Ms. Charmaine Short is the CEO of Ettaverse. She is also known as Bitcoin Madame and NFT whisperer. Her vision is to make Web 3.0, NFT and the metaverse more inclusive. She has been into this for many years and co-founded a DAO called Women of Crypto Art. She is also the author of Confessions of a Crypto Art Collector.

As Web3 is changing games in business in many aspects, I believe Web3 should be an open and decentralized community with equal opportunities and space for everyone. But I find that there are some challenges for women and underrepresented groups, so I have written a white paper to look at the challenges and opportunities to lower the entry barriers into the metaverse. https://medium.com/@Ettatottie/how-to-design-diversity-and-inclusivity-in-the-metaverse-2e103752af20

For example, we are tired of people being bullied for their color and their sexual orientation. We are tired of women Avatars in computer games being sexualized or minor characters and calls for accessibility and people with disabilities are being ignored.

So, an example of this is one of my first metaverse experiences in 2019. I was invited to a round table discussing how we could encourage more women to use a particular metaverse. When I tried to join the conversation on the web browser, the only avatar available was a default male. I went to the platform and asked how do I select a female avatar and was told there wasn't one. So, the platform owner wanted more women users but they didn't see as a priority to give women or people of color identity, so, can you imagine a woman standing in the metaverse and looking like a male, it was like a chicken and egg situation.

How would you attract people to use your metaverse if you are not willing to cater to their needs and their identity? We need to create a metaverse that empowers everyone and gives everyone equal access and respect as one of the key things here is digital identity. For example, LGBTQIA+ people, the metaverse opens up the world of possibilities for us to choose how we want to be seen and design who we are and not let society decide who we are. Perhaps, we want safe spaces for non-binary people, transgender people, gender fluid people can feel safe and accepted to be their authentic self as a part of a like-minded community.

As in some metaverse platforms, the default choices for the clothes and their accessories are quite limited and you have to choose either male avatar or female avatar and you have to have either a baggy male t-shirt or a fitted female t-shirt. So, we need to think about categorizing avatars clothing and objects, not just male and female, but masculine or feminine gender, we also need to do things like allowing people to display their preference with their user's name.

Another area which is lacking in this technology are disability and differently abled people. There are 1.2 billion people with disabilities and collectively they make up the largest minority and the metaverse can empower these people to create an eco-feature for everyone. But we need to consider there are additional requirements when we are designed in the metaverse. So, the disabled population were some of the early adopters of extended reality technology like Oculus Quest and future users can use these VR headsets either in the static mode or they can react on how wheel chair moves.

A lot of disabled people say, it gives them a great sense of freedom and pain relief so, I need to make sure that we are including their requirements when we are building our metaverse platform. As we all know things work better when they are designed for accessibility from the start and none of this is new, the same problem we had in web 2. So, accessibility covers things like having alternative text or images not having control, dealing with people with color blindness so they can't tell us the difference between the red and green. Hence, these are all sought of ways that we can think about including people when we are setting up the metaverse.

Ettaverse offers blockchain, metaverse education and consultancy because many big brands have heard of the metaverse but don't understand what it is or can do for them. So, I would go along and give them education and some examples of use cases and things like NFT if you want to build brand loyalty. I speak to people like car manufacturers and see so many use cases, from the documentation on the blockchain and giving some tickets and preferential treatment to your all-loyal customers or things like that metaverse car showroom, virtual experiences, autonomous cars.

There is so much that can be built and tested in the metaverse. You must think about health and safety to train your staff in dangerous heavy machinery used in manufacturing. So, instead of teaching them with genuine equipment, you can do a simulation in the metaverse and give them training to say that you have passed the test or online test. There are so many different used cases like registration, servicing, and change of ownership as it will give you authenticity; you know that the car is not stolen; it's got the genuine manufacturers parts when it's being repaired. I think the manufacturers and the businesses are gearing up for this, but they don't know how to go about it. We at Ettaverse can help them with that and we also do marketing and run strategies for NFT projects. Hence, my partner Laura Bolanos is a marketing Guru, so I am experimenting with NFT, Web3 side, and she is like brings in Web2 marketing into Web3.

“In Web 2, we had customers, but in Web3, we have community, and it's a very different approach to building up your brand and getting people to invest in your product. So, we help people with the fundamentals of how you promote your project. If you are creating NFT, should you do 1 on 1 NFT, or should you do 10 thousand NFT? What are other competitors doing in the market? What are the trends? Because obviously, NFT projects follow crypto trends if crypto market is down, so this is the NFT market”.

The supply chain of the intensity of goods is an example used case to ensure that you are not getting counterfeit products, so that will be a big thing in the future. I love how you can combine physical and digital items, so if you want your trainers in real life, that may cost you $100. Still, you can also pay an extra $50 and get a digital NFT made of trainers so that your avatar can be in the metaverse with the same fashion and styling and so many different brands like Adidas and Nike are doing clever things. You can buy an NFT in a digital box, and you can either open up and own that, claim that wearable, or you can hold on to the unopened box to get next season's fashion wearable.

I think NFT and metaverse are a match made in heaven. It's like physical and digital lives are converging; it is possible to wander through the metaverse without owning any digital asset, but I think it's fun. You can buy a piece of land and build an art gallery and NFT art gallery in a special metaverse because I have over 200 NFTs. I stopped counting when I got 200 and wanted to display them somewhere because they are on different blockchains, different wallets on different NFT marketplaces. If anybody says to me where’s your collection, I have a huge list of wallets. I thought I would buy my favorite NFT in the gallery in the metaverse, and anybody can wander in. People can click on an NFT to see at what marketplaces are available or where they can buy it. So, it's a great retail opportunity for any brand to display its products in the metaverse.

Disclaimer: This article is based on a conversation between Mr. Abhinav Jain – co-founder of Almond Solutions, and Ms. Charmaine Short – CEO of Ettaverse in a show METAMORPHOSIS, by Meta-Monks.

Copyright: Meta-Monks