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Retail Academy: retail in the metaverse

Posted on 10 October 2022

The metaverse has the potential to provide a much richer, deeper retail experience by blurring the physical and digital worlds, introducing a wealth of new experiences for consumers along with new revenue streams for retailers.

In our latest Retail Academy session on 28 September, our panel considers the drivers behind retailer and consumer engagement in the metaverse, how brands can enter and thrive in the metaverse, and the key challenges and risks.

Panellists:

Matthew Drinkwater – Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion
Anne Rose – Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya
Tom Grogan – CEO, MDRxTech (Moderator)

To view our full Retail Academy programme, please click here.

Full recording

Full film transcript:

Lewis Cohen, Commercial Partner and Co-Head of Retail, Mishcon de Reya

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mishcon de Reya – I’m standing on a box because I’m not very tall – and I’m wearing a suit because actually, it’s important that you felt that you had a lawyer in the room tonight.  Anyway, I’m delighted to welcome you to this event.  This is precisely the reason why we set up the Retail Academy earlier this room – earlier this room? –  earlier this year, because we wanted to convene our clients, our friends and talk about the issues that are really pressing in retail and this we’ve had an event, our Style Gallery, we’ve had an event about NFTs earlier this year and on Big Data and tonight we’re going to be talking about metaverse and I’m delighted that you could all tear yourselves away from the metaverse tonight to be here because clearly that is one of the issues that we’re grappling with because actually, what is it going to be?  What is it going to look like?  How is it going to be relevant to me, to you and of course to retail?  Now I’ve bought land in the metaverse for clients but so far it’s, they’ve not necessarily been particularly active.  I’ve seen some professional services, firms dabbling in it – quite an interesting, risky move from my perspective at the moment – but it’s all very exciting and it’s all up for grabs.  And I’m delighted to pass you to some real experts who can actually share some proper insights with you, so I’m going to pass you to Tom Grogan, who is the CEO of MDRxTech, which is our digital transformation business, and I’m sure he will tell you all about that.  Thanks everyone. 
Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Hello everyone.  Thank you very much for joining.  So, today is hopefully going to be quite an informal panel discussion, we’ve got some really interesting things to talk about.  I am devastated to say we’re not joined this evening by Leanne Elliott-Young, who is CEO of the Institute of Digital Fashion, she is sadly unwell and unable to make it.  She asked me to send her apologies.  I’ll do my best at sort of representing Leanne and the sort of things that I know she may have said were she here.  But we’ve got two amazing people on the panel with us so, first we’ve got Matthew.  Matthew is a world-renowned expert in emerging technologies and their application to the creative industries, in particular he’s a specialist in immersive technology so, XR, MR, AR, VR, Matthew hopefully will be able to explain a few of what those things are during the session and he and his team are building pathways for a truly digitised world.  He was named a ‘fashion tech trailblazer, changing the course of retail’ by Draper’s, a ‘Digital World’s Influencer’ by Stylus for 2020 and  a ‘pioneer and visionary’ by Wired.  Pretty strong.  Big accolades. 

We’ve also got with us Anne Rose, who is one of my favourite people in the world and is one of my colleagues within Mishcon de Reya.  Anne co-leads the Blockchain Group, is really at the forefront of legal developments in so far as they relate to crypto assets and Web3 and we’ll come on in a moment to briefly touch on what that is and is advising clients, including those that Lewis mentioned a moment ago, buying land in the metaverse and all sorts of other commercial contracts.  Hopefully, can shed some light on the sort of key legal and regulatory issues that people are running up against in this space.

I’m Tom.  I’m CEO of one of the Mishcon de Reya Group businesses, so we as an organisation, some of you may be aware are on a bit of a journey, we’re sort of trying to transition from being this amazing law firm with great lawyers, doing amazing stuff for clients, to also advising them in a more full service way by designing and developing their businesses and their software so, my team is 38 people as of today, I’m the only lawyer in the team, everyone else is a blockchain engineer or a designer, a full stack developer, management consultant, project manager and we’re designing and building stuff for clients.  So, hopefully, you’ll have a few different perspectives on the panel. 

Before we start, we’ll take three minutes to quickly level set because I’m conscious there’ll be a very, very diverse range of understanding of what the metaverse is and what the related technologies are so, during this session we’re going to try and talk about the metaverse as broadly as possible, we’re going try and encourage you to not think about the metaverse as a place – obviously the media portrayals of the metaverse are these sort of dystopian, ready player one, The Matrix style worlds that, frankly, are often just a pale imitation of the real thing –  I want to try and encourage all of you to think of it more as a movement and it’s a movement towards a blurring between physical and digital.  At the moment, those things both exist but they exist very, very separate.  If I want to go and buy something today, I go into a store, physically, or I go online.  All the metaverse is, is a blurring of those two realities and it's a bringing together of those two realities that can hopefully, allow you to do all the things you do today but do it in a far more immersive experiential and hopefully, rewarding way. 

We may talk about Web3 as part of this session.  So, Web3 is, it has mean a number of things over the last ten years but most recently, has related to a group of technologies called distributed legers such as blockchains.  Often assets contained on a blockchain referred to as crypto, crypto assets, crypto currency and that is just one version of what the metaverse may look like.  To be very clear, the metaverse is inevitable.  It is already happening.  There is no way that it is going to stop happening and it is going to continue to be relevant in every part of our life for the next twenty, thirty, forty years.  Web3, we don’t know.  I think many of us, myself included, I know Anne included, believe that it can power a much more interesting world, a much more democratic world and it has some really valuable use cases.  Not yet, and we don’t know for sure, we may well not see it.  So, today, we are going to try and mostly focus on the metaverse, the thing we know is happening, the thing for you as retailers, we know is gonna sort of have really, really meaningful impact on you and your businesses for the foreseeable future.  

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

That’s actually a really good description of the metaverse. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Thanks.  I made it up.  Okay, so, why don’t we start then, Matthew, could you tell us briefly about what your role is currently and in particular, when you first started to see the metaverse emerge as a thing?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Sure.  So, hi everyone.  I head up the Innovation team at London College of Fashion and we were set up in 2013, so yeah next year we will turn ten, which is fun.  We, we were given a remit back in 2013 to explore any emerging technology and its impact on the fashion and retail industries so, effectively what we do is just build proof of concept with that technology and show it to the fashion retail industries and say look, this is possible, you can build this, it’s real, it’s coming, you’re gonna need to know about this.  And hopefully accelerate the pace of change and what we do is push that change externally and then bring back all of our learnings into the college and hopefully, send out a generation of students who have a slightly better grasp of emerging technologies and their applications within the industries that we really care about.  We try to focus the work into three main areas.  How we use that technology to change the way that designers and brands are making the collections, so that could be anything from smart materials to smart processes, change the way they show their collections, so Fashion Week is a really good opportunity for us to demo stuff, particularly around immersive technologies. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

And now there’s crypto Fashion Week as well?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

There is and so all of these areas just continue to evolve and that’s the joy of just kind of working with emerging and there’s always something new.  And then ultimately, how we can use those to change the way that they retail their collection so, it’s just looking at a very traditional fashion designer retail business model and showing how we can iterate and create something new.  Typically, with an eye on being sort of three to five years away from commercialisation so, like a good example of that is back in 2017 and we were doing some early blockchain projects, looking at how we could begin to show transparency in supply chain.  Back in 2015, that was looking at how we could digitise lots of different elements of the industry and so that, that started in 2015 with us just looking at it from a productivity perspective.  How could we cut wastage?  How could we improve processes?  But we started ended up with a lot of 3D assets and what do you do with a 3D asset?  Yes, you can use it to design but you can also begin to use that for fun, augmented reality, mixed reality experiences so, I guess from 2015 onwards, for us, is when we were really into this and we really felt that beyond just kind of the incremental improvements in processes that you could achieve for designing and creation, we could push this all the way through to retail.  We genuinely felt, and there’s lots of quotes from a long time ago of us saying that we would be selling digital product.  I guess, I guess it probably took until 2020 for things to really, really seriously start to change. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I’m interested in, so for those retailers, particularly the large ones who are still trying to grow, grow year on year, despite having such big markets such and I can imagine they’re constantly looking for the twelve month, eighteen month time horizon wins to drive that growth.  How do you go about persuading them to look further afield at the three, the five, the seven year trajectory?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Yeah, so I don’t worry too much about persuading them.  I think all we need to do as, and I think it’s one of the things that we’re, we’re a university, I, you guys have to run a business.  I can tell you, this is coming and this is going to be important.  At some point, somebody within that organisation, it’s a leadership thing that we’ve spoken about at length for a long time, it’s accepting that emerging technologies are going to play a part in how your business evolves, i.e. you can either be early on that or you can be late to it and you know, that’s for, for everybody to work out but we knew that 3D design and 3D animation and ultimately, game engines were going to be really crucial to NextGen experiences for retail and we’re saying that from a very, very early stage. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Sorry, I was actually going to say, it’s a really story because we were actually talking in the Green Room earlier about, you know, 3D objects and actually, there is no universal standard for them and, you know, we’ve got the, the metaverse standards forum that’s kind of been started to be set up and actually thinking about do we create a universal standard for 3D objects and that’s a really interesting one, there was as well, last week, there was the Vogue Business Metaverse event on Thursday, which was quite exciting and one of the things was an interview as well there with one of the nephews of Alexander McQueen.  I actually took a note of some of the technology that he used to be able to create some of his 3D objects.  So he used photoshop, which a lot of you will be familiar with, ZBrush to change his 3D sketches, so it was writing by hand, he used Marvellous Designer as well to create patterns for his 3D clothing and KeyShot for the rendering and to actually make his, you know, create the sort of qualities that you might see on fabric and this is a really interesting one because actually a lot of clients as well who are looking at using kind of 3D technology to, or 3D objects or trying to create anything they have which is 2D and making it a 3D version of it, they’re really facing quite a few issues in terms of looking at what licences they’re using and for instance some of them, you won’t be able to use let’s say in an open format like Second Life but you could use it in a closed MMO like War of Warcrafts or using it as part of a wider remit, in terms of Unreal or Unity for example and so it’s one of the big things I think as well that we’re kind of seeing quite a lot of is people have to have to look at but yeah. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And I guess there’s a, there’s an organisational capability that needs to be built in addition to the techno, so one of the things that we find a lot when we’re speaking to, to large retailers, they know that the tech is coming and they know they need to be building that and thinking about what they’re going to do but they have a team that’s set up and equipped to run the business they have today and they need to know or many of those ten thousand people are going have a job in the metaverse or do we need to hire additional people to staff that and I guess part of that horizon steering, for you, is to helping them figure that out. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Yeah for sure and you know, one of my colleagues in Research, Francesca Vanetti, ran a really interesting study into adoption of emerging technologies with retailers, interviewing very many and like fear was one of the phrases I remember her talking about very regularly, fear of being first, fear of being last, fear of being second, fear of cost. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Not FOMO?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Yes, FOMO as well.  All of those things and I think that uncertainty, particularly when you are talking about a new set of skills, is very difficult to adjust be effectively, what the industry is facing, what we’re all talking about, is a shift from 2D to 3D.  This is what’s happening, it’s going to happen, it’s inevitable, there is already a war for 3D talent.  Five years ago, I didn’t see so many students who could code in Unity or Unreal or were making their, I mean a lot of the pattern cutting courses were…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

To be clear, those are the primary languages you use to build in 3D.  Sorry. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

And now we are seeing a lot more.  A lot of our student base, at whatever school they’re coming from, whether it’s the Fashion Business School or Media and Coms or straight design, are much more engaged in 3D design and 3D creation.  We have to see more from the creative industry side to begin to foster what people would begin to understand as the metaverse because I don’t think there are as many exciting examples of what it could look like currently and that is one of the issues that many people look at it and think ah, looks a bit rubbish. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I think, and I think for me, that’s where people are still so hung up on that pale imitation.  They’re trying to replicate what we have right now.  This is great guys, we don’t need to do this in the metaverse, let’s keep doing this in real life.  But let’s have this augmented so we have people who couldn’t be here in person, sitting on the front rows with us and there’ll be a hardware development journey that we need to go on, there’ll be a software development journey we need to go on but it will happen, it already is happening all of the time. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

And it’s crucial so software development as well, I mean the metaverse at the end of the day as well is it’s code, it’s a whole you know number of zeros and ones with a whole load, you have an overlay of lots of different types of data and you have this manufactured kind of synthetic overlay on top of that with you know various digital assets which you can only experience really from within and so, we always have to kind of go back to the basics and really looking at okay look, this is software.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And one of the things that were Leanne here, she does a fantastic job of talking about is, the accessibility that the metaverse can hopefully bring and there’s lots of aspirations about how it can break down barriers to fashion, it can lead to greater equality, greater representation, she says regularly, you know, in the metaverse you have no sex, you have no gender, you have, you don’t have to have sexuality, you can be any race you would like to be it and it all of a sudden breaks down these barriers in ways that are new and novel and interesting and have all sorts of powerful societal questions that we need to grapple with but are interesting and exciting, which is empowering creatives to do what they do best which is create.  Out with… so clearly, I’ve touched on a few of them there, we’ve got representation, we’ve got accessibility, what are the other sort of key pain points that retail is grappling with that you think metaverse might help with?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

I think, I mean I’ll go back just to that point of accessibility, inclusivity that it can and will bring.  In I think it was in June 2020 we did a project with Wyatt Studios, who are just round the corner from here, and we wanted to create a VR fashion show but a lot of the brands that approached during those early days of the pandemic were wanting to replicate a catwalk show in a digital space and we were like no, that’s boring, like with this, we can do anything, why recreate the real world, we can do much cooler experiences. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

It was like in March from the fashion event when like, was it Dolce & Gabbana and they had flying cats who were showing their clothing, it was amazing. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Awesome.  Awesome. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I did once read something that said if you were to tell Aristotle that there was this database which you could search anything on called the internet, people used it to make cat memes, he would be very depressed.  But one of the, one of the challenges I’ve heard posed to design teams is, great, you’ve come up with these amazing concepts that we could either build digitally or physically but digitally, physics doesn’t exist so make me something that’s on fire.  Start to think about it without those sorts of physical limitations and you can get so much more interesting.  The way that buildings are constructed is because of physics.  Physics doesn’t apply.  Get more creative and that sort of big challenge is quite empowering for creatives and for us, experientially as we’re experiencing it, it just means that we can experience things unshackled from those constraints that have held us back forever.  I, full disclosure, I don’t, I don’t get as excited about those things as I do about the operational benefits that we can have every single, I’m far more excited, frankly, at the prospect of having people that couldn’t make it in person on the front row in a seamless way that allows them to interact with you all, than I am about burning dresses and flying cats, personally.  All of these are the metaverse though.  Anne and Matthew love the flying cats and the dresses, personally, I look at it from a operational, commercial, how do we, how do we build this as a business and for me, that is these micro examples are going to be the most powerful and the most iterative that we’ll, that we’ll see. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Out of interest, just to get a gauge from the audience, could anyone put up their hand if they do actually have digital clothing or they have a visual avatar.  Amazing.  Okay.  So for anyone listening in, it’s probably around six people or so. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Out of interest, the people that didn’t raise their hands, did you ever play The Sims?  A lot of nods.  Okay, that’s digital clothing.  When we talk about the metaverse, I’d argue Fortnite is the metaverse.  Again, if we go back to that broad definition of it blurring the boundary between physical and digital, going to a gig is something you do in real life, was true until a couple of years ago when you could do it in Fortnite.  It’s that blurring, that blurring of what it means to be real and that what it means to be digital that is a metaverse movement and I think we have to concede that it is that movement. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Yeah, and if there’s anyone here who likes Fortnite, just hit me up because I spend far too much time…  Yeah, I think that, that point of inclusivity and how we can begin to build these experiences was so noticeable, particularly from a fashion perspective, a lot of my team were in that experience and they were represented as a sprite and there was no identifying them and you know we go to Fashion Week a lot and actually Fashion Week can be quite an intimidating experience.  Where are you sitting?  In the front row?  Yeah at the back?  Oh my god, are you standing?  These are things where there is a hierarchy that exists and actually to begin to remove that, I think over time these are things that will begin to appear within virtual spaces and we’ll, we’ll need to figure that out but there is at least the opportunity to level that playing field initially but as to the kind of practical benefits that this will bring, I think some of those are really close to coming to fruition, I think you talked about people not being able to be here, that sense of presence that will begin, can begin to create through virtual communication is going to come a lot quicker than even I expected and I get to see stuff and you know we Zoom, everyone knows how to Zoom call now.  One of the things that we were talking about at the start of the pandemic was that it’s very difficult to actually feel like you are in the room with that person.  The development of light field displays, stereoscopic displays, of reconstruction of humans, in real time, is so close that you will begin to see applications of that within the next year, where we could be doing this and we can feel like we’re in the room together, that is…

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Without use a headset?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Without using a headset. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And for anyone else trying to run a business in this room, I’m sure you experienced the pain point of… so we found it when everyone was at home it was easy, when everyone was in the office it was easy, when you are trying to balance both that’s, it’s so challenging to give the people that are on screen the same experience as the people you are giving in the room and all of a sudden that begins to break down and that’s a, for my work meetings, that’s the most boring possible application I can think of.  It’s also extremely powerful and extremely valuable.

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

And then again, connected to that as well, I mean there’s a question as to whether we’ll each have our own digital identity and whether we’re looking at moving though towards a almost this idea of self-sovereignty where all your data is carried in your wallet and then you only disclose the data that you want to disclose and you carry with you the value from if we do ever move to something where we have interoperable worlds whereby we can carry our data from one to the other with us. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And this is the beginning to be tripping into, we talk about the metaverse tripping into a Web3 version of the metaverse in which identity, in the form of a token albeit you wouldn’t think about it as a cryptocurrency, begins to have quite powerful implications and that’s why many of us get excited about a Web3 iteration of the metaverse versus a Web2 version of the metaverse, which is basically just enhanced versions of what we’re currently seeing in the mainstream.  Out of interest, so clients are coming to us all the time asking questions, what are the sort of the key heading subjects that are coming up time and time again when they come in with legal questions?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

That’s really interesting one.  You know one of the biggest things is ownership and actually especially when we’re looking at the Web3 space and we’re looking at, for instance, NFTs and actually being able to distinguish between the NFT itself and the underlying assets connected to it and understanding as well what rights you have in respect of that, of those underlying assets.  So, I think broadly, there are probably around four different categories of licences, nearly everything is licenced, you have say commercial licences, so that would, you’ll have to  take club licences, by Yuga Labs, they it’s a pure commercial licence which allows you to do anything really with it without any sort of caveats in terms of the format or any caps in terms of revenue but, emphasis on the but, if you actually read it all the way through as well, they have the right to be able to modify and change the licence at any point in time and we saw that as well when Yuga Labs as well bought Love Labs and with Meebits and they changed it as well so that actually they started receiving 0.5% royalty fees in all secondary sales. This wasn’t proposed to the Meebits community, they didn’t buy it in the first place with this mind and that’s quite an interesting one.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

So it’s both an ownership and a bit of a governance of the systems and what changes can be made and when, so that’s…

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Absolutely.  And you know you go through all the different types of licences and you know if you look at for instance even the creative commons ones, there are so many different types and they each have different rights, you actually have to look at all of them separately.  So for instance, I remember talking to somebody the other day about, without going into too much detail, but it’s a CCBYND and depending on how you’re…

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

So, go on.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Enlighten us. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

You can basically, you can use a commercially but you can’t create derivative works but then the Fidenza scheme, which some of you may have heard of, Tyler Hobbs, big artist, big thing of art blocks as well, he’s created his own version of it, version 4.0, but for that one you can’t actually commercialise it and you also have to make sure that you attribute him in terms of every single time you are using it. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Interesting, so there’s a huge, so there’s a huge ownership and just IP analysis generally, I know we’ve got a brands team, a Mishcon brands team are out in force this evening so if you meet a Mishcon, if you meet a Mishcon lawyer this evening, it will probably be from the Brands team but they’ve been doing so much work protecting in the metaverse, helping establish brands, make sure that their existing protections apply in those environments.  And what about the… so I know the answer and so I’m going to give a very leading question, what’s the quality of the commercial contracts that we’re sometimes seeing for the vendors in this space?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Oh horrendous. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Horrendous, right? 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

If they exist? 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Yeah, and so that’s a challenge for large retailers here, thinking about going into this space.  We, I mean we’ve got a team that are very, very fortunate, Lewis and others in that team, and others that I’ve seen around, are advising on buying land in the metaverse, advising on all of these things.  The first draft of the contract you’re going to receive is going to be rubbish and so just be prepared that you might have to go through a few journeys to make sure it’s something that’s worth the paper it’s written on. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

I think hopefully though that will all start to change and especially as well, you know, we’ve got a lot of changes happening in this space legally and we also have the Law Commission’s consultation on digital assets, which is really exciting. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Talk to us about that then.  So, I know you’re quite heavily involved in that, so what’s so, the headline of like what is that and what are you trying to achieve and what’s your involvement on it?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

So one key thing that we’re trying to achieve in that is actually creating a new category of personal property.  I think this is very exciting.  We haven’t changed the law in this space since 1885 so, currently, right now, you, we recognise a chosen possession, so for instance something that’s gold and a chosen action like debt and we are…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

My rule of thumb by the way is, if you kick it, it’s a chosen action.  A chosen possession.  If you can’t, it’s a chosen action.  That’s my rule of thumb. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Absolutely.  And this is creating a new category of personal property, which are data objects and so they have three different characteristics mainly, one is that it is in electronic form, so for instance code, the other is so it’s independent of persons and legal system and finally, there’s rivalrous as well and this is really exciting as well because I hope as well that by doing this, we start to educate people a bit more about digital assets, start to get people a bit more in space, make people feel reassured as well about what rights they have in respect to those digital assets, especially you must feel that as well, coming from university too, is that learning element, getting people to really understand what they’re doing and…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And what’s your role, and what’s your role within the consultation?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

So, I’m helping to write it.  Um yeah. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

It’s worth… so, I fangirl over Anne regularly on this and it’s difficult to understate how big a deal this whole things is.  I think it’s unthinkable that ten years ago, we’d have been talking about ripping up this sort of two classification system of what assets are and then for me, as the sort of technologist, thinking about it, it opens up all sorts of interesting developments in the future around data trusts and all sorts of interesting things that we are doing on the sort of more emerging end of the technology spectrum, it’s amazing. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

It seems strange though in 1885, they weren’t more prepared for where we would be…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I know, I know.  It’s yeah, very, it’s… however, I have to say, I also am always somewhat in awe of the English legal system, I think it’s a, it’s a remarkable, beautiful thing that somehow we have this sort of evolving, organic corpus of stuff that has adapted since 1885 did you say?  And is still broadly fit for purpose today and without too much legislative intervention, we’re going to make it fit, hopefully, for the next hundred and fifty, I think that’s a incredible testament to a robust and leading legal system, I think that’s very, very cool. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Absolutely and I think that also the courts are starting to recognise that these concepts a little bit more.  You know, not long ago, we had the Lavinia Osbourne case, they recognised NFTs and they said you know, they have a realistic arguable case that their property and this is really interesting, you know, we’re having huge transformations in the industry that’s even, we’ve had service of proceedings by NFTs so, you know, I think the legal system has definitely suddenly become much more aware of all these different concepts and having to understand as well the technology that’s in place. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

It’s amazing and it’s yeah amazing that you’re involved as well.  Always one.  Um, I’ve got to ask, is this the death of the high street?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

No, not at all.  This is the reinvigoration of the high street.  This is…

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Zara’s just released digital clothing.  £60. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

You know, I think this is what we talked about for so long.  This is new revenue streams, new experiences.  Like, I’ve been very critical of what the high street has been like over the past, like it was always my running joke that if you went to Oxford Street to any of the main fast fashion retailers, try and buy something at full price, it’s impossible.  You get to the till point and you offered a discount, it’s like oh fine, I was going to pay full price, okay.  But I genuinely, I think through the technologies that are becoming much more affordable, much more deployable, you can begin to create experiences that return a sense of discovering and amazement.  This is what our industry was about, is making somebody feel magical and feel excited about something they wanted to buy.  I, it’s been so clear for so long that 3D objects are in a pure digital sense, like click through rates is higher on 3D objects, anywhere between 20 to 40% conversion rates higher, almost double return rates are lower.  It’s so glaringly obvious that this is where we have to go and then you add on layers of immersive experiences and we’ve been fortunate enough to build a few really big examples of what that could look like.  So, in 2018 at Fashion Week, we had, we’d spent two years working with Lucasfilm, as someone who was born in 1975, to work alongside Lucasfilm for two years, was like, it’s been rubbish ever since then, I’ve never done anything like that… We were able to deploy a system called Live CGX which was about putting, rendering real time vision effects onto a physical location.  This was the metaverse in 2018 and we spent two years from 2016 onwards beginning to feel that we were able to see dwell time double, so by adding huge immersive experience, you can increase dwell time.  We did some research on the experience, everyone who went through felt much closer to the particular designer and their propensity to purchase physical products not, because digital product at that point, wasn’t even a thing, we were able to, we had a motion capture performer driving the performance of a digital avatar in real time, right next to human, physical models, it was wild and it, and actually during rehearsals for that, the mocap performer came up to me at Chiswick, at the Disney stages, and said, “Matt, how should I walk in this digital garment?”  We’d made two for the experience because it feels a little bit different to the other one and I had to stop and say,  “Vita, what do you mean it feels different?  You’re wearing a very fetching mocap suit” and she said, “no but it just you know this one feels, it moves a bit differently,” very anecdotal, everyone of us got changed there I think, yeah we’ve all got clothes on, brilliant, what you wear changes how you feel, every single one of us knows that.  The notion that what you could wear digitally can change how you feel, is something that we’re beginning to get towards.  So, here we are, we all understand now, 3D assets, much better for conversion, much better for engagement, huge immersive experiences, much better at keeping consumers in a space.  We’re moving to a world where digital canvasses, our cities will become digital canvasses.  We can place consumers inside that experience.  You become part of that story.  This is a shift from kind of narrative storytelling to where you are inside it.  That, that is really huge and we’re just at the beginning of finding out how that works, beginning to build the experiences that people find rewarding but we know that it’s going to be big and already the figures are pointing in that direction.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And one of the words used a number of times there was ‘emersion’ and one of the, one of the words I used at the start of this session was ‘experiential’ and I think both of those are things that retailers generally aspire to provide their customers and their shoppers.  I’m reminded of the analogy of the way cars are currently laid out, is basically just the way a horse and carriage operated.  They’ve been structured in the same way since we had horses.  The same goes for stores.  We’ve had tills for quite a long time, we’ve had racks of clothes for a very long time, all of a sudden we can unshackle ourselves from those physical necessities and have shopping experiences that are just way more enjoyable to be in, you don’t have to go for the Oxford Street crush in the same way, you can enjoy the Oxford Street experience in a way that is less terrifying than it is today. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

And you know, I’m not suggesting that kind of every single store in the high street will become a massive immersive experience but there will be a shift in the type of store that we see, what can be delivered – if anyone’s been to the Outernet at Tottenham Court Road, you can begin to see where this direction is going, huge LED screens, I think 60 foot high in the main space.  That, that relationship between how you begin to feel, what content we create, we’re lucky enough to go in a couple of years ago and begin to build something to test that.  All of these things we’re beginning to figure out but what is undeniable is the type of experience is changing and it will return a sense of wonder that will bring people out again. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

That’s interesting.  Do you also though see the blend as well with say like physical items you could be wearing?  So, if you had say RFID, that’s radio frequency identification chips or NFCs in your clothing and you are a brand and you know let’s say I have a, an NFT connected to that particular asset as well which we could say it was a figital, I know you hate that word.

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

She said it. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

But if I did a collab as well with another brand and I then went into that store, I then might be able to get like a discount for instance off clothing from that store or things like that and actually really bringing this whole experience in together.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Sort of layered experience. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Yeah, exactly, layering. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

So, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people are scared of this space still and I think one of the reasons for that is one, the dystopia that we spoke about at the start but the other is this perception it’s a Wild West and that it’s a place where legal enforcement goes to die and you have no recourse and all of those things are very, very scary.  Looking at the IP points we were talking about earlier, how do you go about enforcing in the metaverse?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Enforcing in the metaverse?

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Enforcing your rights, contractual or legal…

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

So it’s interesting, I think you have to think about with talking with the Brands team as well, so you need to do like a portf… a review as well of your portfolio, you need to break down, we’re talking about IPs here quite a lot but I think we need to really break down and be looking at trademarks, we’re looking at designs, we’re looking at copyright, we’re looking at patents, are we looking at trade secrets for instance, we have to break all of these down and then you know we’re getting constant guidance come out in the space as well at the moment so the EU Intellectual Property Office as well, released some guidance recently on as well, things that you need to think about in terms of how you can protect your rights in terms of extending your class descriptions for instance and making sure that you are properly protected within those relevant classes, for instance Class 9 for virtual goods and or if you are looking at say Class 45 for retail services, 41 probably for entertainment services, so it’s just these are the sorts of things you need to think about.  Also think about maybe setting up a trademark watch service, think about buying Web3 domain names, you know to protect yourself from ether squatting, you know if you go back to the dotcom boom as well and people were buying up, you know, website domain names and actually think about how you can protect your brand and getting in there first.  And getting in there first again, that goes back to being proactive, by actually going into these spaces and whether you are actually actively involved in that space, we’ve had some interaction as well with clients whereby they actually they enter into the space but not necessarily under their own brand but they can monitor as well what other people are doing to really make sure that they’re protecting their brand and just monitoring the space to see what’s going on really and just experiencing out there, so. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

That’s, that’s really… and one of the, one of the themes we hear a lot from clients is talking about the so say anonymity of existing, in these digital worlds and now clearly we know that isn’t true, I know we’ve got a couple of guys from Kroll here who do a lot of investigatory work in the, in the sort of crypto market in particular and we’ve got our fraud team, describing themselves as the Special Ops of fraud – I think it’s a bit grand, they are lawyers – but they do lots of asset tracing and have just obtained a huge freezing injunction in relation to crypto so, there are ways of biting in this, in this space and you just need the sort of, you need the legal support and then you need the tech support to trace and track and hopefully enforce against it, so there’s lots of ways you can go about it.  Where, you said in the next year, you think, we’ll start to see these things, these things popping up.  How long until it is mainstream?

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Until…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

This is recorded by the way.

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

So, so, I mean I think kind of that, that grand vision of what the metaverse can be is still a long way off but we will begin to see improved experience year on year and that’s why I don’t kind of worry about when is it going to, when is it here, it’s unusual this is happening but I think, in my industry, there’s a huge amount of time where people are waiting for hardware to deliver the kind of experiences and kind of hyping every year.  I see more and more sites live Tweeting Apple events, kind of desperately hoping that AR glasses are going to arrive.  Like, three, five, seven years, I think these are the points at which we’ll begin to see much better examples but I think you know there are so many technical challenges, particularly for wearing digital garments, like we do a lot of body tracking and cloth simulation projects.  You want a piece of hardware to deliver all of that in real time and adjust to every lighting condition that we walk into, it’s…

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

That’s really interesting to say.  I’ve got a friend who’s got these beautiful digital earrings, augmented reality but they don’t move that well with, with her face.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Yeah and it’s still jarring. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

And actually, you know that jewellery is one of those areas where you can do it better, you have such fixed anchor points, it’s much easier to do that and footwear has been one which has, again, easier to deliver in AI experience.  Clothing and trying to recreate cloth, how it deforms in real time, is you know well I’m not going to solve that problem, that’s a mathematical, physical problem that we’re going to need the visual effects industry, we’re going to need a lot of high computer power to begin to solve and machine learning will drive all of those.  But those will come and will get better year upon year but and I think the big hope is that yeah, Apple will drop a pair of glasses and that we will all be walking round seeing the metaverse is still some way off and is not, you know as you described earlier, that vision of what I think this is going to end up being over time. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

One of the, and one of the things that it sort of brings us back to the very start of the conversation where when we’re talking to clients and helping them with their strategies, I say to them all the time, you probably didn’t drive any ecommerce through your website till 2001, 2002, 2003, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t important to have a website in 1998 and that is one, just brand positioning but I think far more powerfully, it’s organisational readiness so that when 2002 comes, you can run rather than start to learn to walk and so, a main part of my job with those retailers is equipping them and helping them to, to develop the capabilities required to succeed when the metaverse fully arrives. 

We’ve got a bit more time.  Very happy to take questions.  I can see one hand in the, one hand in the air.  Shall we have some Q&A?

Audience member
Oh okay, cool.  Hi.  Hi, I’m Arabella, I’m from Petit Pli, so I’m not a lawyer. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Congratulations. 

Audience member
Hi.  How are you?  So, recently I was fortunate to be at the talk with Robby Yung, so maybe you know him, and I think a lot of the products that you’ve mentioned are coming from a supplier, so it’s still that same age old way of manufacture and consuming goods but there’s a really exciting opportunity for co-creation and what with the recent sale of Figma to Adobe, the future is co-creative, so it would be really interesting to understand what rights there are within co-creation, within metaverse or Web3 just because it was so heavily product, supply, product, supply that…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Do you want to talk about that, the sort of…?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Yeah, you go first, yeah. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Well I think it’s an IP question mostly isn’t it?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Yeah, well, so when you are looking at co-creation, that, that’s really interesting because then that goes back as well to like the licences point that we were talking about before, yeah, absolutely.  So you really do need to start, well depending on what you’re doing, it is actually setting it out in your agreement of terms and how you are working together, thinking about how the brands are going to collab together, are you going to think about are you creating a joint mark together?  What sort of rights are you creating?  What’s the underlying asset that you are really collaborating on?  And I think it’s really, in all of these things, we were kind of talking about earlier as well, is it’s going back to basics in all of them and just really looking out what you are doing and then making sure you’re drafting in respect of that. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I think there’s also a, again I’m now, I’m not speaking as a lawyer, I’m speaking from the strategy side, there’s a, there’s a mindset shift that has to happen with a lot of these vendors where they accept they don’t own everything and that’s hard, their entire, entire business model is predicated on ownership and monetising ownership, that’s a very, very difficult organisational problem to solve.  Will it be solved?  Don’t know.  Maybe they’ll just say tough, we own it.  But we’re helping clients figure out what do they want to be and how does that work in this sort of co-creative environment. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

That’s an interesting one as well and I think as well if people are using rather sort of open source software, you know, we’ve had people as well making sure their, you know, you were doing like, you can do these scans, like Blackback software as well scans to actually make sure that you know what the person you are collaborating with when you are using their libraries, that you can actually do it for what you want to do and that’s been quite a big one as well that we’re seeing because there’s such a big use of Open-source software at the moment in people’s GitHub repositories and actually doing analysis of it. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And my design team are delighted, by the way, that Figma has just been acquired by Adobe, they think it’s brilliant.  Yeah, really interesting though and I think Web3 brings in another dynamic but perhaps we haven’t got time to properly dive into in terms of true distributed contributions but in a Web2 metaverse, it’s more of a cultural problem I think. 

Hands popping up everywhere now.

Audience member

Hi.  So my name’s Charles.  I’m from WineApp and I kind of think there’s an underrated technology this year has been this Abba show and I think that really people haven’t, I don’t know if people just haven’t seen it because it’s been very like gay kept but it’s, I know Dolce & Gabbana were very heavily involved in the process but like the 3D fashion element of it was kind of insane and I think sort of blurring that line between reality and virtual you know, the virtual world without the need for glasses, without any of the headsets, it’s, it was kind of ground-breaking, so I’m curious to sort of see what your thoughts are on being able to use physical environments to blur that line might be, especially in retail perhaps. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

For me, that is, that is the definition of the metaverse, is, is the breaking down of those boundaries, it’s the, it’s the, the erosion of what it means to do one versus the other and so you just can do both of them.  I would love, if in the history annals of technology, we can refer to Abba as a seminal moment.  I think that would be wonderful.

Audience member

I think so. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Yes, yes, that, that, that was, I was, so the team at ILM worked on all of that and I mean it was really expensive to do but is, is the example of how these experiences, they have, they have the Abba state, they were, I forget the name of the Abba dome or whatever it’s called but that space was built specifically for a digital experience.  That’s wild.  Yeah, and um, there’ll be more of those sorts of experiences to come and just, it is interesting and I think when they first announced it, there was a huge amount of publicity and yet it seems to have faded away a little bit but, yeah, what’s happening day after day there is, is kind of cool but I love that it’s just, it’s happening, it’s there, it’s every day. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And you’ve already seen a movement in that sort of experiential event of they perhaps haven’t got the budget that, that Abba had to throw at that – you’re pulling a face, I can tell that was a big budget – but the, you’ve seen the Stranger Things Experience now, we’re watching in London following the latest season, that isn’t anywhere near as immersive, anywhere near as digital but it is this experiential, I don’t know what it is, what you are going to, you’re going to a trip, on an event, to a experience, it’s this sort of hybrid thing that we don’t really have a word for yet but it’s, yeah.

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

But I think also we’ve seen it with kind of digital art and I’m a huge TeamLab fan and those experiences are not using, in those instances, the most cutting edge technologies and I was just at Disney Studios a few weeks ago and kind of one of the best experiences I saw when I was there was just the use of LiDAR scanners and projectors, so you could turn any surface into an interactive experience and then that just comes down to the creative and honestly, just playing with the rules and seeing everything come to life is hugely enjoyable, this is stuff that I want to do and it, it’s the use of those technologies and getting the creatives in place to be able to deliver them, are what will deliver the next generation of consumer experiences like, yes of course my team will always be pushing forward with whatever the next technology is available but I think you’re right to point to, to things that are available now and are not crazy expensive for us to deploy. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

I even like that thing we were talking about the other day, the Little Chef Experience, which was absolutely amazing.

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

There’s a Little Chef Experience?

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Have you seen it, there’s this, it’s a yeah, go on Anne, you tell, you tell the, what it is. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Oh, it’s amazing, you as kids, you order like what you want from the menu and once it’s gone away and they’ve taken your order, you see a Little Chef on your plate creating the food…

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Oh my god. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

…so you get to see everything that’s happening really in the kitchen but it’s done from Little Chef Experience.  It’s amazing and by the time it’s done…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

You’re pulling a face.  Take my money.  Honestly, I think that’s amazing. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

Where is the nearest Little Chef?  I need to get in my car now.  Let’s go. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

…then your food is put on your plate. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

It’s New York, I think. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Yeah, it’s in New York.  It’s amazing.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

That is very, very cool.  There was a question over on this side, there was a hand up.  Hello.

Audience member

Hi.  This might be a bit of a…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Did you bring your own microphone?  Oh, you were handed a microphone.

Audience member

This may be a bit of an academic question about the data objects consultation paper for you all but and about the rhetoric of ownership and my understanding there is the kind of differentiation between control and possession there.  So I was wondering whether to shift to a more kind of control centric rhetoric will have a practical impact and how licences and agreements and contracts are constructed and in a way the kind of the commercial reality happens or whether that’s just simply linguistic kind of difference there, so?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

That’s a really interesting question.  We don’t actually see there being any practical change in that particular respect and the whole point as well is of getting control, is that a lot of the stuff we’re talking about between that cryptographic keys and we’re talking about being able to have control through that rather than possession and so it’s kind of talking through what’s happening technically and so the paper kind of goes through that a lot in terms of looking at the distinction between the two that so far, we haven’t thought that this will necessarily have an impact in terms of how actually drafting the agreements, that’s really, really interesting question. 

Audience member

Thanks.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

One more.  Oh, there’s a hand up from Hugo.

Audience member

Thank you.  I’m Hugo Tom.  Matthew, Anne, really thank you very much for your time, this is, it’s great to hear some really complex issues spoken about in such understandable terms, so appreciate it.  I’m conscious of the audience as well, so let’s see if you can answer this one, if you are able to, I’m interested in your examples maybe good and bad examples of brands who’ve got into the metaverse, you know if you want to keep them anonymous sure but if you want to also name and praise, also name and shame, that would be alright with me too. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Oh, yeah, I’ll go.  So…

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

That was quick. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Okay, so, so bad I think we’ve seen a lot of brands who have somewhat taken their following for granted and have assumed that because they are – insert large significant brand here – that they will automatically pivot and translate very, very well to the metaverse.  That isn’t true, it’s been proven not to be true and we’ve seen a lot of, a lot of very large, very respectable brands not only not really make it a success but experience quite a lot of blowback from their community or their customers because they see it quite transparently for what it can sometimes be, which is a bit of a cash grab.  I think we need to call it what it is and we need to be quite careful of that.  For me, my pin up that I always talk about is Disney, I think they’ve nailed it.  They talk about, they talk about the metaverse as the next great frontier of storytelling, which I think is a very beautiful turn of phrase and also summarises it quite nicely, I think what they’ve done very well is forget the technology for a moment, what are we trying to do, we’re trying to tell stories every single day and they are now experimenting and they’re still in an experimental phase but they are beginning to try to do things that sell, tell those stories more powerfully, more immersively, more experientially.  Baby Steps, they launched a collection of NFTs eighteen months ago, twelve months ago ish that were basically just little golden statuette things but importantly, the reason they did it wasn’t to get a load of money, it was because they used it as a learning opportunity internally to build their internal capability and figure out what are NFTs?  What does it mean operationally to launch them?  How can that inch our business forward to what we want it to be in 2030?  And having that broader, organisational strategy beyond just doing it as a cash grab or a marketing ploy, I think is far more powerful and that’s what we try and encourage all of our clients to think about in this space.  Not sure if you want to throw any other corporates under the bus? 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

I think Disney are interesting because Disney own a portal into your home through Disney+.  They also sit on some theme parks which are clearly going to be an opportunity for these sorts of experiences to exist so, yeah, I would suggest they’re probably one to watch but honestly, the bad, yeah, of course I cringe every day when I see stuff but, but i.e. I’m more excited by the fact that brands are doing it and experimenting and if there’s been one message from us, as a team, over the years, it’s been just try it.  You’re not going to get it right every time and you don’t have to and you, those things, if there’s a cash grid yeah there eighteen months ago, there was a lot of money to be made, I get it, there’s, there’s a reason to go out there and one of the big drivers, people used to look at our work with interest and go yeah, it’s cool, maybe one day and then suddenly people are making money, that’s a revenue stream and it drove a lot of people to it, some you know, some more obvious than others but at least there’s activity and from my perspective, I just want to see that sense of experimentation, that will lead us into all of those new areas because no one, we’re not going to get from A to Z in one jump, it is going to need all of those experiments and for people to be brave. 

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

And that’s an interesting one because we were talking earlier about what’s so great about this space, particularly the Web3 space and looking at this community and everyone being together and engaging and I think as well some of the exciting things that we’re seeing as well is this whole concept of token-gated commerce and the additional kind of benefits that you can get for instance of ownership, for instance of like NNFT, whether that’s getting certain discounts, whether it’s getting access to particular events, it’s being part of this community with other people as well who love this brand and all being there together and I think that’s really exciting. 

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

This is clientelling, this is what the luxury industry has always done, it is you know through the ownership of something that you can begin to automate this experience but make it unique to each and every consumer.  That is a enormous opportunity so, yeah, I think those are things that will really become very important to what NFTs mean, particularly at a luxury over time. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I’m conscious of time.  We’ve probably got time for one or two more questions, I can see a microphone primed in your hand.  So let’s, so we’ve got one question there, one question there and I think that’s every, so shall we take those two.  Go on, you go first. 

Audience member

Thank you very much.  I think, I would like to hear if you have any ideas of how this generative AI site will side-line both NFTs and virtual objects really?

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

How generative AI will side… I’m not sure what side-line either of them, I think it will make them more interesting.  I think it will make them far more voluminous and I think it will remove the more banal elements of creating, you can skip past the boring stuff that you can automatically generate and focus on the great stuff that is the human ingenuity that hasn’t been done before and therefore no AI ML model is going to be able to generate it because it hasn’t been trained on data similar to it.  I don’t see it as a threat, I see it as an amazing, empowering weapon that we will see technologists and creatives use.  Do you agree with that?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

Yeah, absolutely.  Sorry, you go.  No, because there’s so much value as well, we reckon it’s great here as well in the UK, we recognise computer generated works has copyright and we’ve recognised that is a really valuable asset.  One of the interesting…

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Who owns it?  Who owns the copyright?

Anne Rose, Co-Lead of Blockchain, Mishcon de Reya

This is a really interesting question and you have to look as well, as well as it’s being the person who’s created things but we’re going through a massive consultation at the moment and as well I think that’s actually we’ve had the results back from that and there are going to be changes and we’re making some exceptions, for instance there will be now the text and data mining exception that we had as well, is actually changing too so, for instance, under this as well you’ve for instance right holders wouldn’t be able to opt out but they might be able to have a say over you know what platform there is and in terms of fees that would be charged, in terms of access to the platform but that’s quite an interesting one because a human creates a sort of an AI tool, let’s say you are using let’s say there was a particular, I don’t know there was a hologram which had a fault for instance in a particular metaverse and you then decide to create an AI tool to be able to go round to work out each instance in which there was a flickering of that particular hologram and you could collect this data and then actually start to think about okay, how can I create a tool that will make this even better because before as well, that sort of process would only be for non-commercial use and that’s now as well starting, starting to change, which is really interesting but I’ve got some, there are other colleagues who are much more proficient in this area than I am

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

It’s, it’s wild and I, we could spend a whole evening talking about the impact on creativity of generative design and, but those tools, I mean when we, we started looking at generative AI and where that applies to fashion a few years ago, I had a friend at MIT who was doing some fun stuff and she started her own company called Glitch and we were beginning to, it took weeks to train the data, weeks and weeks, we were using tons of like 40,000 images to train our data sets and then run and show the interpellations and you could see the movement between the garments, it was really cool.  And now, I’ve just a prompt, I can type it in and instantly I get those results.  The impact of that for creatives is extraordinary but there are some really significant questions about what that means and what that will do for future roles.  I mean, look, we were just doing some mood boarding last week and instantly, I can generate images and put them on a mood, but that is for workflow, anyone in the create… that is wild, it’s incredible and we’ve got a long way to go down that route so, yeah, just I would encourage everybody to get in, get your Dall-e, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, all of it, do it all.  It’s gonna create new specialities, it’s kind of like the co-creation question.  I see Roy from Unity here, and Unity acquired Weta and like, so you, so now if you use Unity, you can have vision effects tools that can you start making movie level vid… visual effects?  Some people will but not everyone.  I think these, these tools will develop new specialities over time and where that goes and new job roles and new positions within the industry will be developed through these technologies.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

I’m conscious of time.  Shall we have one last question and then everyone can grab a drink downstairs.

Audience member

Is that alright?  Super quick.

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

Yeah, of course.

Audience member

Oh hi, my name is Nick.  Yes, going back to your physical retail point and I suppose the role of flagship stores and you know you talked about tills and the racks and those things so, do you think going forward, I’ll give you an example, Gymshark’s opening, I’m sure you’ve read of a new flagship store in Regent Street and speaking with Brent recently, he said oh Nick, 20% of my floorspace is just going to be apparel, only 20%, very small square footage of the store will be that, the rest will be this word ‘experiential’ which we always hear, so I suppose my question is what the role of flagship stores do you think brands going forward will dedicate even more square footage to the metaverse and experiences like that or will they stick to the tills and racks?

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

So I think there’s two ways of answering that question.  On the one hand, you can say that they’re not stores, they’re brand centres, which is why you have real estate on, in these streets in the first place, it’s to emanate your brand, not really about the cash collection, or one of the reasons.  The other thing I would say is, even the fact we’re talking about it as being binary, I think is what we’ll see change.  At the moment, you either have to have a metaverse floor or a store floor.  I think what we’re saying is, we’re going to see that blur and that’s going to be the same things can exist on the same floorplate.  I think, I remember the discussions we all had back in Covid where we said is anyone ever going to go to the office ever again and our, I remember one of the best articles I read on that at the time is that large, international law firm will instead have its head office as a brand centre in a key jurisdiction versus an office.  Clearly, that isn’t quite the case, we’re mostly back but we are moving towards that experiential blurring of physical, digital and brand centres.  Matthew, you’ve probably got a really interesting perspective on that.

Matthew Drinkwater, Head of Innovation Agency, London College of Fashion

No, I, that’s the answer.  I mean yeah, I think the kind of, and for a long time I think kind of that traditional route of how much am I going to generate per square foot?  What is that return?  Like the internet changed of all that and the traditional brand journey or consumer journey of like the store was the end point, like all of those journeys have changed, you might go to a store and then convert online, all of those things, all of the omnichannel discussions were apparent for the last ten years and so that shift has been necessary, I think it does begin to bring up the question around what leases look like and how brands… so, those, those are the big kind of structural questions but ultimately, yes, I think you’ll see obviously experiential units that are used but also I see, as we shift to a more digital world, just to also a return of heritage craft, all of those things will be celebrated but not everybody has to do this, like we can have both and we should, I want my cake and I want to eat it. 

Tom Grogan, CEO, MDRxTech

And if you think all of this wild, just wait until quantum computing hits, that will be a whole new level.  Have a retail academy on that, that would be interesting.  So I think we’ve definitely reached the end of the time.  Thank you so much everyone for joining us.  We’ve got drinks downstairs.  Hope that as many of you as possible can join us.  We’ll all be sticking around I think so, come and grab us if you’ve got any questions.  Thank you. 

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