Why we need to make the metaverse and Web3 more inclusive - a conversation with Giselle Mota

Giselle Mota is a futurist and thought leader focused on enabling inclusion as it relates to product design, the future of work, and all things emerging tech including Web3 and metaverse. She is the creator of NFTY Collective, which focuses on bringing disability inclusion into Web3 and metaverse. She is also founder of Versd, an inclusive innovation and strategic ventures group.

Giselle, what is your mission with the NFTY Collective? And what are your priorities with inclusivity and the metaverse and Web3 in general?

The world of the metaverse, Web3 and mixed reality have been designed and developed without a lot of accessibility or the inclusion of people with disabilities in mind. In all these experiences where you can take on an avatar in virtual or augmented reality, you hardly ever see the option to show up as a someone who has a disability.

We wanted to create choice. That's the key – the choice.

Above: NFTY Collective focuses on bringing disability inclusion into web3 and the metaverse, such as through the creation of more inclusive digital identities and training of AI models can tailor more inclusive digital experiences

At NFTY, we are creating avatars based on real people from around the world who are doing amazing things and just happen to have disabilities. Instead of just giving somebody the option of having Snoop Dogg as their avatar, or a monster, or an animal, we’re paving a pathway to choose a digital identity that looks more like themselves.

We have created avatars that had both seen and unseen disabilities. The people behind them are actors, Paralympians, musicians, consultants, authors, speakers.  They just didn't see themselves in many digital experiences because they're blind or deaf or born without limbs – all kinds of things.

There are also some people with unseen disabilities – for example, some are people with Autism and others with Chronic Illnesses. I too have an unseen disability of Dyslexia.

We’re also including people of the LGBTQ+ community who have disabilities and people who are all different colors and shapes and sizes, and body types. They're all included inside of our collection. We are now starting to use them inside of games and other metaverse spaces. We're also creating lots of AR experiences with those characters to bring them to life, including filters, games, art galleries.

Can you talk about why it’s important to be doing this work right now, while we’re still in the early days of the metaverse?

Because it's the start. If we can get it right now, we are on our way to a different experience than we've had in the physical world for people with disabilities. And with Web 2.0, there have also been a lot of limitations for people with disabilities despite the existence of standards, laws and guidelines.

With Web3, there is the potential for more human agency. People want more control of their own data. They don't want to just have to upload a picture somewhere or to read – or not read – the fine print of an agreement all the way through. Now some organization owns your pictures, your videos, your personal information. They're monetizing off your data.

For people with disabilities, Web3 can enable employment opportunities for people working from home on Web3 projects, and they can own their projects and their work and make money in different ways. That's not even to mention mixed reality experiences and the metaverse.

So if we can get it right with the next iteration of the way we interact with the internet, we're going to be ahead of the curve.

Above: Watch the full conversation between Giselle and Matthew

I saw some analysis a couple of weeks ago that suggested there are over a billion people with some form of disability, seen or unseen. That is an amazing statistic to consider.

An untapped market and underrepresented market. Imagine that! We talk about diversity, equity and inclusion so much. And it's not just, oh, because it's a good thing to do. It is also because there's so many untapped markets.

The people you want as consumers and customers, those very people are diverse, and should be valued as such. They come from all kinds of backgrounds, experiences, cultures, gender identities and identities. So if we're now saying that we're going to evolve technology, we have to bring inclusion along on that journey. We have to design with and for the people that we are expecting to be loyal and to transact with.

Many of the characters that we're working with are people of color, and others are people with LGBTQ+ backgrounds. We also have people from all around the world. So we're really trying to push the idea that whoever you are, you belong in this experience as well. You don't have to be left out or left behind.

We’ve partnered and collaborated with many platform providers. We have even – through artificial intelligence and augmented reality – started creating personalized and accessible experiences for those with blindness, color blindness, Down Syndrome, from training AI to be able to respond to an individual to creating sound experiences that would typically be consumed visually.

We're also trying to create opportunities where you can take these avatars and have AI guides that understand that this person is deaf or blind and [tailor the system to their needs].

I would say if you're a tech provider, or a platform provider, and you want to collaborate, and you want to do something neat, like we're so open to different uses, and projects to put together.

A friend in the telco industry who is blind recently asked: “Am I blind in the Metaverse?” What a fascinating question that is when you think about the possibilities ahead?

This is why it's so important for technology and platform providers to start thinking about these questions because they may have great use cases for enterprise but they haven't been created with accessibility in mind.

Imagine you were able to guide someone through those spaces because you understood what their disability was. You'd be able to tell them with audio descriptions what they saw. You would allow them to navigate certain AR experiences.

In fact, we did that recently at a conference, we had an AR experience and created an audio description on top of it. If attendees were visually impaired, if they had low vision, if they were blind, they were able to still experience the conference with screen readers with an audio connection. It's just thinking outside of the box and innovating with more people in mind.

Where do you see the metaverse taking off first? Many people talk about enterprise as the first widespread use case.

I think there's been a big push towards the enterprise just because people saw an opportunity to monetize and make profit and do something new. People and brands have been thinking about ways to engage customers in a new way that doesn't require a physical location or physical interactions, especially during the pandemic.

But I think that it actually started off with kids. For me, the creatives of the world – children and older gamers, people who are into more of a creative and a fun outlet – they’re the ones that started this with gaming, film and animation.

Kids were the ones who were like: “Hey, Mom, I'm building this game. And you know, I'm building a space here, I have a character and an avatar and I have to buy something, so I'm using digital currency to buy something in here.”

They were the first ones on this. And I think it's hilarious that everybody else now is tripping over their feet to understand a topic that kids, gamers and nerds were doing all along.

How does digital inclusion in terms of devices and the digital divide relate to your work with avatars and actions within the metaverse?

All of these technology experiences that we're talking about need to be engaged through a device. Virtual reality for the most part has been confined to some sort of headset, which you have to put on your face and need to use your eyes for.

I'll list some limitations real quick. What if you get motion sickness behind a goggle set? Or what if you can't afford it? What if you can't see because you have low vision, or you're blind?

What if you can't afford a headset, then you're out of the experience. And so, we all devices, we need to think about that. We should also try to think about accessibility of experiences through multiple devices. So it shouldn't be that I need have a smartphone to create this experience. Somebody could be at their desk, on a laptop or a desktop. You could actually create all kinds of different ways to give people a chance to experience extended reality and the metaverse.

What would you like to see more of in the metaverse discussion and at metaverse-related events?

I would love to see more deliberate inclusion in future gatherings around topics like this. Given the topic, it's just so blatantly obvious that we need to talk about inclusion and have the right people in the room who are not all, you know, basically kind of the same.

There are many, many talented people in tech and in user design, engineering and research and development who have disabilities. And I wonder how much their voices are being heard.

One thing I loved at the Imagine Possible event was hearing so many different voices coming together in terms of their areas of expertise. So we had one person talking about, you know, sustainability, and thinking about how can you reuse materials and how can we eliminate waste. Then we had somebody else from an academic background who was talking about, hey, this is all actually about management. It's about how we design efficiently and how we continue to innovate.

It was also cool to hear the granularity of how we need to build business cases. This is what we need to think about in terms of profitability. But I would just love to hear more about inclusion when we're talking about mixed reality, the metaverse and Web3.

Learn more

Learn more about the NFTY Collective

Watch more highlights from Imagine Possible Santa Clara 2022

Read more about Ericsson’s commitment to diversity and inclusion