May 3, 2023
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In this episode of the Hedera Corner, King Solomon from Genfinity interviews Brandon Hargreaves from Twigital to dive deep into their value propositions. Through digital twins, Twigital is aiming to change the way the physical world integrates in the digital world by leveraging Hedera. With the upcoming release of the Twigital iOS app in June, Brandon shared some insights on what the users can expect when using their application.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
All right, we are going to kick off, guys. I am going to start and to give you guys a heads up, Brandon, HBAR Bull on Twitter, and Creet's Marc will kill me if I don't separate these interviews out because he has to transcribe them. From a standpoint, so I try to separate these out. So, the first half hour, I'm going to interview Twigital in the digital twin aspects as far as what they're building out utilizing Hedera. And then, we're going to get into Creet's as well. So, I have to give a gigantic shout-out to Brandon, as well as Jesse from the Twigital team. They actually came on to an XRPL space this morning for about two hours, so this is the second one they're doing today. But we're going to act as if we don't know anything about Twigital today, and Brandon and Jesse, maybe if you could just give a little bit of background about yourselves in the ecosystem, what you ended up three, what interested you about the Hedera ecosystem, and maybe the Inception aspects of how Twigital kind of came to fruition.
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Sure, it'd be happy to. I'm going to take point on this one. Jesse is listening in; he might jump in at times, but he's gearing up for Consensus. We're going to have a Twigital booth down there, so he's getting ready for all that. But yeah, Jesse and I are long-time H-barians. We've been in this space for a really long time. Right off the bat, when Hedera first started to go public, there was a guy named Gossip Guy who covered Hedera ecosystem stuff right on YouTube. There was also Gossip about Gossip that was actually put on by the Hedera team. And then there was a time where both of those kind of dropped off. I started early on doing some coverage on, you know, the investment aspect of Hedera and the H-bar and all that fun stuff. But we saw there was a gap in there where Hedera ecosystem things weren't getting covered. So, we started Hedera Forum, where we would talk to various people throughout the ecosystem. The entire time, as we just wanted to stay close to the Hedera ecosystem, we had ideas, just like everybody else has ideas of what we can do in the space. And Twigital is actually Jesse, my co-founder's brainchild, and he's been thinking about this for years. It really came about because of a lot of the things that Leemon Baird, the founder and the inventor of the Hashgraph algorithm, he would talk about these shared worlds and having these digital twins and how everything of value is going to be captured on chain and on graph in the case of Hedera. And that really inspired him to want to follow this. What's the first thing of value that you're going to think of? It's all the physical things that we have in the world. And as we've gone through this journey, we've thought about all kinds of things we could do. But either way, just to get into what Twigital does, it uses initially, right now, it's an iOS application that we are in beta testing right now, and it uses photogrammetry to capture and create 3D assets out of almost any physical object and then tokenize that on the Hedera token service into an NFT. So, that's where we stand now. I won't go too deep into it because I'm sure you're going to have some specific questions there, Solomon, but that's the gist of it.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, one of the interesting things for me is that, you know, you, and I've said this to you before privately, I think that you guys are really on to something with Twigital and the digital twin aspects. I was in a space last week, which is why you came on this morning, into that same space, and there was like three or four different builders talking about, "Hey, you know what? What is the metaverse truly going to look like? How do we build out true utility in the metaverse, and what types of aspects or technologies will be used?" And three or four individuals from that space, because I mentioned and brought up Twigital and what you guys are doing with photograms three and the digital twin aspects, we're extremely excited to learn a little bit more about what you guys are facilitating. I guess I'll ask some of the basic questions to kind of start with. We know there's you; we know that there is Jesse as well. Is that the team size right now that you guys have? Are you looking for a potentially onboarding additional new team members and maybe that experience to really build out the application? As far as where it's at right now, working with the team that you have, if you could touch base a little bit about when development started versus where you guys are at now and where you plan to be in 2023, that'd be fantastic.
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Sure. Yeah, as far as the team, as far as full-time members, it is just Jesse and I for everything else that we've done, whether it's legal or development, everything along those lines, it's all contractors. We're contracting it out. That's not to say we don't want additional team members. We certainly are looking for that, whether it comes to operations, whether it comes to the technical side of things. We are looking to expand the team because like you said, we want to expand what Twigital can offer. So, as far as the roadmap, as I mentioned, we're kind of in a closed beta right now. We started off with a team-only beta. We were really impressed with what we got our hands on when we started to use it. You know, it just worked out of the box. If you look, I pinned a tweet up there that has the very first Twigital and the very first time I tried Twigital. It's that karate combat glove, but it's fairly easy to use, and then ideas just pop into your head. You know, I have the starburst thing up there because they started the juicy first. I was like, "Hey, I can make some things out of Starburst." You also see a hell of future Buzz had a coin that she sent me. She's like, "Can you do this?" Had to work some things out. You see I put a little stand on there and all that kind of stuff that allows to capture, but it's really not too difficult to use. And as far as us going forward, as I mentioned, we're going to be down at Consensus. We're going to set up a Twigital booth. We're going to have items that we've had a fair amount of success with the process down there to show people how it works. But hey, if you want to bring over your own object, if you're down there, and we'll give it a shot and see if we can Twigitize it. We're more than happy to do that as well. It'll be at the Hedera booth. So, that's going to be the next step. We're pretty much doing our sprint. We're trying to get to the point where we can actually bring Twigital to market so people can use it. Initially, we wanted to have a real broad beta where we had a lot of people come in, and we really just figured we're like, "Let's just try to, you know, get a few key members to get in on this beta because we only can process so much feedback anyway and then get to market as soon as possible. And our hopes are we're going to get to market with our iOS application as early as June. I think we certainly on the roadmap right now, I think we can get there by early June, and everybody can end up using this, so we're excited about it.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, no, 100%, and I mean, even just looking, so I know that you pinned up to the jumbotron, the karate combat glove, and I know that you, I mean, you're certainly, you're innovating in real-time and even testing out the application you guys are building, which is always really cool to see, the juicy verse and the starburst aspects that I saw, the gigantic Starburst H that was that you twigitized, which was really, really cool. If you could just maybe give a little bit of a breakdown about what the experience from the user standpoint is within the application, again, guys, we are talking to Brandon, and Jesse's down there listening from Twigital, representing digital twins of real-life objects in the three space, whether it be metaverse or whatever your use case may be, which I think is fantastic. But, Brandon, if you could just maybe explain a little bit about that user experience, so what would they expect to potentially be getting into, how many images, what is the process like to twigitize something in that digital twin aspect?
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Yeah, be happy to. So, to start off, it's gonna feel like when you first start, it's gonna feel like a wallet, and before I continue on, beyond that, I do have again in that tweet thread up above, there's the beta test guide, so if anybody wants to see what this process looks like from opening an account to actually twittarizing something, you can go ahead and take a look at that. It's only like a four-minute video, but you can check that out. But, you essentially create an account, and you know the whole thing, you get your recovery phrase and everything along those lines. It does have a lot of aspects that you would think of from a wallet, but you know, we don't want you to secure significant amounts of cryptocurrency, just enough Hbar to send the digital assets, things along those lines, those fees we do cover the fees for. That's wrapped up in the cost of Twigital itself for creating the twigitals, that one dollar, one for one NFT, but you create your account, once you've gotten to that point, it's pretty simple, you can either upload pictures from your camera roll, or you can take pictures from your camera, and that's the easiest way to do it. You just go ahead and set it up and take pictures from all angles of the object. We usually go straight on and then do about 20 degrees below, looking up, and 20 degrees above, looking down. Then we usually lay things on their side and get all the way around it like that. It usually takes several dozen, maybe smaller objects you might be able to get away with 60 or 70 pictures. Usually, I just have a routine when I go through it. I take anywhere between 100 and 130 pictures to capture one of these objects. I count one, two, three, and I click right, and I just keep doing that over and over again. It takes about two or three minutes to capture all of those pictures. Once you're done, you just go ahead and process it. That process of all the back-end stuff going on again takes two or three minutes or so. Once that process is done, it's going to show you your 3D asset, allow you to inspect it to make sure that you're happy with it. Once you're happy with it, you can go ahead and pick your thumbnail and you can go ahead and mint it. That's a pretty fast process. We have all used Hedera. It's only a few seconds, and it gives you your NFT. So, that's pretty much the workflow, all within the workflow of the application.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, that's fantastic, and I mean, you talk about potentially going to market fairly soon here, and I know that Jesse, in the previous space today, which I thought was just awesome, was talking about five minutes kind of being the first benchmark as far as getting in, getting in, utilizing the application, taking the images that you would need to twigitize whatever you want to twigilize, and then getting it all processed out. So, five minutes is certainly kind of in the realm of what I would consider really efficient, especially for an application that is just going to market very soon. One of the questions that I would have, and I think you briefly touched on it, is, and I know you probably can't get way too deep into it, but with the revenue aspects when you guys do go live, can you talk about that user aspect as far as I think you mentioned a dollar to twigitize something? Certainly, there's going to be, with something like this, at least in my opinion, probably a lot of different use cases, not only from the community and retail side but potentially enterprise aspects as well. How much planning has gone into the potential for the revenue model down the line for you guys, and what that looks like for bandwidth and network usage and everything else that would have to run through the application?
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Yeah, so that dollar is just the Hedera fee for a one-for-one NFT. That's mostly what we'll look at efficiencies later on, and then of course, we have the iOS. They're going to take 20 to 30 percent off the top, as far as Apple. And then of course, we have some other overhead, but it's going to be fairly affordable to do this process. We don't want to make this an onerous cost on the user, so it is going to be fairly affordable. We're looking at all kinds of revenue models we want to build. We look at this more like a utility. This is the base utility, and we want to build a network so, I'll use as an example, you know, because you talked about use cases, we'll use that Karate Combat glove as an example. We'll say in 100 years, MMA has exploded. It's bigger than baseball, and George St-Pierre is the Babe Ruth of MMA. And that glove, you want to be able to follow the providence of that glove all the way through every time it gets appraised, every time it gets authenticated. You can have additional files, of course, with Hedera, so we'd want a picture of him signing the glove or the interviews that I did with him when he was down there. And as you go through each authentication, you might have an authenticator actually digitally signed that he inspected the glove for an insurance company or something along those lines. So, it has a lot of benefits for insurance companies for capturing this object in the most real way that you can, inspecting everything along those lines. But, of course, we have deep fakes and all that kind of stuff, so you'd want to be able to have somebody who has the skills and experience to authenticate it, do that possibly in person, maybe remotely, but then they can digitally sign it, and that gives that additional layer of authentication, and that follows that object all the way through its life cycle. And, you know, that's a big part of what all these physical objects are. It's the story behind it. It's what's happened, and we just want to capture that in the most immutable way. And we know DLT is a great way to do that. So, that's just one use case that we can explore, and, you know, setting up that network, there's ways to monetize around that. If we did do any kind of a royalty, it would be dust, like 10 basis points, 0.1%, something along those lines. So, if you're using the NFT itself as the value transfer mechanism, you know, there might be something that comes back to Twigital. But on the other side of it, if you already have your payment rail set up for selling these physical objects, and these are just digital receipts that you're using for the object, which makes a lot of sense, then you don't have to worry about that fee, right? It's not using the NFT as the value transfer mechanism. So, there's, I know, I want to on a bit of a rant there, but, um, just to round out what you were asking.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, and I know, I think you, one of the first Twitter spaces that you held, regarding digital, I think you had mentioned even, I mean, maybe it was you that mentioned, but it's almost like, for me, thinking about what you guys are doing with digital twin representation as just being a much more efficient, and this again is probably just one aspect out of many aspects, like think about a normal user experience in like web 2 right now if you use eBay, and it's like, you know, I want to go to eBay, and I'm a really big nerd, so I'm just going to give you my own reference point here, and I've bought lots of really old Frank Frazetta puzzles from the '70s. Frank Frazetta did all the artwork around Conan the Barbarian, or at least that's what it was inspired by, and he has these great, crazy pieces of artwork. And when you go onto eBay and purchase something, you don't get a digital twin representation of that. You've got somebody basically taking shitty pictures from their phone. They're blurry, they're dark in the room, you can't really see the status of the object that you're actually trying to purchase. In that regard, the question that I'd like to ask you guys is what types of objects are best suited to utilize with the photogrammetry aspects of Twigital as it sits right now, and how do you imagine that expanding over time into potentially being able to capture more digital twin aspects of additional objects that might be difficult to capture right now?
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Sure, yeah, a great question. So, objects that work really well with the process are going to have a matte finish, so they're not going to be hyper-reflective. You don't want translucent things, along those lines. But one of the things about this that's really impressed us is the back end of what we built. A year ago, we would use it, and it would work fairly well, but it was even more challenging. That's getting improving all the time. And just like a lot of the technology in this space, it's exponential how much better it's getting over time. Just a couple of months ago, right when we first got a hold of our beta, Elizabeth from Hello Future Buz sent me this coin, and I tried to set it up so I could capture it. And I actually got a pretty good result, but I just did it again, and the result was even better. And I think that's because the back end is improving, so even though there are challenges now, this technology is improving all the time. So you can just wait a couple of months, try again, and you'd probably have better luck. And then there's also new technologies beyond photogrammetry. Right now, you'll see a lot of things where AI will do a similar thing, but it's not actually capturing the object. What it is doing is it's recognizing what the object is, and that it already has that in its database, and it throws out as the digital twin. But that's not a real digital twin because it really doesn't. It's replacing it with another 3D object. This is actually capturing, creating a 3D mesh of the object and actually pasting the pictures that you took on that mesh. So it's really, really hyper-accurate, and you're not assuming what's on the backside of it. You actually know that that's what it is. But there are other new technologies that are coming to Bear all the time, that we're going to try to integrate as soon as they come out, so we can give you the best possible 3D asset as a result.
Genfinity – Valor – Founder & CCO
I think that's super awesome. And this is Valor, by the way, from Genfinity. Just from the hosting account, I actually just had a quick question regarding the models themselves. So, like, when you say setup, I just noticed how awesome that glove looks and, I'm sure, the setup on that. I don't know what that entails, but when you're taking photographs, like, just from... I guess this is more of a question... when you're taking a photograph and you want to isolate, let's say, an object, is that something that your application does for you or is that something that you kind of specify through that process? Let's say it's the ground, like something that something is sitting on. How do you, as a base user that's not necessarily skilled in modeling, isolate it from the floor itself or from the table it's sitting on? Like you said, from doing a coin, I would imagine that'd be pretty hard to do. I was just curious kind of on that process.
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Sure. And, just like the object, it's good to have a matte solid background to capture these objects so the backend can identify what is the object and what is the background, and it's getting really good at doing that. So that's pretty much it. You have a smooth background that's a fairly matte finish, and you're gonna get a pretty good result. Jesse has been doing a lot of things where, you know, I have my little "Twigital" booth down in my basement that has that already kind of set up. I have a turntable, but what Jesse's been doing is if he sees something that's cool in a store, he'll go ahead and try to find that good background that's solid, and he'll just try to twigitaize it right there and has been having an impressive amount of luck just doing that. So that's one of the things that he was just talking about is, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool in a bar when we're down to consensus if we just twitters items right in a bar?"
Genfinity – Valor – Founder & CCO
You know, that's especially awesome. Yeah, I just think that there's so many use cases. I know of a couple metaverses that are being built, obviously, probably friends' land on Hedera, building out a metaverse-style kind of gaming platform. I think they would be super cool to be able to purchase a home there and take things from your physical home and place them in your world or inside of your home. I think there's a lot of cool use cases. We'll definitely see you at consensus, and maybe we'll go check it out, see if we can scan some stuff. That would be super cool.
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
That would be awesome. We only have a few minutes here. I know you wanted to stop at the top of the hour. I don't know if you'll have a little bit of leeway there, but I don't know if Jesse wants to add anything. But we also have some graders down there in the audience that's one of our beta testers. They are photogrammetry experts. They might have something they would want to add as well.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, feel free to come up and speak real quick, sun raises, if you guys want to. I was even just thinking, dude, like, how cool would it be, you know, within your metaverse, to have real... you know... Physical digital twins of things that you may have, and it's like it's almost like you know we consistently see aspects of e-commerce going on in web 3 that haven't existed before. And I know even from the Hedera standpoint, you see some of that like the NFT marketplace is adapting and adding in functionality for users where it's like I don't have to necessarily put something up for sale for somebody to put a bid on it. I just imagine Valor you walking through my metaverse house and being like, "Oh, that's pretty cool. I wonder if that Twigital is for sale." And it doesn't even have to be because you could potentially put an offer on it. I did want to ask you, Brandon, real quick, a couple of kind of last questions here. What was the process for you guys to be able to integrate the application into iOS? Because we've heard a lot of horror stories from people that are in crypto and web3 that dealing with Apple and the iOS aspects is really kind of difficult. And then, you know, kind of an add-on to that question is plans to integrate crypto, obviously HBAR would probably be on the roadmap. What does that look like for you guys in the future?
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Yeah, so as far as the first question, we're actually going through that process. So the application that we built now and we're testing is all through this TestFlight testing software, and we're going through that process to get it on iOS now. So we'll have to give you an answer on that. That entire process of actually getting into the App Store here in a couple months should be interesting, but I think we shouldn't have too much of a problem. We have great development partners that have been through this process and will get us through this process without too many issues. I'm sorry, what was the second part of your question?
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
The integration of crypto, whether it be HBAR or, I mean, I think obviously for you guys, it totally makes sense with the HBAR aspect probably down the line here or whenever you have that kind of planned out. But also, you know, even just last week, just mentioning what you guys were doing brought a lot of interest outside of the HBAR ecosystem still in web3 with other kind of crypto economies going on. So, yeah, your thoughts around what that looks like for you guys moving forward would be great.
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Yeah, so I think the main thing around our next steps and integrating crypto and things along those lines is we want to be a piece of the broader Hedera ecosystem. We don't necessarily want to facilitate everything. There's great marketplaces that are already out there, and we would want to leverage those marketplaces instead of creating our own marketplaces. Not to say that we won't have that in the future, but, you know, we want to be a part of this greater Hedera world and carve out like shared worlds, right? We just want to carve out our part, create this utility for everybody to use if they want it, and also just be good community members that enhance the other products that are already out there. But some of the things that we certainly want to do is create those digital identifiers, create that network of authenticators for some of these objects. We also are thinking about having a Clearinghouse, so of course, a lot of these marketplaces they just deal with the digital. There may be people that want to create these objects and attach that physical object to it, so we might act as a Clearinghouse, bring all those objects in. Those objects might never leave our warehouse, but they may. So, you know, we'll be there to facilitate that. We don't know when we're actually going to do that, but those are some of the things that are in our roadmap.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Awesome, I would love to hear from Sun Grazers for just a minute about your experience working with the Twitter app and being photogram experts in your field. What has it been like working from the ground up with Brandon and Jesse? And you know, it really, I have to give you so much kudos, Brandon and Jesse. I mean, the application, just what it's even that glove up above that you guys pinned, I mean, it looks absolutely amazing. So Sun Grazers would love to hear your thoughts.
SUNGRAZERS
Thanks, King Solomon. Yes, good morning from Australia. We're almost literally the whole nation is up because it's our equivalent of Veterans Day, and we're all supposed to be at a parade at dawn in about 10 minutes, so I'm a bit embarrassed that I'm here instead, but anyway, hello from Australia. Yes, we've been very privileged that Brandon invited us to participate in the beta testing. Our specialty is outside shooting from drones, but certainly outside lit naturally rather than in a studio environment. And I promised Brandon at the beginning that I would try and break the system, and I'm still trying to break it, but it's working remarkably well. The thing that impressed us most of all was that we've been just starting small and placing items on the grass and photographing them in their natural environment, and it deals with it so well. It recognizes that grass is not part of what you want to be including in the 3D object, clears it away, and leaves you with the object that you need. So that's been fabulous. The little video that Brandon has pinned to the top shows just how easy it is to get into this. I mean, it's a five-minute exercise and works really well for the uninitiated, so that's been fantastic. Yeah, there is I am succeeding in breaking it in places, but that's what I hope we're talking about, and that's what a beta test is all about. I was interested to move the conversation into the wider use because I saw just a couple of hours ago there was an announcement that Hedera in accepting glb files for 3D objects, I went, "Hang on a minute, other people surely are already accepting that." But that led me into a wider hour of exploring which metaverses you can import your own objects into or not. Um, obviously, the widespread adoption, depends on that. We've had great success with uh putting, items into uh Arium spaces, and the glb files that are coming out of Twitter were just fantastic - just slot it straight in. Um, so really, really pleased with that. But, um, interested in how some metaverses are going to get left behind very rapidly if they don't allow us, to put these 3D objects in. I think it's a really important part of the expansion of the system. Thanks for inviting me out. Thank you.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Thanks so much. We only have maybe a minute left, and I think we invited up Sunshine real quick. My last question for you guys from Twigital is, are we going to be - because I know that you guys are still kind of in the closed beta with partners and other kind of, um, I don't even want to say scientists, people like Sangres have that are really expanding out on the tech and the photogrammetry aspects, but are we going to, I'll say scientists, you got scientists on Grazer 100. Are we going to be able to twigitize down a consensus Brandon at the booth? I'm so excited. I got to bring something to twigitize, and I'm gonna bring down one of the Hedera coins from each part of the Moon, and see what that looks like. Um, yeah, coins can be challenging, but yeah, I'll bring something down. Sunshine, uh, if you had something real quick,
Sunshines-365
Hello everyone, good evening from here. Though I came late into the AMA section, I just want to answer some specific questions concerning the H bar. I really don't understand, I just want to ask, does the H bar, as are they trying to prepare their own token or what? I don't understand.
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
So I think, yeah, we're probably gonna have to do that on another space. We're doing two interviews up here today, so yeah, H bar does have HBAR, is obviously a coin. It's on a layer one. I can offer something there.
Twigital – Jesse Damrow - Founder
King just, oh, real quick, just to clear it up for him. So hedera is so great because they have a native token service which not many others, if any others have, and that's really what allows the cell to happen. This is Leemon and Mance's vision really just coming to life, and because of the native token service that Hedera is able to offer is why we're able to do this.
Sunshines-365
Oh okay, no problem. Thank you very much. My last question is, how can I get the HBAR token, and where can I get it from, and is it... or what?
Genfinity - King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I mean, HBAR is available on multiple exchanges. Obviously, do your own research before buying anything in the crypto space, but um, yeah, I mean, HBAR is available on multiple exchanges. I also believe that there's Fiat on-ramps through some of the bigger wallets within Hedera, whether that be HashPack. I'm not sure if Blade has Fiat onboarding yet, but again, I would very much so recommend that you do your own research into anything before you buy it, regardless if it's a layer one or whatever it may be, but I certainly recommend that you look into all of the services within Hedera, whether that be the token service or consensus or file sharing or file storage service, whatever that may be, and uh, yeah, and then making your decision. But, some of the best places to go if you want to look and see where the highest liquidity aspects are for any crypto that you buy, you know, you can go to CoinMarketCap, you can go to, any of these things, type in the asset, and you'll be able to see, you know, where you need to go for that. So, thank you for coming up, Sunshine, as well. Really appreciate it. Dude, I'm going to hop you down real quick to listeners because we have two interviews, to do today. So, Brandon and Jesse, both from Twigital and Stun Grazers, thank you guys so much for coming up. Would love if you could hang out up here. We are going to be dealing in kind of the meme coin aspect, explosion aspect of what Warlock is putting together, like a wild animal again, like I mentioned before. To Sunshine, nothing is financial advice within this. We're trying to consistently interview as many people within the Hedera ecosystem as possible, and it's really, really awesome to see you guys are facilitating in this space. Brandon and Jesse, just such a pleasure to have you guys on and looking forward to Twigitizing something down at Consensus as well.
Twigital – Brandon Hargreaves - Founder
Our pleasure. Thank you so much for having us on, King. Thank you, King.
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