Robert Gryn is a serial entrepreneur who has built a high-tech Metaverse scanner which he hopes will act as a portal from our physical reality into th
Robert Gryn is a serial entrepreneur who has built a high-tech Metaverse scanner which he hopes will act as a portal from our physical reality into the Metaverse.
It is no secret that the physical world is beginning to merge with the digital, and that blockchain is serving as the arbiter of reality in many of these nascent metaverses. Gryn, CEO of MetaHero, is doing his part to make that new reality as real as possible, creating high-definition 3D scans of people, objects and animals that you may soon encounter in games, virtual worlds and NFTs.
After spending a decade building European marketing company Codewise in Poland and even being featured on a Forbes list for the nation’s richest, Gryn left it all behind and moved to Dubai while building a solution with which he hopes to onboard the next billion people to the blockchain.
Privacy worries
Gryn excitedly lists the potential applications of his full-body Metaverse scanners for things like digital fashion: “You‘ll be able to scan yourself in your underpants, for example — it‘d be very easy to try on not only digital fashion but real-world clothing,” he says.
But, this raises a serious concern. What if some privacy box is left unchecked or the system is hacked and I find my digital clone as the unwilling star of an AI-created adult video?
Is this my eternal form? I got scanned into the metaverse by @Metahero_io at Dubai’s Future Blockchain Summit last October. #Cointelegraph article coming soon! @wdw_io #metaverse #HERO pic.twitter.com/ItPEjnMNw5
— Elias Ahonen.eth (@eahonen) February 16, 2022
Gryn recognizes the issue, admitting that “if ultra-realistic scans got leaked and someone manipulated them to be in some sort of pornographic scene, that would potentially be the beginning of the end for us.” For that reason, he stresses the importance of secure file storage and the use of security measures such as watermarks.
Storing and managing high-resolution 3D scans of thousands of people is no easy technical feat, and it can also be a nightmare of privacy and copyright laws. The tech raises plenty of questions: Who can be given access to scans, how can they be used and how do royalties need to be set up? There are no easy answers.
“We are going to have to hire small armies of lawyers to cover all global jurisdictions to figure out what we can and cannot do in any given jurisdiction,” Gryn says, adding that the management of “terabytes of new data on a daily basis” is no small challenge but one he is confident he will overcome.
Making the rich list
Originally from Poland, Gryn started out in an “eclectic kind of course” studying for a Master of Science in technology entrepreneurship at the University of Surrey in England from 2004 to 2008, where “each week, they would invite a local entrepreneur” to share their life story and answer questions about their business. One such presenter once told the class that of 100 people who want to start a business, only four actually do — and just one of them succeeds. Gryn recalls pondering how he could avoid the 96% fate of a “wantrepreneur” and strike out for real. After graduating, he continued with a master‘s in marketing at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
He realized early on he was not cut out to be a corporate drone, during an internship at mobile network company Orange, where he received an employee number and access to the group‘s intranet on the first day. Browsing the boring corporate intranet all day, “it was very obvious to me that I don‘t belong there, and I don‘t want to belong.” As he began his second day, nobody came along to give him work, and during lunch, “I decided just to bail and never ever allow myself to be part of this corporate type of structure,” he recalls with a laugh.
With the exception of his two-day stint there and another minor internship, Gryn’s first job was one of his own entrepreneurial makings as CEO of Codewise, a marketing company which he founded in Krakow, Poland in 2011. Using technology to help manage the brand marketing of various clients, the firm has ranked among Europe’s fastest-growing companies for three years in a row.
Each year, he remembers browsing the Polish edition of the Forbes magazine when they released an annual list of society‘s wealthiest, where he would “always be looking for someone young that made it in a country that does quite the opposite of facilitating entrepreneurship.” Later, undue bureaucracy and a post-communist mentality which he says is prevalent in Eastern Europe influenced his decision to relocate to Dubai which he considers more business-friendly.
He made it, building the firm into “a 250-person IT company in the advertising technology space.” At age 31 in 2017, he was featured as the youngest self-made man on the Forbes…
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