevent fake duplicate of their luxury brands, luxury items?
Yeah, we touched on this a little bit.
We think this is, you know, a way that these assets can be used.
We think that they can be used in all kinds of different ways.
But like we said, anything with a wood grain or leather grain or pigments and things like that that are identifiable, if you capture them in this way, it's the best way to be able to match them up to the actual authentic item, you know.
And when you have counterfeits out there, if it doesn't have, you know, one of these digital receipts attached to it, there's an issue there.
And if it does have one and it wasn't created with the digital identifier of the manufacturer, that's a problem.
You know, we can go down the line of all the ways we can authenticate with this.
But yeah, we're thinking along the same lines, Basil.
And how about, you know, using Twigital to create, you know, like digital experience, again, for business to business industry.
But like brands could use Twigital to create, you know, virtual showcase room where they would, you know, like use the app and showcase 3D digital, you know, items.
For instance, if it's a luxury handbag, they could, you know, like have it on using the phone so that they create a digital experience where people can actually see the new handbag launched by any luxury brands.
Well, I think, Jesse, I think this is a perfect opportunity to talk about those spatial, those digital spatial environments, the ones that are being developed by Apple and things along those lines.
And maybe even touch on how these universal scene description files first came about and how they can be used.
Yeah, see, these 3D files are great.
I mean, there's a lot of different types of them.
And I don't want to, you know, people sort of jump to this luxury market all the time, especially with crypto and Web3 for some reason.
It's just a really fun, great thing to use.
Because it certainly can be used for luxury items and has a bunch of benefits in the any counterfeit realm.
And that's certainly a huge use case.
But also just documenting things for posterity and a great, great many other reasons.
Once you have this library of objects documented in this way, you can begin to build baskets of insurable items and virtual retail stores.
And Twigital is a utility that makes the objects that will populate Web3-enabled spatial computing environments.
So if you think about a spatial environment that you go to visit, whether it's a game or something, if it has this decentralized capability to allow a tokenized object to exist within that environment, then you don't need a checkout.
You know, there's no checkout line.
A user, if they're in a game, they can go and find it.
Maybe they just win it if they find it.
If it's a scavenger thing.
If it's a store, they can just go and buy it.
And they can buy it immediately.
You know, if you're going to settle that transaction using the digital twin as the value transfer mechanism, of course.
So it will allow for a decentralized spatial computing environment where people can populate the environment with any of these objects and people can explore whether they're retail items or whatever they are.
And I anticipate there will be, as Lehman says, these shared worlds popping up where, you know, you'll need to populate these worlds with things.
Because a lot of times these worlds now, when you think about them, the objects that are populating these worlds are just computer-generated facsimiles of real-world items.
Maybe a chair that sort of looks like, you know, it's got that computer look to it, right?
But in the future, I think the objects that populate the environments will be as much or more important than the environment itself.
And so Trigital is focused on creating the utility that enables the user to create these objects.
And I think that's really important.
And I think along the same lines that you were saying, Jesse, initially, even though we would love to integrate with these big brands and we see a lot of potential and utility for them,
just to start off the bat, it's just a fun and easy app to use.
Picking the right objects is certainly important.
And, you know, we talked about that.
Make sure they're to start off as a beginner.
Make sure they're good size and 3D.
Make sure that they have a kind of a matte finish, things along those lines.
But another thing that, Jesse, you started to do right off the bat was capture some of your kids' art, right?
The things that your kids think should be in a museum.
It's probably only going to last a few weeks.
But now you've captured it in a way that you can keep it forever and then show it off just like a photo album there in the future, right?
This is probably my favorite implementation for the product as it currently stands is in the future.
You know, I have several children and they're relatively young.
And I can envision a time, you know, they're over at their grandparents' house looking through an old photo book and the pages are sticking together and this is how they documented things.
And then, you know, then they got a video camera in the 80s and were able to watch some old video, you know.
And, you know, it just keeps evolving in the future.
I think having these objects created now and then being able to hopefully review those later in the form of some type of family album or something with our children will be a really, really powerful experience.
As opposed to, you know, thumbing through photos or viewing digital photos on a flat screen.
So, you know, that's really exciting.
And I just I love I love to see how people will use it and what's important to them.
What are the objects that, you know, are meaningful to them and what's their story?
Why would they want to document it?
And certainly all those enterprise use cases are in the works and unfolding.
But digital in its current form that you can all download right now is very much a user focused application to really explore.
Get your introduction to creating these 3D files and hopefully learn a little bit about tokenization and how that works as well.
Now, I had a set of topics that I wanted to go over with Jesse, but I'm actually liking the questions we're getting from the community a lot more.
So if you have any questions, make sure you request to be a speaker and we'll bring you up.
But I did see that we had another hand up from Patrick.
I've got many, many questions still, but I'll try to give some space with the others as well.
Now, Jesse mentioned fun and easy to use.
I can actually imagine if my son, so I'm maybe not able to download it today or maybe this evening or tomorrow because of my location in Europe, but we'll see.
But if my son, Marlon, who is now 12 years old, if he sees this app, I'm 100% sure he'll try to digitalize everything that he has and show it off to his friends.
But that brings up another question to me because I can see different uses, use cases as well.
And I think we will be surprised by how many use cases might pop up just from the community using it, everyone who's going to use it.
But you just said something about museums.
I can imagine if I had a museum, I would digitalize all my items that I had.
It's so easy to just bring it on screen in high resolution.
But the ease of use, is it because I couldn't download it?
I saw your movie, of course.
Well, let's say 12 year olds, not totalists, of course.
Is it very easy to use for them as well?
Or will there be different versions?
Maybe one for a museum, for the industry, for retail.
So is that something that you've been thinking about?
And Ray asked about APIs earlier for enterprise use cases.
And we'll certainly, I think, you know, the software application that Twigital is now will have a few different forms.
But ultimately, it will serve the same purpose to document an object and then digitally record it in this way.
I can see where, you know, there's different versions of it available depending on use case.
And also, we won't be limited to the iOS store.
I mean, right now, the first product implementation is an iOS app.
And I hear a lot of users out there, frustrated Android users.
And we're working on that as well.
And it's been a labor of love.
Brandon and I have done a lot of this, you know, in our free time.
And we've been building this with sort of, you know, as best we can with the time and resources available.
And we're really proud to get it out there right now in its current form.
But certainly a lot of work to do.
And we want to make it as accessible as possible to all users depending on their use case.
Well, you did a great job so far.
And I'm always very keen on design.
And I love the logo and the design that you guys did because it's the first thing you see.
A good design is attractive and draws you in even more to a product.
Did you do the design or did you have someone else doing that?
Because it really looks top notch.
I like to think the whole team is responsible.
It's very much a team effort.
Brandon and I are working together with our partners in development and others, our advisors.
Shout out to everybody who's given us support along the way in any of those areas.
Could not be here without you.
So, yeah, a collaborative effort for sure.
We came up with many different iterations of the logo.
And everybody, even my wife, you know, put her two cents in on which one she wanted.
So, it really was collaborative.
We had a lot of different choices we could go through.
And this is what we landed on.
And I think we landed on the right one.
So, Jesse, we've been playing with this for, you know, a long time.
We've had this app in our hands.
Six, seven months where we've been able to use it?
Yeah, I'm not sure exactly.
So, during this, you know, beta process, what are some things that surprised you about, you know,
getting into using the app, making these 3D assets, some of the things that have been created by our beta testers, things along those lines?
What's kind of stuck out to you, even lessons learned and things like that?
Yeah, well, it definitely can be frustrating at first if you have never used this type of technology.
And this technology, I said earlier, it's emergent, and it certainly is.
I would say, you know, certainly accessibility has become a key factor in driving its emergent qualities now in recent years.
But, you know, one of the processes we use to create these digital twins is called photogrammetry.
And it's one way that you can do this.
But this is kind of a process that maybe takes a little getting used to, right?
So, it's really just taking photos of an object, but you need to be taking them in a certain way.
And that will become more familiar to people.
As I said, if objects are important, flat photos won't do.
They just won't be compatible with the environments we're spending our time in in the near future.
So, everyone will sort of be on a learning curve to learn how to document objects in this way.
I don't know what the timeframe is on that, but Twigital will be so unique and so far ahead that will allow you, of course, also not only the opportunity to digitize these objects, but to tokenize them within the workflow of the app, which opens up this whole new realm of possibilities.
So, if there's one thing I would say to new users, it's have a little patience.
I highly recommend, you know, a very inexpensive turntable, if you can, just a little motorized turntable.
And play around with some different objects.
Stay away from objects that are highly reflective.
Try to eliminate as many shadows as you can when you're taking photos of your object.
And direct light is not good.
So, you want to eliminate those shadows.
So, ambient light and a little turntable.
And then keep the camera in front of the object.
Let the object spin in front of the camera and just take, like Brandon said, maybe 30, 40, 50 pictures, whatever you want, and play with it.
It's definitely something that takes a little time to become familiar with.
And as I said, over time, I believe it's just going to get easier and easier.
And we'll, of course, continue to, you know, make it as easy as we can for our users.
Yeah, starting out with some of those easy objects is certainly a good way to go.
But once you have figured it out, it becomes kind of natural the way you go about things.
It actually works pretty good, you know, good-sized objects if you put it, like, on a driveway or something like that.
That works pretty well as well.
I was out the other day and capturing, and I know there's a team that's looking into this, and Twigital could be a good tool for them to use.
But I was actually capturing headstones.
And that worked out really well.
And it was a sunny day, too.
So, for some reason, you know, it was just capturing those because it was granite.
It was, you know, things along those lines.
It was capturing them fairly well.
But, yeah, once you get used to it, just like anything else, there's a learning curve.
But once you figure it out, it gets a lot easier.
All right, so I know we're kind of just scratching the surface here with Twigital, but for others that are, you know, building in this space, what advice would you have for builders that are trying to bring products to market?
Right now, it's tough, right?
Because it's been, you know, we've been in this bear market, especially with Web3 and crypto.
And, you know, NFTs became sort of, you know, almost like a cuss word or something.
So, we're kind of fighting uphill.
But I think it's really important to just keep moving ahead.
You know, whatever problems you have, believe me, everyone, nothing is easy.
If you're building something that's worthwhile, it's not going to be easy.
Not everyone's going to get it.
And, you know, good things can happen if you're earnest in your work ethic and if you have a focus on something.
And so, you know, it's hard right now in this arena, I think.
A lot of people have felt that.
But certainly, as they say, you know, during the bear market is when good teams have their heads down and they're building things.
And I think in this case, it's exactly what's happened and what's happening.
And we'll be ready for not only those markets as they turn, but also just for the emerging technology field that is spatial computing.
And I haven't said metaverse yet, but, you know, this is a term that people use.
Whatever that's going to be.
I'll stick with shared worlds for now.
I like Lehman's word for it.
But whatever these spaces are, and there's a bunch of them in development, of course, it's only going to work probably when there's, you know, a few open source protocols or some type of environments where everyone has clear playing rules and can use these environments.
We'll see what Apple comes up with.
They've given us space in the early SDKs.
But certainly shared worlds are coming.
And, you know, you've got to populate those worlds with something.
And Twitch is one utility that will allow you to do that.
Yeah, so I do want to, again, invite, we've had some great questions here from the audience.
So if anybody wants to come up, just request to be a speaker.
You can ask Jesse whatever you'd like.
But you mentioned, you know, us being able to play around with the SDK.
I was really impressed right off the bat that we uploaded our assets to it.
In this case, it was the Karate Combat Glove that we twigitized.
But we also had some other files that were associated with it.
And you were able to kind of shift through these files and bring up the different things.
It seems like that environment, at least the one that Apple's working on, is going to work really well with the assets we're creating, don't you think?
Yeah, admittedly, leading with the iOS application as our first product, you know, we did that with this in mind.
And I really like the look and feel, even though the headset's really, really going to be expensive and prohibitive for many users early on.
And it's a good first step.
And that's the same way I feel about Twigital is we're just getting started.
So this is the first iteration of a concept like this that we're aware of.
And we're really excited to continue to build and explore and add feature sets and add different products and engage with our users.
Basil with Ledgers of the Past, go ahead.
So you just mentioned the SDK.
Well, how user-friendly is it?
Like, can I download the SDK and play around with it?
I think I was referring to Apple's SDK for Vision OS, which is the operating system for the new headset coming up.
I thought it was like already a public SDK of Twigital.
It was like, it goes too fast.
Yeah, we might not be far off from that.
But right now, we're just looking forward to engaging with the community, see how people use it and get feedback and continue to improve the product.
And are you using any of the features of the VR set, of the Apple VR set, like already?
Yeah, well, no one will have seen this, of course.
But we already have a version of a beta app that is specifically designed for the Vision OS hardware.
So, yeah, we might be in one of the earliest apps in the App Store for the Vision OS device when it comes out.
And if you can give some idea, like, what kind of features are you using?
Because, like, well, it's been a while already, but I remember when I watched the Apple keynote about, you know, the text, it tracks your eyes, it tracks all of the movement.
Are you using some of those, you know, like technology features?
So, you know, what you might be able to do, I'll say might, because, you know, it's a little ways off, but the hardware is really expensive.
So, as I said, I think there's a barrier there initially, but it comes equipped with a bunch of cameras and a bunch of different sensory equipment that will allow you to phone or the headset to create these digital twins just by looking at them and walking around them.
But even then, more so, they're files that are instantly compatible with what Apple has termed space.
So all you need to do is drag them and drop them into the room you're in.
And they also have this really neat thing called occlusion, which means you can kind of fade in as much reality as you want.
So you can imagine sharing something like a photo in the future of something, you won't, you know, you'll be able to actually closely inspect the object itself at a distance in the room you're in, whether you're using your phone or your headset.
And so that's, I think the biggest step forward is, you know, the space, the programmatic space that APRIL has provided and the fact that, you know, our files are going to be instantly compatible with that space.
And what, can I ask another question?
Okay, so I have another question, but more from a 3D perspective.
Again, we are a video game, building a mobile game.
So we're all about, you know, polygon optimization so that, you know, you have an efficient and your graphic cards computes your game.
Anyway, that's all of our issues, and that's the main aspect about gaming.
How do you handle, you know, polygon optimization so that you can have, because like right now when you're using 3D tool and it creates, you know, a 3D file, how many poly do you have?
And, yeah, how big and how, you know, how much computer power does it require to render it, you know, in real time?
Very little computer power.
The compute environment to render these, and it will depend on how many photos you take, of course, as to the geometry of the underlying, the object's underlying geometry, of course.
The more photos you take, the more detailed you want to get.
You'll get a more detailed model.
You'll get more polygons, and you'll have a slightly larger file size.
But for all intents and purposes, most, you know, objects, say the size of a basketball or smaller with a judicious amount of photos, maybe 50 to 100 photos, will be a very relatively, I should say, small file and easily able to render and won't be a heavy compute load.
But you can check that as well if you use Twigital, and if you make one, you can really play with that, with your photos, and you can download that into other software.
And actually, you can't do this in Twigital, but you could take it into other software, of course, 3D modeling software, and get counts on polygons and things, and play with it there.
Same as Patrick, I'm based in Europe, so I don't think, but I can, you know, always use, you know, Bypass to download.
So, like, the app is only in the U.S.
Actually, I just got a notification from Apple, so it should be available worldwide, pretty much, at this time.
It does take a while to work through the store, but check back, and...
Hey, maybe we can get a real-time download, Patrick or Basil, if you can try to do it now.
These are great questions.
Now, Jesse, we've talked about some of the edge use cases that we've had, but, you know, we have some stuff going on right now on education.
You know, we've had Rob Allen, somebody who's, of course, pretty famous in the Hedera space, do some really interesting things.
Can you talk about some of these other edge use cases that have you excited?
Rob's use case is amazing.
Anywhere you, and the pumpkins as well, the kids' artwork, you know, things that aren't built to last, you know, you can really preserve them in this way.
That's really cool to me.
In Rob's case, you know, if you visit something and you can't take a piece of it with you, you can make this digital twin and take that with you as a memento and add that to your scrapbook.
You know, that's such a great idea.
The education has been our leading use case.
It's where I've focused my most attention on just initial use cases.
I just thought of that instantly because I'm an architect and we work a lot with modeling and especially architects, as they make their journey through schooling, you know, they'll build a lot of these models.
And I was invited to be a juror on the end of year projects for one of our local universities here where I attended.
And I couldn't help but notice that even this year or in December of last year, a lot of the presentations were still largely on a board in a 2D sort of format.
Even though they had these beautiful handmade models, they weren't built digitally.
And sometimes students will build them digitally, sometimes with their hand.
Now, anything they build with their hand, they can easily bring into any other software, modeling software, by creating this digital twin.
And there are other applications, of course, that allow you to do this, but not in the way that Twigital does and not with the access that Twigital gives.
So, you know, they're really excited about it.
We've got some great, really talented young architects, especially in sculptors in the School of the Arts, who are now using Twigital in curriculum, actually.
And with our augmented reality features, they can sort of make a model of their study model.
And then if they have access to the physical site where this is planned, they can actually go and place the model on the site, use that AR function, and sort of get a sense of how that massing of the structure would look on the site,
how it might affect things like the sun pattern and weather and things like that.
So it's a great design tool that they can have as well.
So we're really excited about that.
And Patrick, we have your hand up now.
Just wanted to quick you because it's almost time, so I don't have time for my next question.
So it's online in Europe now, too.
We'll do some final thoughts here.
We're getting toward the top of the hour.
Jesse, I'm going to go first.
I know you guys might have some pumpkins lying around.
You have an opportunity to go ahead and get some HBAR.
Take a look at the pinned tweet at the top.
It was put out by Twigital app, and then I retweeted it from the HBAR Bull.
If you're more familiar with that one, you can certainly check that out.
And as Jesse said, be patient.
If the first object you do you have a little bit of struggles with,
somebody talked to me about a guitar pick, about a coin, those things.
Oh, a pen was another one somebody struggled with.
Those objects are going to be tough because they're so small and hard to set up.
But bigger objects are going to be a lot easier.
As Jesse said, just be patient.
Jesse, do you have any final thoughts before we close this one down?
No, just thanks, everybody, in the Hedera community and beyond for taking an interest
and looking forward to connecting with you all and supporting your use cases of Twigital as we move ahead.
We do have a Discord server as well that we're going to be releasing very shortly
so we can add additional features and support and build some community around that.
So keep an eye out for that.
We do have just a few minutes left, and I see Basil has his hand up, so we might as well take one more.
So it's not a question, but it's just saying congrats and to tell you that I have downloaded the app,
I have it on my phone at the moment.
I'm at the moment connecting it through HHPAC, so I have to upload my seed phrase.
So I need a little bit more time than that, but the app is on my phone.
All right, guys, I think that's pretty much all we have.
Thank you so much to Jesse for coming on here today and giving us some time.
Thanks to everyone who asked questions and, of course, everyone who listened in.