# Metaverse Japan Meetup #3 2022/09/22: Notes

## Moderator:
PwC managing director, Metaverse Japan Director?

## Speakers:
VRM Consortium members

#### Hiroki Tanaka Cluster Co., Ltd. Executive Officer CTO
cluster クラスター株式会社 | クラスター株式会社（メタバースプラットフォーム cluster）
*Metaverse dev company

#### Yohei Ishii, Director and COO, Virtual Cast
バーチャルキャスト[Virtual Cast]
Makers of VirtualCast on Steam (steampowered.com)

#### Shinnosuke Iwashiro, Director and CTO, VRM Consortium @ DWANGO
Japan VRM standards body VRM Consortium (vrm-consortium.org)
All above are members, in addition to Unity, communications, studios, pixiv, etc.

#### Ayato Yu
Blockchain Consultant Metaverse Japan Board of Directors
| 一般社団法人Metaverse Japan (metaverse-japan.org)

### Discussion topic, 3D Avatars & Metaverse:

Why the metaverse?
- HYPE ➝ Meta/FB, emerging technologies like NFTs, VR, 5G, convergence is near
- Community and Ecosystem


- 10 year roadmap ➝ Core tech, VR glasses improve, web3 etc.
- Mission: Become a hub for metaverse promotion to the world


- Currently 3 working groups ➝
- Metaverse Lifestyle
- Web 3 metaverse
- Digital Twin (Commercial, XR)

- Self Governance/rule-making
- Compliance focus for domestic regulations covering KYC, personal info protection act, IP protection, financial compliance, etc. etc.

- They want to be a hub between different associations domestically
- 

- Working globally?

- What is VRM Consortium
- VRM format committee
- VRM usage legal committee
- VRM promotion committee

- Basic explanation aboutt VRM features
- VRM 0.x was made, which is the version most widely used now
- VRM 1.0 standard designation is currently in the works for a few years
- VRM 1.0 legal restriction clarifications
- 
- Today, VRM 1.0 release (UniVRM)
- out of beta?

- CLUSTER as a metaverse service and avatar authoring tool, they want to optimize characters with high quality with appropriate LOD generation to support social experiences

- Concern about western influence on having the avatar standard pushing VRM aside

- Main speaker saying that they have no idea about web3 direction with metaverse implementations?
- Web3 advisor mentioned some domestic projects are playing with simple imeplentation of web3 as AUTH that is platform agnostic. Seems like a lack of awareness of current web3 metaverse projects?

## Q&A

- Question from TOPPAN Printing Inc: Curious to understand VRM promotion endeavors
- A: Creating content, supporting large domestic IPs to use VRM standard, coordinating with foreign metaverse associations.

- Question from audience: What is the main VRM 1.0 difference as opposed to before?
- A: Clearer license and usage restrictions. Lots of creator sourced feedback was incorporated for usage restrictions. Derivitave support to record original creator?

- Question from audience: What happens with backwards compatibility with VRM with the new format on the CLUSTER platfrom? As a user without skills to use Unity, concerned about ongoing support.
- A: We have not supported 1.0 official yet. We will support current 0.x VRM format for the forseeable future even after 1.0 support. But regarding licensing and usage restrictions, as these two a disparate licenses management approaches, we may need to move over to 1.0 and in such case, we might be able to prepare tools to upgrade 0.x models to 1.0 to support regulatory needs of our platform.

- QUESTION from M3: Are there any browser based projects involved in the VRM standard?
- A: PIXIV has "three-VRM" which is a threeJS browser based VRM library. We've been working with them and they maintain it. They have also supported 1.0 as far as we are aware. https://github.com/pixiv/three-vrm