What is Ready Player Me, the interoperability-focused avatar platform led by a16z?

Written by: flowie, Chain Catcher

Recently, a16z announced it led a $56 million Series B funding round for the avatar platform Ready Player Me, with participation from Roblox co-founder David Baszucki, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, and others. At the end of last year, this avatar platform had just announced a $13 million Series A funding round.

In addition to the rapid fundraising pace, Ready Player Me has also achieved impressive results in customer expansion. Since announcing its funding at the end of last year, the number of partners for Ready Player Me has grown from 900 to over 3,000 in just eight months, more than tripling. Notable users include VRChat, RTFKT, Adidas, New Balance, Dior, and Label.

Amid the metaverse craze, the avatar field has birthed a unicorn company, Genies. What is the story behind the capital-favored Ready Player Me?

Interoperable Virtuality

Ready Player Me was incubated by Wolf3D, a provider of 3D facial scanning technology. Founded in 2014, Wolf3D initially focused on 3D scanning hardware for public spaces such as airports, museums, and conference halls.

After years of accumulation, Wolf3D has built a database containing over 20,000 facial scans. Wolf3D founder Timmu Toke stated that this is currently the largest patent database for facial scans. The team spent about four years developing a deep learning solution to predict how to shape a face through selfies, ultimately achieving accurate predictions and rendering of a real face from a 2D photo, generating real-time animated avatars different from Animoji on Apple iOS. They have customized 3D avatar systems for enterprise clients such as Tencent, Huawei, HTC, Wargaming, and Verizon.

In 2020, based on its database of over 20,000 facial scans, Wolf3D launched the customizable 3D virtual avatar plug-and-play system Ready Player Me, allowing developers to focus on the most important gaming experience and enter the market faster instead of spending time rebuilding complex virtual avatars.

For ordinary players, they can create their virtual avatars using the Avatar Creator on Ready Player Me and its partner applications. Ready Player Me allows users to generate 3D virtual avatars directly from photos. Once created, players can use their avatars as their virtual identity, sharing them on social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and Discord, or in games and other applications that partner with Ready Player Me. Ready Player Me supports operation on desktop, web, and mobile devices.

For developers, they can integrate the Ready Player Me SDK or API into their applications to access user-created avatars. Developers can also seek new revenue opportunities by selling interoperable skins and Ready Player Me avatar assets, which can be traded across the entire partner network, earning royalties on each transaction. Ready Player Me supports various development systems, including Web, Unity, Unreal, React Native, Android, and iOS Native.

Currently, over 3,000 applications have integrated Ready Player Me, including VRChat, Spatial, Somnium Space, IGG, Pixelynx, RTFKT, and more. Ready Player Me provides developers with distribution advantages by inserting them into a cross-game network of over 5 million avatars. Developers can also seek new revenue opportunities by selling interoperable skins and virtual avatar assets—these assets can be traded across the network, with creators earning royalties on each transaction.

The core innovation of the project lies in interoperability. Ready Player Me defines itself as an open metaverse building interoperable identity protocols—enabling players and developers to bring their identities and assets into any 3D experience.

a16z mentioned in its article "Investing in Ready Player Me" that most games and virtual worlds today are closed economies. From Fortnite to Minecraft to League of Legends, most games do not allow players to trade or carry digital assets outside of their walled gardens.

"We believe the next generation of games and virtual worlds will be built on interoperability as a core principle. Instead of locking players in walled gardens, virtual worlds that constitute an open metaverse will allow players to own their identities and take their digital assets anywhere. These open economies will be larger and more enduring than any closed economy games we have seen, and players will be deeply invested in their assets, driving innovation as co-creators/co-owners of their surrounding worlds," a16z stated.

Timmu also expressed that the key feature of virtual avatars is interoperability. Avatars represent users in the virtual world, making them a crucial part of the metaverse experience, allowing for identity expression in the digital realm. Users can buy and wear items for their avatars, and these assets travel with them, creating a more unified experience across different virtual worlds. This allows avatars to become wallets in the metaverse.

Launching "Wearable NFTs" to Create a Digital Asset Store

"NFTs are one of the key technologies for achieving interoperability," Ready Player Me mentioned on its official website, hoping to provide players with NFTs compatible with Ready Player Me, allowing users to verify their assets across multiple platforms and import them into supported applications and games.

Currently, Ready Player Me has launched a series of wearable NFTs. On OpenSea, Ready Player Me collaborated with Deadmau5 to launch the "Head5" NFT series, which includes 5,555 generated 3D collectibles minted on the Polygon blockchain, usable in over 400 metaverse spaces, with a floor price of 0.08 ETH and 1,800 purchases already made.

Ready Player Me has also released the original NFT series Punks airdrop, allowing CryptoPunk NFT owners to generate a unique 3D avatar version of their Punk for use in multiple virtual worlds. Ready Player Me stated that it would share 50% of NFT revenue with developers to jointly expand the metaverse.

In terms of business model, Ready Player Me's virtual avatar system is currently offered for free to developers or ordinary players. Ready Player Me mentioned that its goal is to create a digital asset store in the future, focusing on market penetration rather than monetization. "In the future Ready Player Me digital asset store, artists, brands, and developers will be able to sell virtual assets such as custom avatars, while Ready Player Me will take a certain percentage of the revenue share."

After this funding round, Ready Player Me will continue to expand its team, use more development tools to enhance the platform, and build more services for creators using Ready Player Me (it simultaneously provides SDK and API) to achieve faster user growth.