What will the internet of the future look like? Will it be a place of freedom, creativity and connectivity? We ask Sam Hamilton the Creative Director of Decentraland how his dream of a digital future is coming into fruition. What is it like walking down a 3D virtual street, going to a VR concert, or designing your next outfit inspired by a Metaverse Fashion show? Decentraland is hosting its annual Decentraland Metaverse Fashion Week next week, so if you want to check it out head to mvfw.org.
Walter Jennings: Would you buy a house in the Metaverse, propose to your other half as an avatar or spend your day wearing VR goggles? Today's guest is here to help us work out is the Metaverse the future, or is it a digital hype that's fading into the trash pile of Web3. Here to get into the specifics is Sam Hamilton, Creative Director of Decentraland. Welcome to the Finoverse Sam. Glad to have you on the show.
Sam Hamilton: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Walter Jennings: Sam. According to you, the internet is broken. Why is that?
Sam Hamilton: I think it's something that people feel worldwide at the moment that the internet we set out to build 20, 30 years ago is not what it became. It was a place of freedom, of connectivity, and now it's a place where a few corporations use people as a product and have become like so powerful that they're probably more powerful than governments in most places in the world. I don't think that's what we set out to build. I think worldwide people feel that something's wrong. There's a lot of mental health issues with the way these companies use core addictive loops, um, to keep people coming back for more and trying to get that dopamine here. Um, I don't think everybody quite realizes what the problems are, but they feel that there is a problem. Obviously, Decentraland is trying to guide the internet back to the place where it was when we first started, and we had a dream of building this like global-free connected world.
Walter Jennings: Now, Sam, how would you describe to someone who's not heard of Decentraland? What Decentraland is?
Sam Hamilton: It's many things, actually. Um, first and foremost, it's a city, genesis city, um, that's built in a 3D environment. It uses cryptocurrency to have an ecosystem and, and transactions. It's owned by its users, so people can buy plots of land and then build whatever they want on it. People have built libraries, casinos, university, nightclubs, everything that a normal city would have. And then, um, there's a community that goes there every day and goes to events and, and plans things. And it's also a philosophy. It's like the idea of bringing decentralization back to the internet. A lot of people in the community and the foundation who I work for, um, really believe in trying to change the way the internet is at the moment, making it more open source, giving it back to the people, basically giving the power back to the people. So that's the philosophical side. There's a creative side. There's tools like Blender that just allow people to build a 3D environment on the internet. And so there's a lot of people who have learned these tools and now they're somewhere to really express themselves and build architecture and clothes and all these things that go into a virtual digital world.
Walter Jennings: And Sam, you mentioned that people can monetize their creations. Uh, obviously this is built on blockchain or what folks call Web3 that allows the item to follow the person versus, uh, sticking within the walled garden of a Web2 society, like whether it's Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Uh, this is a portable.
Sam Hamilton: Yes, indeed. Um, our founders actually grew up on games like Roblox, world of Warcraft and spent, you know, thousands of hours of their time as young adults, playing these games, spending money on items in these games. And when they grew out of it, when it was time to move on, there was no way of like extracting that time or value that they put into it. So this was the premise that they started this idea on that, you know, anything that you buying game you can sell on for cryptocurrency, and then you can cash out that cryptocurrency and move on to another game. Or even we've started to have interoperable items that you can buy in one game and it works in another game, which is something really that changes the whole gaming industry completely.
Walter Jennings: Yeah. It also allows the people who build the towers and the libraries and the cinemas to monetize that. So tell me about the best ways to build in Decentraland. Do you have to follow the regular rules of architecture or, you know, how do you approach a building in the Metaverse?
Sam Hamilton: I mean, there's what many ways of approaching it. I'm of the theory that people don't want to just be dropped into a completely abstract world that they don't understand. So we have things like roads and buildings on the floor that are, you know, seem to be there, but because of gravity, even though there is no gravity. So giving people a sense of being comfortable in their environment, first of all. But then if you walk down the street where all the buildings are on the floor and they have stairs, and then you get to the end of the street and there's one building floating and animated and spinning and doing something really abstract, you really notice it, you know, suddenly it feels really out of place and abstract and something that could only happen in the metaverse. We already live in the metaverse in my opinion.
You know, we already live in a digital world that we're spending eight, 10 hours a day on our mobile, on our home computer in this digital reality. But it's not a very human experience. And I think what the next iteration of the internet, is a spacial internet where you can walk around, if you go to buy a, a dress, you can put that dress on and try it on and look in the mirror. And you know, at the moment we're buying everything online, but we're not really getting a human interaction with those things. And the spatial internet gives you the chance to do that.
Walter Jennings: Yeah, no, and it's also a different way of experiencing information. If you're older like I am, you would be used to more of a magazine format, and that's the way the internet is laid out now. You kind of go from page to page, but if you grew up on Roblox or Minecraft, you're used to heading off on a journey and finding your information. So I think conceptually the way the next generation accesses and use the internet is being fueled by the games they played as a youth. And now that being enabled in a metaverse that is a whole different relationship with information.
Sam Hamilton: A hundred per cent. Um, the generation that has grown up on these games have lived in metaverse-like environments for the last 20 years. And now they're coming of age and they're looking for more adult experiences. And I don't mean adult in a kind of sexual way, although that may be what they're looking for, but I mean, adult in terms of conferences, in terms of understanding the world in not such a childlike way, even though we have quite a cartoony environment because of our low poly aesthetic. So it's still fun, but it, you know, it deals with more adult themes, I'd say.
Walter Jennings: Yeah, no, and certainly during Covid, there were many, uh, early builders who, uh, we read of, you know, the people who were able to monetize during covid their transactions on the chain and what they were building in Decentraland or another metaverse, and being able to sell those. And so it really becomes an economy like any village. Um, yet it is created not for teenage gamers, but for adults who are maybe wanting, uh, new forms of entertainment, but also looking for, uh, conducting business or finding information. So, you know, it's a multipurpose platform, I suppose.
Sam Hamilton: I mean, COVID is a really interesting time because it went, you know, we went from a few hundred people who everybody thought was crazy, really, um, to everybody understanding that there was a serious use case here. Like within weeks of lockdown happening, we had 10 conferences that were supposed to happen in the real world that got shut down, um, that were suddenly happening in Decentraland. And that, that just continued the momentum and it didn't stop when lockdown stopped, you know, people had already adjusted to a new way of working and a new way of, you know, maybe going to concerts. You know, the idea that you can go to a concert that somebody is playing in the states when you live in Kuala Lumpur is incredible, you know? Um, and we really showed people that that was possible during Covid, but it didn't mean they didn't want to do it once they weren't locked down. You know, it's still a new medium of entertainment, that people are really excited about.
Walter Jennings: Well, Sam, I'm glad at least you managed to get Taylor Swift tickets, but, being able to attend an event anywhere in the world is certainly a novelty. In your role as creative director, does that mean you are kind of choosing paint swatches to paint buildings or are you kind of architecture on a conceptual level? Tell me more about what comes with your job.
Sam Hamilton: I guess over the years it's changed quite a lot. We started as a very small organization of like 20 or 30 people. We're over a hundred now, and we've changed a lot the way we approach things. So we started it off, like, the first problem we really had was nobody using the platform and nobody building content. And we needed content to bring users and we needed users for people to want to build content. So it was like a chicken and an egg situation. I put together a team from the community of the best people I'd seen building experiences on the platform, and we started to lead by example and just build content for the platform that showed people what was possible using the tools we had, but also open sourcing all of that. So giving people the building blocks to make it easier for them.
So we took use case after use case, like a conference center, a cinema, a nightclub, and we built those experiences and we made them really great, and then we put them on something that we call the awesome repository, which is like lots of open source content that anybody can use and then customize the way they want. And that really worked, it really got people inspired and it made it like the barrier to entry much easier for people to start building content. And then we had a real burst of brands wanting to enter the metaverse. So my role then became assisting them, educating a lot of people about Web3 and why it was different and how they had to approach it differently, but then also brainstorming and, you know, creatively designing their experiences within Decentraland.
Walter Jennings: Yeah. So managing to create a unique experience for each of the brands, uh, will be very different depending on their target audience.
Sam Hamilton: Yeah. And it was, that period was insane. We were so busy, like, I mean, we don't really use the phone, but like the analogy, the phone didn't stop bringing is correct in this situation, you know? Um, so yeah, that was a really intense period. And then we decided that we wanted to give back to the community some really big events over the year, like seasonal and start to form kind of traditions within this city, you know? Um, so we do things like we're, we're up to our fourth annual art week this year. We'll be doing our third music festival in September, and we do our second, uh, fashion week.
Walter Jennings: And what are some of the highlights that we can look for during Metaverse Fashion Week?
Sam Hamilton: Yeah, it's gonna be amazing. Um, I'm looking forward to seeing like the crazy designs people come up with. Obviously, any normal fashion week is quite extravagant, but when you can have a goldfish bowl as a head or be a robot, you know, it, it just gets super weird. I think the highlights were always the runway shows, you know, that's where the most effort and most, um, you know, it'll be the spectacular. They're short, but they're, you know, the wire moments. I don't wanna give too much away. Um, but just to say that the fashion industry is obviously something that sees the benefit in the metaverse. It already sees the economy in which, you know, a new generation is spending a lot of money on their digital identity, and the fashion industry doesn't want to miss that part of their industry that's happening, kind of like outside their scope.
So we've had, last year we had like 70 brands, um, come into fashion week and really just wanna be part of the web3 movement. This year we have a lot of brands, but we're also really community focused and focused on design houses that have come solely through digital. So this is their realm. Um, so there's a lot of focus on those two, um, this year as well, which is really important not to overlook the fact that, you know, the people who built this space shouldn't just be overshadowed by all the brands. But yeah, I mean, the fashion industry is like, there's been a bit of, last year there was a lot of hype about the metaverse that's died down a lot, and a lot of industries and now are kind of rubbing their chin and saying, do we fit in the metaverse or not? And kind of going through that stage of this. Um, but the fashion industry hasn't backed off at all because they get it and they, you know, it's already happening on such a grand scale that the fashion industry have already realized this is inevitable.s
Walter Jennings: Fashion is a very forward-looking industry. You also, earlier a year ago, we had an enormous amount of art and artists moving on to NFTs and to digital art. Um, and that was an early adoption use case. Um, what other industries do you see pivoting earlier into the Metaverse? We've art, fashion, what's next?
Sam Hamilton: Everything is next. So like, um, I remember back in the nineties people saying, why would a restaurant have a website? You can't taste the food on a website. And you know, now if a restaurant doesn't have a website, you don't take it seriously and probably can't even book a table. So, you know, people's thinking will change dramatically over the years to come. However, what shocks me is like things like banking and politics or, you know, nation-states, when these things start to come in, that for me, that's like, whoa, this is a level that I never, it's not like I didn't expect it, it just never crossed my idea path. You know, it was like when the first embassy said, oh, we want an embassy in the Metaverse. And they explained to us why it was a great idea because to build a metaverse, uh, an embassy in every country of the world is super expensive for small, poor countries, you know? So having one in the metaverse and being able to do some of that stuff digitally in a 3D environment with NPCs or with real people, it makes sense, but it never crossed my mind that that would come and so early. And then banking as well. Banking seems like such a stuffy industry, you know what I mean? Like, I'm a creative director, I don't mean anything rude by that, but you know,
Walter Jennings: No, there are very creative bankers.
Sam Hamilton: There are, and you know, I've had meetings with super intelligent people that came with great ideas from the banking industry that again, it's not anything that would ever have crossed my mind. And so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff coming.
Walter Jennings: And Sam we're kind of, we're in that chicken and eggs scenario that we mentioned earlier, which is, you know, you've gotta have a community to build great content, and you need great content to attract community. So, you know, these, uh, big step upgrades and changes in patterns of behavior really require people to make it happen. Tell me about how the community has changed and grown over the years in Decentraland.
Sam Hamilton: Yeah, I mean, firstly we don't really have that chicken and egg problem from my perspective. You know, I've come from when there was literally nobody and nothing, you know, it's like an empty canvas. Um, so for me, having tens of thousands of users a day and having half the world built is like a massive achievement already. When you look at where we want to go, there's still a long way to go. And I accept that. And, you know, in terms of kind of the world size, the mass media, there was a lot of hype last year that's died down this year, but the core community has grown. The people who go there every day, the people who really live and breathe this stuff, it's growing all the time. And so, you know, the trajectory is still, you know, upward. It's just media hype, often overplays things, then, then wants to bring it down a level and play the other side, and then it becomes like the norm as it were. Um, and I think that's, you know, the phase we are going through.
Walter Jennings: Yeah, and Sam, in large terms, it tracks the adoption of crypto. We saw a lot of people diving into it because they wanted to trade. Um, now we see the same levels of interest, particularly amongst major corporations or institutions, and they're instead trying to figure out, how do I build on this for the longer term? So, you know, we might have had the bump of the curious, um, and now behind them come the planners, and they're starting to put the stakes in that will feed the community for the next generation.
Sam Hamilton: It's true. Um, and you know, we always talk about community, but in Decentraland, the reality is communities with a plural, because there's people all over the world speaking different languages and they're forming their own smaller communities. But what I've definitely found, like I went on the road a lot last year doing conferences and speaking publicly and, and meeting the community in real life. And what I find is, I dunno how we did this, but somehow our core values and our philosophy and our essence has been passed on like to next generation and next generation of community. And like, I now hear them speaking with the same passion and love for the same things that I was five years ago. And it's incredible to see that, you know, somehow, like even though there's people all over the world, different languages, different cultures, there's something binding them all together, you know, like an idea, a dream, a hope of like building something better for the future.
Walter Jennings: Um, well, I think your community have aligned their values around the benefits of being pioneers and, you know, they're building in the midst of a great hinterland that had previously been unpopulated. So that ties them together forever in spirit I suppose.
Sam Hamilton: I'd love when people draw parallels to the real, real world, whatever that is. Um, because I agree, I think all of this is, you know, when really not doing anything new, it's all about storytelling, which we've been doing for thousands of years. We're just creating a new medium to do that storytelling in, um, and virtual worlds as well, like in some ways, cities, virtual worlds, they're these things that we create to, to feed all of the needs of information going into our head. It's in the physical world, and now we're doing it in a digital world. But, you know, the human story doesn't change that much. It's just we find new ways of telling it.
Walter Jennings: Now, Sam participating in Decentraland, requires an object and requires a screen and requires time behind a screen. Are you just, uh, exacerbating too much screen time, or are you enhancing the experience?
Sam Hamilton: So I'm a strong advocate of like, so some people, you know, within the foundation, within our organization, we are really open and everyone talks and debates and we have different opinions, and we try and get to a consensus. And, you know, the idea of kind of like getting more people to spend more time in your platform and more attention and more call loops and all of this stuff is actually my worst nightmare. And for me, I feel like we should judge metrics on, hey, if we can get somebody into an experience and after 30 minutes or an hour they leave completely satisfied enough that they walk away from the screen, for me, that's a much better way of judging whether we are being successful or not. We're in a really unique position that our business model, like the foundation is a nonprofit. We don't have to have revenue.
We, you know, we've got very clever financial people from the start of the company, you know, did cryptocurrency stuff. And so we've got 10 years runway to build this whole platform and open source it and give it to the community without really having to worry where the money's coming from, which means we don't have to, you know, try and squeeze every penny out of every user. And so for me, I think we're definitely going through a tech paradigm shift at the moment with AI, with Metaverse, with VR, with all of these different things. And we have a responsibility to make sure that we don't fall down the same traps as web2. Um, you know, we have like, you know, you say, you said earlier in the conversation, you were old, I'm old too, you know, all of this stuff is like mind-blowing for me.
Um, it was science fiction when I was a teenager, really like Snow Crash. I read Snow Crash in the nineties and it was science fiction, and now it's like, it's, we're on the verge of really being there. Um, and so yeah, we have a super responsibility to make sure that the next iteration of the internet takes into consideration the evolution of the brain and how we are dealing with this on a psychological level. Because if we don't, it will be too late, at least for a generation by the time we learn about all of this stuff. You know, a whole generation of already gonna have lived their lives inside these virtual worlds, if we're not careful.
Walter Jennings: Well, Sam, you've got a heck then, a heck of a responsibility if you're responsible for creativity in a decentralized world. How do you power yourself to add new innovations, new angles, new approaches? Or is it really about kind of, making this more comprehensible or understandable?
Sam Hamilton: Um, I, so there's a few things. Like, first of all, I have a five year old kid, and so my motivation comes from not wanting her to grow up in a world dominated by big corporations who use her as the product. Okay. So that, you know, that really drives me and Decentraland and the founders of Decentraland. So it's not just the project, but the people behind it really inspired me and really made me believe that they're the right people to guide this into existence. Um, and then, you know, looking at it from a very different place. So rather than taking control of everything, constantly giving up control of everything. So like I said, with Fashion Week, you know, we put that whole thing together, we devised it, we organized it, we made the whole thing happen in the first year. This year there's much more community involvement, and eventually it will be completely run by the community.
You know, like, I have no ownership of these things that I first create. It's really about giving it to the world. And, you know, even to the point where we are not trying to control, like it's the Metaverse Fashion Week, and it's not just in Decentraland. We started it, we did it last year, we did it on our own, and now there's more, um, metaverses involved and we've opened it up for them and we're sharing partnerships with them and, you know, really trying to educate people that it doesn't have to be competitive, it can be collaborative. That's the early internet was like that. The early internet was just people doing it for the sake of it, because they wanted it to be in existence. Look at what Tim Berners led, he didn't, you know, write a patent and start a company. He just gave HTML to the world. And, underneath all of what Decentraland does, is a protocol. We're writing a protocol for the next iteration of the internet, and that's all open source. Anyone can come along and take everything we do and make their own version, and we encourage that. And this is a completely different way of looking at the world and business models. And I think it's what the world needs right.
Walter Jennings: Now, how do you set in place the guardrails that will retain a sense of safety within your community? Uh, because sometimes people, um, when they're on the internet, they're not necessarily human, um, and there's bad behaviors.
Sam Hamilton: Yeah. This is, you know, I'm not gonna lie to you and say, we've got a solution for this because we don't, it's an incredibly difficult problem that some of the biggest companies in the world are throwing huge amounts of manpower and trying to solve and still not really doing a very good job of it. Our philosophy is everything is owned by the community, so that includes this, you know, we cannot simply ban somebody from the platform or, you know, ban a piece of content. But what we do have is a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, which is the other pillar of Decentraland. I work for the foundation. And the other pillar is the DAO. And the DAO is really the community, like anyone who owns land, wearables, any assets within the ecosystem gets voting power for owning that, and then can vote on all sorts of proposals from who gets a little star on the map to say, this is a point of interest to should this name be banned because it's offensive or racist, you know, should this piece of content not be shown in the client because it's the same, um, you know, so all of that stuff can go through the DAO but it takes somebody from the community to flag it, to bring it to the DAO probably a week or two, processing, voting, all of that before something could be taken down, which isn't ideal right now.
But, um, we are at the very beginning of this whole revolution, you know, this, this whole change in the internet. And like, I expect, you know, huge innovations over the next few years. I think AI is gonna make a big difference. We're already programming MPCs with AI to be in world and like be support chat, for instance. So we can have, like, you know, if you want somewhere in the world and you need help, you can just call up a character and there'll be a character and you can chat to them like they're another player, but they'll have all the answers because they're programed by AI to have all of those. So it's, um, it's moving really fast.
Walter Jennings: Yeah, no, in fact, I liked one of your earlier quotes where you said, if you compare the metaverse to the history of films, we are in the days of silent movies. So the pianist is playing alongside by the screen to provide some noise and action. But even if you watch those, uh, if you watch audiences experiencing their first movies, you know, they were just as thrilled by a train coming down the screen with no noise as, as you and I might be at the latest Mission Impossible film. That was surprising then.
Sam Hamilton: Yeah, a hundred per cent. Like, you know, think of all the little details that have been invented over the last hundred years that have brought us to the point of the big blockbuster movies now, like cinema, you know, having somewhere to watch movies that had to be built, I mean Dolly Cam, CGI, all of these things. There's another really interesting story. I heard once that when the train was invented in the UK, it drove from somewhere to Manchester and the mayor of Manchester was there to meet the train, the first ever train journey from one place to another. And it's actually quite a tragic story, but it gives you an idea of perception. The mayor of Manchester, when the train came into the town, stood in front of it and held up his hand and was run over and killed, but until then, any moving vehicle was run by a horse, and that's how he stopped it. So he assumed, he made that assumption that it was the same. And you can see like that's technology and that's people like making that transition into a new way of thinking. And I guess that's where we're going now.
Walter Jennings: No, and also the way we even look after the community in Decentraland with the DAO, with the community members who bring things up, it seems to me a slightly more utopian view than going through the Facebook sensors or others to kind of get the same outcome.
Sam Hamilton: It's utopian, but don't think it's without its problems. Like, you know, the ideology is a utopian, but you know, we are dealing with people and emotions and perspectives, so not, you know, it's not like, Hey, we've got this thing and everyone says, Hey, yeah, we all back that. And there's a lot of really hard discussions, and also it's a complex project, you know, there's so much depth to it that actually just understanding it all is a full-time job in itself. Um, but we'll get that.
Walter Jennings: So Sam, if I'm a first-timer to Decentraland, what are the two or three things I absolutely must see?
Sam Hamilton: Um, well, I think first timer in Decentraland, we've just built a new onboarding, um, like scene. So when you first arrive in Decentraland, it helps you understand what's going on, how to navigate, you know, you actually get a couple of free gifts by going through the process. Um, so you get your first wearables and your first emote. So that's a must, just because we had, for a couple of years, we had people like arriving at the platform and just like, okay, what do I do? And we were like, okay, yeah, we need to build something so people understand that. So we have that, um, as a first place that you join. And then for sure, the second place I'd go is Genesis Plaza, because there's actually people in the community just standing there all day waiting for new people to arrive so they can welcome them and show them around and give them a tour.
And when I talk to people in the community, it's that kind of like service that keeps people, keeps the next, so somebody did that for a user and then that user did that for the next person because they felt like it was such a great experience. And this is what I mean by, um, that essence carrying on. Um, so yeah, I would definitely go to Genesis Plaza, and then it really depends what it is you are into. We have an events page, there's like 20, 30 events going on every day, um, and from all different kind of genres, whether that be music or theater or comedy or conferences, there's stuff happening for everybody. So if you go to our events page, then you, you can jump in wherever you want.
Walter Jennings: Now, other than Metaverse Fashion Week, is there anything that you've got in news or developments that we'd wanna share with our listeners here?
Sam Hamilton: As a foundation? We're concentrating a lot on new features at the moment, so we've just released a feature called Worlds, which means that if you own a name, you can have like an isolated experience. So I guess if you think of Genesis City as a social media platform, and then you think of your world as like your own little website or somewhere you want to direct people to. So that's just been released. We've just released our SDK seven, which means that the experiences that we can build on Decentraland are much richer now and much easier to put together. So we'll definitely be having a few game jams and hackathons this year to bring in new creators and see what crazy stuff they come up with. Um, that's gonna be interesting. We always do stuff in pride months, um, that will be great. I dunno exactly know what that entails this year, but probably a parade of some kind and a few concerts and definitely some risque wearables, let's say, you know, the music festival obviously is a huge part of our calendar.
Um, it takes a lot of organization, a lot of time putting organized artists together, so we'll start working on that soon as well. We are starting to do quests, so we are gonna do some like worldwide quests that like, take time to achieve, and the community has to work together to get them, we're calling them seasons, so, you know, every three months they'll be like, one Quest will lead into another. And you know, there'll be big prizes on offer for that. So all of this will come later in the year, um, probably the autumn, Q3, Q4.
Walter Jennings: Cool. And Sam, if I were to sit inside your head and imagine Decentraland in three to five years from now, what kind of, uh, visions are you having?
Sam Hamilton: Whew. Um, so I literally just watched a video of like an exoskeleton that, um, you can, like, it's open source so you can like, get the plans and build it yourself and then be fully immersed in like, it's not even like a body suit, it's literally a skeleton. And we have to think about what's coming next, right? We have to think about, okay, if that's the hardware, how does our software interact with that? And that's huge. Like, I'm doing a lot of research at the moment into AI, into VR, into how all of this stuff becomes part of our workflow because, you know, it's happening, it's happening quicker than anyone expected, and I honestly feel like I'm at a point where I don't quite know, like, I'm researching, but I dunno how far this can go. Um, I'm loving the fact that in VR you can pick things up, you can, you know, have that tangible feeling and I, you know, it, it really blows me away that your hands, like something in your brain changes and that controller becomes your hands and feels like your hands. Um, so I think there's a lot of research to do, in how the brain works when we're put inside these virtual worlds and, and how we can play with that.
Walter Jennings: It's a very interesting future. And if I can influence you to work on augmented reality glasses with facial recognition to provide me the names of the people I forgot, uh, when I run into a meta party, that would be brilliant. So maybe you can link it up with LinkedIn, or the Decentraland community.
Sam Hamilton: Yeah. You know, um, in Decentraland, your name appears above your head. Um, and we actually talked about doing an augmented reality thing where we had everyone's names above their head at, uh, like Decentraland Meetup, it would be funny.
Walter Jennings: It would be hilarious. Sam, to end up this show today, we have a segment we call Tracks in the Finoverse. Everyone loves a tune when they're working, and we're interested to know the kind of music that would power your journey in the Finoverse and in Decentraland.
Sam Hamilton: So I thought about this a lot and you know, I have quite a traditional taste in music. I suppose. You know, my favorite band is the Velva Underground. I really like Bowie and a lot of old music like that. But I think that the right song for this is "Where Is My Mind" by the Pixies.
Walter Jennings: Well, that's a very good, um, concept because it is a very important question where is my mind? So we'll, uh, listen to that as we power our way out of the Waves in the Finoverse interview.
Thank you Sam Hamilton for talking us through the creative direction at Decentraland? Thanks for having me. It's been awesome.
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