Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's webinar, Express the Rise of the Meta-Humans. With our guest speakers, Virginia Bray, who is co-founder and Senior Director of Marketing Fusion, Roy Kamani, Creative Director at Cube and Guy Gadney, who is co-founder and CEO of Charisma. If you're a university student attending today's webinar, then you may want to sign up to the CIM Marketing Club. All you need to do is hover your camera over the QR code you can see on the screen and that will take you through to the sign-up page. The Marketing Club will keep you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry, so it really is worth taking a look. So I'd now like to introduce our first guest speaker, co-founder and Senior Director of Marketing Fusion, Virginia Bray. Over to you Virginia. Thank you Judith. I'm really really very excited to be here and so thrilled that so many people have decided to join us today to learn about a topic that we see has got an enormous potential for us all as marketers. Firstly, I'd just like to introduce my co-panelists. As Judith mentioned, Roy Kamani is Creative Director at Cube. They're a multi award-winning video animation and photography agency and our long-standing partners. These guys are really at the forefront of the latest virtual production techniques and technologies, so it'd be really exciting to hear from Roy. And also Guy Gadney, who's got a long degree and pedigree in the entertainment sector and is running charisma entertainment. Really exciting platform. It's using machine learning to power virtual characters and interactive narrative experiences. So really looking forward to both of those sessions. And then just to briefly introduce myself, I'm Virginia Bray, co-founder of Marketing Fusion.  So quickly, just touching on the agenda. Because of the fallout today, which is obviously fantastic to have an opportunity to do an express webinar with CIM. We're very delighted to be involved in that. But we are going to have a fairly tight timeframe. So what we're going to suggest is that, you know, obviously we'll cover as much as we can on the session today. But for those of you that do want to maybe learn a little bit more, maybe find out and take this to the next level, see some interactive demos, et cetera. There'll be a QR code on some of the slides and at the end that will take you to a page where you can register for one of our interactive workshops, which will be limited places. But please do register if you're interested in enjoying one of those sessions. So briefly, as I said, my session today is all about what I see as the opportunity for marketers from this, you know, these amazing new technologies. And one of the things to point out is that we are really at the start of this journey. So, you know, with 3D virtual production, with digital humans, it's very much, you know, we're at the early stages of those initiatives. So I wanted to start off by talking a little bit about some of the technologies and trends that we're seeing around us. And then I can sort of touch on how that links in, I think, to some of the marketing opportunities that that presents. So obviously, all around us, we're seeing a huge amount of advances in technology, in particular in the area of real-time 3D and virtual production, things like Unreal Engine 5 from Epic Games and some of the other gaming platforms that we'll be touching on later are really sort of bringing together the virtual world and the real world. So I don't know if people have seen things like The Matrix Awakens, which is an Unreal Engine 5 experience. That kind of gives you a glimpse for how these, you know, the potential that these technologies give us to build these virtual worlds. You know, obviously for movie makers and gamers, fantastic. But for marketers, it's actually giving us the opportunity to create much more powerful stories, pretty much in any environment that we choose to create.  So, you know, we don't have to set our stories in the places that we're familiar with. They can be wherever we want them to be and similarly with the characters. Another trend that we see is around virtual influences. So some of these, you know, people might think of influences in terms of, you know, the Kardashians or the rock and people at bat obviously have these vast social media followers. But take a look at some of the virtual influences that are starting to gain real strong popularity in the marketplace. So this lady is someone called Lil Mikaela. I think she has something like 3 million followers on Instagram. Some of them are being created by brands themselves. So you'll see some examples of that in a few minutes. Others are being created by effectively creators with a specific audience that they're designed to appeal to. Brands like Samsung, Puma, Alibaba, etc. Lots of brands are actually engaging with these virtual influences who in some cases have their own kind of PR agencies.  And just to give you a bit of a flavor of the value, I think one of them's got, there's a stable of virtual influences that are sort of part of this group with Mikaela. And they've got a market valuation of around $125 million. So this is not small change. AI is obviously around us. And I'm not going to touch on that too much, because obviously in guys sessions shortly, you'll learn a lot more about that than I can tell you.  Having those conversations and computers being able to engage with this, it's been around for some while. But what's been missing perhaps is the human interaction element of it. And being able to put a human face on AI. So that's what I think is going to be important to see coming down track.  It's really here. I think lots of brands are starting to explore the potential or are they already doing it? You know, if you take the definition of the metaverse as being the internet in 3D, it does give us some of the sort of idea of the scale and scope of what it can do. And by 2020 2030, it's going to be worth something like $13 trillion. So that's a huge potential that we need to sort of get our heads around. And just briefly, I also wanted to touch on some of the things that we're seeing from the marketing side of things. Though, as marketers, we're all under, you know, there's an enormous opportunity, but there's also an enormous amount of pressure, I suppose, more than ever before to deliver some of these really sort of personalized experiences to create more visual engagement, to drive, for example, the opportunity for certainly sort of, you know, decision makers that are coming through the ranks, and coming up from sort of, you know, to actually be able to drive their own experiences. So how can we enable those kinds of things? How can we stay relevant? How can we create this differentiation, differentiation in this cut through? It's a huge challenge. And it's one that we obviously are dealing with and working with our clients with on a daily basis. How can we create more one to one connections, capture attention, capture engagement? How can we tell stories and build these long lasting relationships? It's creating a massive challenge, but it's, you know, the other aspect of that is the fact that we need to be able to do this, not only at scale, but we need to be able to do it in multiple languages, and in multiple environments. So potentially creating a massive huge need for content. But effectively, it's also creating for us a perfect storm of opportunity. So MetaHim is powered by AI. Give us some opportunity to address some of those challenges. We can create and scale stories, we can do that in a highly efficient way, and you're just going to get a bit of a flavor of some of those things today. So we're starting to see digital humans being used in social media. You see the Prada example that I think Roy's going to touch on later. In live events where you have sort of live people interacting with digital characters in a in an events environment. And these interactive experiences, which I think are also going to be massive. Think about, I mean, this is a literal onboarding from Qatar Airways, but think about customer onboarding. How can you actually interact and create this engagement with your prospects and customers, guide them through your, you know, through your environment, through the things that you need them to learn, have interactions with them, give them control, you know, enormous potential in a lot of different aspects, whether that be in campaigns, in countless marketing to create these personalized experiences, you know, website concierge, etc. And I think the next session in that I'm going to hand over now to Roy is to actually give you some more deeper insight into some of those elements. So Roy, I think that controls with you now to move the slides on to your next slide. No worries. Thank you very much for that Virginia. And yeah, so brief introduction about myself. I'm Roy Kimani, one of the co founders and creative directors here at cube. And yeah, I'll be telling you a bit more about what meta humans are. So, and so here at cube, so we kind of approach to any new emerging sort of technology is to really look at what those things enable us to do as content creators and even taking a step further is because just because of the nature of our business, we work with a lot of marketeers such as Virginia and marketing fusion is to kind of see, okay, what is technologies enable us to do and what is it that can be taken from them that could be useful for marketing point of view. Now we know that the whole metaverse term is a bit of a buzzword now. But these metaverses, so to speak, have existed for a long time. Anyone who's familiar with gaming will know of a metaverse sort of environment where you play games, you know, the most well known is Fortnite. But yeah, if you play any game online, or you put on some headsets and you speak to someone on the other side of the world, that gaming experience that you find yourself in is a metaverse and we'll now look into a bit more detail about what these meta humans are. So yeah, in a nutshell, a meta human is a photorealistic 3D human character. Now, these methods or rather 3D assets have always existed as long as far back as the beginning of CGI. So in movie making, in game development, the, you know, the term meta human is quite commonly used because these are the kind of building blocks to which a character will be built from. But what has happened is again, which I'll touch on the next couple of slides is there's been an advancement in a particular technology that's now kind of democratised a lot of these 3D assets, which basically means anyone can access them now. You don't have to be a game developer or, you know, work in film to be able to utilise these these humans. So seeing what how good these meta humans have become and how accessible they are at the moment kind of raises the question. What I was saying earlier is, OK, so from a marketing point of view, how can we take these these assets and do something exciting with them for normally ourselves, but maybe even for some of our clients. So we see this as a really unique opportunity. And essentially what has happened is that these new technologies have democratised the sort of landscape of sort of 3D assets, kind of like what Instagram did to photography.  But all that really did is pretty much, especially with the advancements of smartphones and cameras. It's basically anyone can be a photographer now, but, you know, not everyone has the art of photography within them. But, you know, you turn up your phone now and you see all these assets being shared. And, you know, all of a sudden it's an every brand had their own page to try and take advantage of this uptake that people have from consuming content. So that exact same thing is happening with meta humans. So these points that Virginia touched on earlier, how can we use this meta humans? So any sort of output outlet, so whether it be social media or, you know, your company website, these are avenues from which you can utilise these assets just on the get go. And the exciting thing about these meta humans, which I'll explore in a bit more detail, is the fact that you can now fully customise them and use them for whatever it is that you see fit. And then in addition to that, we've got to start thinking about the, you know, okay, so if I'm to utilise this meta humans, what benefits are there actually to me? Some of these Virginia mentioned, but the ones I wanted to particularly touch on are the last two, which is localisation and inclusivity. So localisation in the sense that if you just create these assets and, for example, make it speak, you know, you could have it. One user case that we are looking at is it could be, it could deliver, say, a company-wide message for a, you know, a global brand with multiple geographical locations that they need to address. So you could do one in English and Guy may even touch this, but you can also make it speak another language through things like AI. So the people, for example, if I want to put out a video and it needs to go out to China, I can just record one message in English and the meta human will communicate that, but if it needs to go to China, we go, okay, maybe you should speak Chinese now. And it is getting to the point where it'll just be a quick click of a button. And all of a sudden, you have, you know, this message being delivered in a language that is, you know, local to the people are targeted towards it. And, you know, you don't have to, at least like for us, create like multiple sub types of, you know, let's say like 10, 20 different videos because they're going to 20 different locations. So that's a really big benefit. Another thing is also inclusivity, which is a big topic across the world. But a meta human can essentially be anyone and everyone. So you can have one that's Caucasian or black or Asian, it could be tall, skinny, fat thin. There's no limit. The only limit really is your creativity. But the fact that from the get go, you have this asset that can tick all the boxes for you is extremely exciting for us. So where can you find these meta humans? There's a couple of platforms out there, but the ones that most familiar to us are Unreal, CryEngine and Unity. I'll focus specifically on Unreal. And reason being is because you can go onto the website to the meta human creator and actually now have a go at these creating your own meta human. And what the meta human creator essentially is, it's a platform that allows you to customize these assets. However, if you go onto the platform, please feel free to do so, sign up using your email address. You'll be able to have the option to pretty much fully customize this human. And it can be a bit creepy because they're very full to real, but it is exciting. You can change anything. You can even try and make yourself. I've seen a couple of people who've done so and use it as their LinkedIn profile pictures, but yeah, the opportunity is there and it's very easy to use, very intuitive. Please by what means, give it a go. We talked about user cases, Virginia did mention it, but specifically, I think it's because it's a very new, I guess partly techy sort of area. So there's a stigma that how can I actually apply this? And one quick and easy way is to kind of think of these people, this meta human, sorry, as, you know, these virtual influences. And what we've found really is, so the uptake of the meta humans in marketing is really China, South Korea, Japan are at the forefront, but you know, they have agencies, talent agencies for these digital assets and they kind of hire them out based on, you know, whatever preference you may have, you know, you're looking for a particular person or this is a particular audience. So people are now trying to see, you know, how can we actually essentially make money out of these things, not in an exploited manner, but rather relevant to us as marketeers. Is there way we can take these assets, give them a personality and have them, you know, push out content or promote some products or services. So it is happening. The West is kind of slower to catch on, but a lot of these tech trends do seem to start in Asia and then slowly trickle in into the West. A good example of a well-known brand that's taken up a virtual character in their marketing is L'Oreal as collaboration with Prada. So this particular, I guess, meta-human is specific to Prada and L'Oreal's collaboration to sell this product. Now, one thing to mention is, if your brand or business and you're looking to utilize these meta-humans, it is important to kind of really think through it almost as you would a sort of branding exercise for your company. If you are to, you know, associate yourself with a meta-human or create your own, what does that asset look like in terms of, you know, what does it say about your brand? We've seen some examples out there that haven't been the best executed, but you can easily see when a company is trying to associate with this sort of new thing and kind of executing it poorly and it starts to look gimmicky. Like, it's just something that they think, oh, we'll create a quick buzz and see what everyone says, but because of the poor execution, it seems to get a lot backlash as opposed to any benefit, so wrong kind of attention. Whereas with L'Oreal here and Prada, you can really see that it's been completely thought through. I mean, it's evident that it's not a real person. It's not looking to replace a real human model, but if anything, you know, you have the purpleized pink lipstick, the calypher, it's a branded asset associated with this product. And this is just a summary of all the things we've been talking about. I don't run through everything, but some interesting stats are any sort of brand that's utilised as humans has really seen, you know, a significant uptake in terms of just engagement, people wanting to know what's this thing that's associated with their product or service. It is a lot cheaper sometimes and perhaps maybe hiring a real influencer, you know, if you have these sort of assets, they, you know, they can be super imposed into some of your event photography, such as this one here on your top right, or they can be product and losses, like the bomb left, which is, I think that's a campaign for Porsche, and they've employed this meta-human to be their sort of race car ambassador, which is kind of cool. But yeah, that's sort of the end of my presentation. Pass it on to Guy now. Thank you, Roy. Thank you, Virginia. And thank you everyone for coming along on Monday. While we have talked a little bit about how good meta-humans can look, we at Charisma want to focus on how good they feel. So in essence, what Charisma's doing is, its engine, our engine, is the mind, heart and soul of meta-humans. If you want to get in touch with me, please do these my details, which will be up at the end of this presentation as well. So what we do really is we power charismatic digital humans. So these are not the characters that you might see as a sort of standard chatbot. With our characters, you can talk to them, voice in, they talk back, voice out, and what you say to them has actually an emotional impact on them. So they react to you and you react back and what that allows is for a sense of relationship to build up. And they look stunning. You know, the meta- humans look fantastic. Ready Player Me's look great. There are plenty of other fantastic organizations such as Zebra Dynamics, who are recently acquired by Unity, HyperReal, Unique. These companies are building wonderful, wonderful-looking digital humans. And what we want to do is power them. And we want to power them because brands need that power. If you are a brand, you want to be a brand that a consumer can have a relationship with, you want to be a brand that is interesting to consumers, not sort of dry and dull. So that's where we come into the mix. And to cover up a couple of use cases, firstly, you know, I think the stage one in the digital human market is as a guide. In some ways, what you've got is you've got an opportunity now to blend the role of a brand ambassador, a sales director, and a call center operative all into one individual who can communicate with the consumer, manage the relationship with the brand, and engage with them. So this is an example from Unique. You know, these are realistic, as Roy said, diverse and very flexible characters who just make you that one step closer to consumers. In the metahuman space, we were fortunate enough to get, to awarded an Epic Mega Grant by Epic Games who make metahumans in January. And what this enabled us to do was to bridge the gap, create a plug-in between Unreal Engine as a 3D games engine and Charisma. We already have Unity in there, but the Unreal one, especially with metahumans, is important for us because of the level of fidelity and detail, visual fidelity that you can get out of these metahumans. So what this means is, as Roy said, it's easy to create these metahumans and the metahuman creator, but then you want to bring them to life and get them to do something. And that pipeline for us has to be very fast. You want to be spinning these sorts of characters up in minutes rather than days, and they need to be customizable. So on the first questions we get asked was great, you know, what do they speak, what voice do they speak? Well out of the box we have, in drop-down menu, I think over 500 voices from various different voice partners. Or, as I did a couple of weeks ago, capture my own voice and put it into a character because it's, you know, you've got to walk the walk as well as talking the talk, but it was interesting to see how it felt for me, which was fine, I found it quite fun. And then friends and family to see if they could spot the real me versus the AI one. So we take this to a number of different industries, whether it's education, teaching kids, you know, with virtual versions of Romeo and Juliet, through brands for marketing campaigns, as a way to reach new markets, through to marketing campaigns for people like Warner Brothers, bringing to life existing virtual production assets, such as Steppenwolf as we did here, and he's looking directly at you, he's talking directly to you, you are having a conversation directly back to him, and what you say changes in this instance the fate of planet earth. So there's a whole story that goes around this, and our view always is that what story does to a to an experience is it provides an element of direction to it. So it's not just a Q and A, but is where you're popping in and popping out super quickly. It's something where you are engaging for much longer periods of time, and for example, you know, the standard chatbot experience should be some should be very short, should be between 30 seconds in a minute, whereas the sort of level of engagement you want from a brand where you're properly engaging with that brand should be, you know, sort of 30 minutes, 40 minutes an hour, they're proper entertainment experiences. And the way to do this, you know, this is not easy, it's taken a while to build chrysaline to the way that we wanted to build it, and it needs certain types of bespoke machine learning, natural language processing to recognize what people are saying, and indeed, you know, generative AI, new forms of AI, such as GBT-3, which we are gently infusing into the process, to make sure that, you know, side questions which are brought up can be answered in real time and dynamically, as well as from a core script. And as we head into the metaverse world with places like Decentralized and Decentraland, and indeed, as Roy said, you know, Unreal Engine, which is certainly a metaverse platform, we want to be there because the worst thing could happen in a metaverse is for it to be empty, it's like walking into an empty party or an empty warehouse.  So for those places to be automatically populated with AI humans 24-7 is actually a critical foundation. It's not a nice to have. So with us, you know, we have, as I said, over 250, it's actually now over 500 over the weekend, which is nice because we have a new partner. You have unlimited characters, so what we're seeing as use cases at the moment tends to be one-to-one where I'm talking to one other individual, but it's much more fun, much more engaging if there are two or more characters in the experience that you're talking to. We're looking at custom voice prints, as I said, with myself and others, as we've done for Sky TV, with custom voices, we've built for them. And then Charisma, you want to be interoperable. So wherever your customers are, you need to be there too, but that's where mobile, our 3D platforms, and across multiple languages. And that language, by the way, feeds into the central piece of automated workflow because you don't want to have to write a script in English, let's say, and then have it manually translated into multiple languages. There is an automated workflow of that which allows those writes to automatically create the new content into a graph form. So that's the key bit, maintaining the format of the translation, and then allow the human to do the last mile just to make sure that it's okay. So all of these things, this is balance between AI and human intervention that we're very keen to exploit. And then finally, really, for us, the real showcase that we are about to announce properly this month in July, and hopefully will launch by Christmas, is a full-length immersive experience based on all of this technology. And for this, we chose John Wyndham's title. He wrote Dead the Trifids. We licensed his book, The Crack and Wakes, which is an epic, sci-fi sort of environmental thriller. And we are adapting that into immersive forms. As you can see, there are over 30 characters in that title, all of whom you can talk to and all of whom, depending on what you say to who, the other ones may change their view of view as well. So all of these elements have come together in this great jigsaw of technology that we work with. So top five takeaways from me. Yes, there's brand, there's sort of conversation design, but there's brand character design as well. If you're looking at this, think about who your character might be, what they look like, how they speak, as well as just what they say. For us, engagement is that holy grail. The Q and A's are great, but really what you're doing is fending off complaints. Whereas if we can do something which makes people feel positive sentiment towards the brand, that's measured in engagement and is fantastic. And often overrated or simultaneously sort of under-recognized is the power of proper good storytelling. Because it's how we make sense of the world. It's how we start conversations, actually, whether it's just how are you. And the answer to that often is a story of what happened to that person. So stories are very important to us as humans. AI, for me, is the massive tsunami that is following on behind all of the other trends that are hitting tech at the moment, whether they're crypto or metaverses or NFTs. It is AI which is the cause and automation which is the effect. And whether you're a table manufacturer or a chef or a digital marketer, AI is going to be influencing your lives in the next year if it has not already. And finally, the metaverse is a big deal. Games are interesting because they tend to start and finish. The metaverse is on 24x7. It is a persistent world and we're very bullish on this particular piece. It's an evolution, it's not revolution. We did a lot of work in Second Life so we saw how that's rising as a piece of technology and as a consumer proposition, as a brand proposition. We built all the worlds back in the day for Accenture worldwide and did anything from parkour games through to Q&A and HR interviews. And the analytics we saw from that are that people enjoy being in these spaces. They learn a lot from it and they enjoy having the alter egos and living a sort of playful version of themselves. So our view is as technology and broadband and these technologies rise, then the metaverse is going to be, as Virginia alluded to, the Internet in 3D, which is how we sit. So that's our view at the moment. Thank you very much for listening so far and I will pass back to Virginia. Thank you Guy. Yeah, bit of a mindblower that one. So yeah, I guess the summary that we wanted to leave you with appreciate the fact that you've given us half an hour of your good attention. It's really just to say that the world is now opening up to a whole range of creativity with tools and technologies that previously were not available to us as marketers but we can now have full access to. We can create stories and that's actually, we feel it's a real crux point for marketers to be able to tell those stories, to be able to create those personalized experiences in any language, in any environment and to really unleash our imaginations to as to how we do that. So today was really just a glimpse but if you'd like to find out more, we've actually got a QR code for a landing page where you can basically sign up for our free interactive sessions and those are really where we can give you a little bit more of an experience of how these technologies can work and show in real life. With that, I'm handing it back to Judith. Brilliant, that's great. Some food for thought there definitely. So we're now going to have a short Q&A session. So first question we'll start off with from a viewer who's interested but where do they start? What are the quickest and easiest ways for them to incorporate meta-humans into their marketing? How do we get started? How do you get started? I guess the best place really is to just go out there and get as much information as you possibly can. There's a lot of info out on the internet about these meta-humans. So before you really start playing around with them, it'd be good to inform yourself with all the relevant knowledge and kind of approach as you would any sort of marketing exercise really because some of my co-parties are saying is these things are assets at the end of the day and they need to be assets of which you can utilize and how better to know how to utilize them than equip yourself with information. So that's my take on that. Anybody want to add anything to that? I was just going to say I think for me I'm not a creator in particular but I've been able to download meta-human creator and have a little play. I've had a play with Charisma on the app and so on. So just even trying it out for yourself I think gives you some of that hands-on feel for what these things can do and I think as soon as you start to get some of those experiences for yourself and we've been fortunate to be able to go to things like the Unreal Engine, Epic Labs and so on it just starts those ideas flowing and I think the ideas is what makes this it's really exciting to just be able to think about the potential for how it can be used. Okay next question. Can any of you give us some examples of some B2B campaigns and to see how they're being adopted by B2B organizations? Can you think of any of those? It's earlier stages to be fair in B2B but it's starting to happen so there are some that have been certainly some interactions for example some events that have highlighted some of the use cases. I think brands like Samsung like Alibaba they're incorporating meta-humans in some of their campaigns and technologies so effectively they've taken virtual influences and created a brand image and you know virtual influences are not necessarily high-quality digital humans and there have been many kind of characters represented. I mean you know a few of us remember some of these sort of little tools and widgets that have popped up on earlier versions of Windows. How can I help you? Where can I point you towards? So it's kind of early stage iterations if you like for where this technology sort of sprung from and the potential that it goes forward there's quite a lot of work actually being done in the area of chatbots for brands and that's as Guy was alluding to with the customer experience element. So yeah a number of organisations are actually built or are building out customer engagement, customer experience interactions with digital humans effectively being voiced or the face behind the chatbot. So that's quite an exciting space to explore as well. Next question is someone's asking is the development of this dependent on the growth of 5G? I can take that because we were on a 5G accelerator last year. No it's not actually because which is very good news and part of it is that the way in which a lot of these new digital humans or not even new a lot of the way that the industry is evolving is to be platform agnostic. So you want to be able to have something where you have an interaction on a mobile on that mobile if it's not on wifi you need to be very aware of data plans for a lot of demographics. So these are thoughts which are put into the original thinking around designs for these things up to the metahuman style which needs a chunky PC and you know not necessarily 5G but certainly if you're in a gaming environment you want that latency to be to be reduced. But I think from a marketing perspective actually the way that a lot of these designs are certainly the way we do them is is is around accessibility and accessibility is broadest sense and data connections is one of those one of those points. Okay someone's saying here that they work for nature brands is it just humans that can be created or other mammals and birds it wouldn't be a metahuman would they? Metacotons. No you can Sorry go on. I was just going to point to the nine foot seven alien that I had on my slide called Stephen Wolfe who as we granted is not particularly good representation of nature I'll take that. But we do we yeah we've seen a lot of really interesting tell you why it's not necessarily is specific for this but the raw Shakespeare company did a did a production during lockdown which is a book production where they took an actor and then then that actor turned in morphed into star into sort of star constellations and everything. So the imagination I would say it's entirely what you want it to be you could have that act of being a tree being an animal being whatever it is they are absolutely that absolutely is a valid use case and exciting one as well. Yeah I mean yeah they're everywhere I think I think what's something I'd be more familiar would be the meerkats compared to meerkat yeah yeah I I've met a meerkat don't they? But essentially they're 3D assets any anything and everything can be made into a 3D asset these days.  Every time you need it you know for another business actually you mentioned B2B I know Deloitte have revisited they had they did a version of a virtual employee help desk met a human which wasn't the best but I think they're looking at it again and it's actually exciting because yeah Deloitte said I mean next question how do you determine met a human personality for brands do you collaborate with brand managers or a psychologist? Do you want to do that one Ryan? Personality I can take that one so like for example like it's what I was saying before you kind of have to approach this as a branding exercise essentially so for example we're working on a cube met a human I think we're basing up James actually he's Michael founder but you know cube as a brand has you know its own tone of voice we have our values and you know everyone who works within the company kind of is a reflection of those things so a met human would be no different it needs to sound like a cube person look like a cube person and communicate as a cube brand so to speak so I would approach it as you would a branding exercise and really give it the personality and values the look that you needed to have okay so you said you're in the present sorry Guy just to leave it on there quickly because we went through this process with Accenture building theirs in Second Life so I was mentioning and that was working was working with their brand teams their brand teams were very good at RGB values and what the logo should look like this that another when we said are you wood steel or glass as a building or what tone of voice are you it got a little bit challenging I think there are there are lessons to be learned from story design from characters from Hollywood that come into this and psychology it's a barge that's good good question I've just got one more point if it's okay because I think going back to the bandwidth question it occurred to me that obviously the marker for this is the interactive experience for the charisma thing but you know you can use digital humans in in lots of different ways creatively for example in brand imagery and static in video in social media so the interactive experience is the pinnacle but they you know a normal video is a normal video and you know it's just that sort of creative element of how you choose the figure and where but that that obviously isn't bandwidth dependent so the need for bandwidth is very much sort of you know varied and doesn't necessarily have a high impact okay you mentioned in the presentation that China were leading the way on this and South Korea how far behind are we in say the UK to the way they are we're going to be able to catch up quite quickly and on top of that how could you predict where we're maybe in say five years time with something like this we didn't see the pandemic coming so I you know granted we've been we've been strived and the technology's been sent but and any any thoughts on that I was going to put a bit of research sorry Guy do you want to say this Guy yeah it's a very quick answer and it's the it's the way that I look at it which is that we in the UK are two years behind the US and six years behind South Korea and having just one of our CTO came back from permission to South Korea about two weeks ago and that sort of bears it out in terms of catching up we need we need more we need more investment in it you know that's that's the core of it whether it comes from government or VCs or whatever we do tend to do things second rather than first in a lot of ways but my my core investment focus should would be on AI as a as a catalyst for it Roy Virginia do you want to add to that I would say that it's an opportunity for forward-looking brands and marketers who want to to get an early footprint in this area I mean the metaverse as we've talked about is going to be one of the driving forces along with AI that's going to be accelerating this you know this area forward so yeah if you want to be a thought leader and if you want to to make your mark you want to use some really exciting technology to create standard experiences for your customers and your brand with the scalability values that actually are inherent yeah I think it's a really exciting time but yeah we've we've got an opportunity to step forward now Roy you're nodding do you want to add anything to that um I can see the answer to the question would we we catch up I I don't think so the only reason being is like at the thing in Asia that the demographic is is different from a cultural point of view because you know it's not unusual for example in Japan to live another complete life online and in parallel with your you know normal life so that I guess that's why that you know this space our technology advances a lot quicker there because people live and breathe and stuff all the time and maybe the the question should be shouldn't really be looking to catch up but really okay what does the meta bus so to speak mean will look like in the west you know because there'll be unique factors that are not present in Sakurai or China or Japan that are you know for example very normal in the UK so those are the things I think we should be looking to own and yeah it's just I guess you have to use use Asia's inspiration yeah we could could there be any downsides or dark sides that we could sort of spot them identifying and potentially avoid or is it all just positive um I mean with any collection of people so like this is friends especially to the metaverse there's always room for trouble but like these these worlds have been you know the existing gaming and the game industry has managed to regulate you know you know weed out a lot of the the nastiness out of it but I think for yeah for be for be to be for an interview yeah I guess it'd be the same risks as you would have if you're engaging any sort of online community but probably not as bad as it would be anything else here it's a tricky question I don't know if I've answered that anybody want to add to that I was talking to someone at the weekend this great barbecue conversation just around whose job is in it's a niche area certified identification of people online you know so matching kids to passports or you know whatever it may be and he said that that tends to remove 95% of the toxicity in online communities by removing non-imity and you know I just want to say interesting point because there are there's a lot of toxins out there so there is everywhere but if we can find ways like that to remove it then fantastic I think also a lot of brands will probably start by creating their own like mini-verse if you like so a bit like the Keevers or the the Katana Airways thing you know you control that environment that's basically your thing you can then decide you know who's in it how they appear and so on in the same way that you would monitor and control any kind of community effectively so so there are you know different aspects to this obviously the metaverse you know people are concerned and there are issues around that but that's a big thing and we're talking about you know applications of a particular type of technology that could be used within the metaverse or even outside of it so different levels of control will apply in those instances I think we've got time for one final question because we've been fascinating we could go on all day with the questions that are coming in final comments how close are meta-humans to the human mind and will there be as close to and if and will they become as close and if so when and the follow on to that would will computers make their own meta-humans one day just to scare everybody anyone want to take that one as a final flourish it's wonderful bait but that question the cue to me is AGI which is is general intelligence of artificial intelligence in terms of how close that gets to a thinking autonomous AI system whatever that system is it's very debatable as to when that will occur and some people debate whether it will occur estimates anywhere between about four and 20 years if you agree that it does and by that time if it does making meta-humans won't be our concern it'll be a lot bigger than that but you know I think that it would be very good for example this early stage to be training large AI models on real world problems that we that can make this planet a better place like environmental issues traffic issues rather than trying to teach it how to beat humans in games like chess where beating human is a success criteria just one point anyone else got anything to add to that no I mean I think the bigger questions of life are always open to different opinions but yeah no I think what Guy said is it's pretty straight enough yeah yeah right well we'll draw it to a close because we all want to go off now and try and create our new improved linked images so younger versions for me so I'd just like to say sadly that's all we have time for now for our webinar I'd like to say thank you again to Virginia Roy and Guy for their presentations and to the CIM Southeast Group for organising the event we'll be taking a bit of a break over the summer months for what with our webinar express series but we'll be back again on the 6th of September when our East of England group will be hosting successful and fulfilling marketing leadership so that just leaves me to say thank you to you for joining us today and hope that you've enjoyed our webinar take care everyone have a lovely summer and we look forward to seeing you soon thank you


And welcome to today's edition of Barns Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barns Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education, and today I'm taking us to Gallery 16. We're on the second floor, and we're facing east, and this is one of the galleries that is full of stuff. I did an earlier takeout on Marsden Hartley's movement here, movement Bermuda from 1916. But on this wall, we can see just an abundance of things to look at and an incredible variety of traditions that are drawn from. The wall centers on a panel by the American artist and carver Charles Prendergast, the Hartleys surround that. And then below we have works from Persia, illuminated manuscripts from France and England, works from China and Korea. But the painting I've selected for us to consider today is all the way over on the left hand corner, up here in the corner, and it's a work by the artist Alfred Moore. It's called Hills, and it was painted around 1908. Moore was an artist who spent American artists who spent considerable amount of time in Europe. Traveling first at the very end of the 19th century and staying until the beginning of the First World War, which meant that, and he spent most of his time while he was there in France and in Paris, which meant that he was present as some of the sort of monumental movements of modern art were emerging and they were influencing him. And chief among them and having a strong influence on Moore in these early years was the movement titled Fovism. It was a group of artists that congregated around Henri Matisse. And the title Fovism was not one they chose themselves, but was one that was foisted upon them, meaning wild beasts, because when these artists first showed these works, the critics were shocked by them and considered the artists that created them something akin to wild beasts, or that the art themselves, these pictures hung amongst very staid and academic paintings, very conventional paintings. The paintings themselves seemed like beasts among the tamed and civilized paintings. Mar adapted himself to the fove technique and palette, and for many years really explored its possibilities. He is considered the first American artist to really adapt fovism and to introduce fovism to an American audience through exhibiting these works in the United States. And so what is it about this work that garnered the term fovism, the wild beasts? I think just looking at it, even today we can get a sense of how the color was quite shocking. The fovists dispensed with naturalistic colors, what we would call local colors, colors that replicate the colors of nature, trying to evoke the visual sensation of things as they actually are. And instead, tried to, rather than looking outwards, looked inwards to themselves and tried to paint by way of color, their reaction to a subject. And landscapes were a big part of this. And what that meant was that rather than using the colors that they may have actually seen in that landscape, they searched for a palette and for colors that would convey their subjective, emotional, and sensual response to that landscape. And we see that, we see that at work here, that we have a foreground that's dominated by these strongly contrasting pinks and lavenders and this greenish-yellow patch. The way that those two colors sort of communicate with each other is quite startling. And then we have these jagged lines that perhaps were brush or a bush or it's not entirely clear what it was, but rather than being the things themselves, more distills them down to their shapes, similarly to the path, to the hedgerow just beyond, and then to the trees and hills that give the picture its name. The titles of these were not really intended to suggest a narrative, but were rather just to sort of identify it. And what is Mara focusing on? Well, he's focusing on colors and color relationships to each other, as I suggested, with the pink and violet against the green, or the yellow, the yellow tree here, set against a backdrop of this rich blue and then green, or this green against blue and then with this cap of yellow and then red. And it's things like this, this line of red that comes up, perhaps a distant hill, that crests that hill, and we see that similar color used over here, that was quite surprising. That is that they're calling out colors that are evocative rather than descriptive. Another thing is that Mara was largely uninterested or didn't really focus so much on literal spatial relationships that is using elements of linear perspective, for instance, but rather allowed the overlapping of color areas and color shapes to suggest a receding space, more like planes of color stacked on top of each other. Volume, dimensionality of the things themselves, the trees, for instance, or even the hills, are not modeled in conventional ways in terms of values, light to dark, but rather are modeled in terms of colors. So again, the crest of the hill and the red and then the yellow and then the green, it suggests some sort of rise to that hill, again without literally reproducing it. Things are simplified to geometric shapes. I mentioned the lines here in the foreground, the curving shape of what was a path, the jagged lines that define that, or the hedgerows, or the hills themselves, all of them into these sort of basic shapes of lines, of circular shapes, of crescent shapes. Again, suggesting the subject rather than strictly illustrating it. And another thing that these artists were interested in doing was making reference to the act of painting itself. So brushstrokes are very loose and open. You can see the way that these blue areas, actually much of the picture, has a textural quality due to the bristles of the brush scraping through the paint. The paint is applied quite lightly, which allows the ground, so this white that we see here is not painted on, but rather is the surface of the panel on which the picture is painted coming through. So learning from the impressionists to use that to brighten and lighten their palette, the folks did that even more so, large areas of the ground exposed. And where the colors applied, it's often applied thinly, which allows the whiteness of that ground to come through, further brightening and lightening the overall quality of the picture. And all but absent, only sort of minorly suggested are shadows, but instead everything is flooded with this bright, brilliant glowing light, light conveyed through color. Essentially what we're looking at while we can still recognize the sort of essence of a subject of a landscape, what we're experiencing is the interrelationship and interaction of colors and shapes and lines, suggesting qualities of space and luminosity or light. But it's really about the experience of looking at a picture, and that's the other thing that the folks were interested in conveying to the viewer, that it's not the illusion of looking through a window out onto a natural landscape, but instead calling attention to the very physicality, the materiality of a painting itself, that one can enjoy the interaction of colors and lines and shapes just as much or perhaps even more so than the recognition of looking at a naturalistic landscape. Ultimately what the foes did was they showed us our world, our familiar world in a way we common everyday people don't or perhaps can't see it. The artist's eyes are attuned to colors that most of us can't see, colors that they will insist are there, or at least that they see and they sense. But in their paintings we're able to experience something of that artistic vision of seeing the world in these bright, vivid, bold colors forming these simplified, distilled shapes. And really being incredibly evocative of the artist's sensation. Mar had a very close relationship with Dr. Barnes in a pivotal time as the collection was being begun to be assembled in the early teens. And Barnes was a strong advocate of Alfred Moore going so far as to finance a one man show of his work in New York. So when you come back to the Barnes, this is perhaps a picture that you may overlook and I'll point out also that there's another picture by Moore here. And just to make the connection with Moore, the foes and Henri Matisse, Barnes hung a work by Matisse over the door as a reference. And there I should say that there are more Matisse's in the adjoining galleries. So the memory of Matisse resonates throughout these several galleries. But when you come back, take an opportunity to spend some time looking at this important American artist. There's still more than 10 works of Moore that remain in the collection, not all of them on permanent display, but many of them on permanent display. And as I said, I hope you'll take advantage of looking at them the next time you come or explore them on our website. Be sure to leave comments if you have any reflections or observations about any of our takeouts. We always love to hear from those of you that are tuning into us and join us again for our next installment of Barnes Takeout. Thank you. Take care. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.