Avatar company Ready Player Me raises millions ahead of our forthcoming digital dystopia

Ready to spend every waking hour in a computer simulation and buy fake clothes for your fake avatar? The venture capital industry is laying the groundwork.

The internet is changing, or at least it will if Mark Zuckerberg has his way. Facebook recently rebranded itself as “Meta” ahead of introducing the Metaverse, a term Zuckerberg borrowed from the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Basically, Zuck wants to take the internet from a network of websites we surf from behind a computer screen (or a phone, more likely) to a network of digital worlds we explore using virtual reality technology. It’s still early days, but think of it basically as the OASIS from Ready Player One: create your digital avatar, plug in and live your life in the metaverse.

Other companies are rushing to lay the groundwork for this evolution. For instance, Venture Beat reports that the company Ready Player Me, a company that helps people create avatars they’ll use to explore the metaverse, recently raised $13 million in venture capital, with VC firm Taavet+Sten leading the way. Ready Player Me (geddit?) aims to become “the default avatar system for the metaverse.” As CEO Timmu Tõke said:

"2021 has been a breakout year for Ready Player Me – our avatar platform adoption has grown from 25 to 900 companies. By giving people avatars that travel across virtual worlds, we can make the metaverse more connected. The metaverse is not one place or platform, it’s a network of thousands of experiences. With the funding, we will scale our partner network further and will build out monetization tools for developers to help them make money with avatar customization assets and NFTs."

By “assets and NFTS,” Tõke is referring to the company’s plan to create unique pieces of digital clothing people can buy for their avatars. Or to put it in layman’s terms, they want to charge you real money for fake clothes your fake avatar can wear around the metaverse.

So clearly I’m kind of side-eyeing this whole thing — I mean, the internet is taxing enough without adding virtual reality to it — but I dunno, maybe it’ll be brilliant. What do you make of the metaverse? Is it an exciting next step for the internet or a digital dystopia in waiting?

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