Adam Torres and Andrew Prell discuss the Las Vegas Investor Conference.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Las Vegas Investor Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Andrew Prell, Founder of Convergence of 4 Dimensions, explore Convergence of 4 Dimensions and the Las Vegas Investor Conference event.
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About Andrew Prell
Andrew Prell, a veteran inventor, director, developer, and serial entrepreneur, is an early pioneer of virtual reality, being one of the first to commercialize the technology in the early 1990s. Andrew was the founder and CEO of Alternate Worlds Technology, Inc. (AWT) which developed and successfully marketed the first US Manufactured Virtual Reality Arcade System, the “Reality Rocket”. The system featured several high profile games developed by Andrew’s team, including Wolfenstein VR, and one of the first real-time 3D virtual reality games, Xenomorph, which was based on PixelPlanes Technology from the University of North Carolina.
About Convergence of 4 Dimensions
Convergence of 4 Dimensions (“Convergence”) Founded in 2015, the Convergence team are the Inventors of Cross-Reality (XR), creating the operating layer that will bring all AR/VR, 2D and 3D platforms onto one real-time multiplayer platform; building a community ecosystem that will drive the in-game virtual economy onto the blockchain and into the real-world lives of developers, creators, and players.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I am at in Las Vegas at the Sahara casino, and I’m at the loss.
Investor conference and Andrew is is my, is my guest, Andrew. Welcome to the show. And well, thank you for having me. All right. So we got a lot to talk about here today. First off, I need to know, is this your first time attending this conference? Or have you been to some of these before? Well, this is the first time to this specific conference, the Las Vegas investor conference, okay.
I’ve been to Many conferences over the decade. Yeah. So for this talk about your experience so far. not everybody could be here today, but I want everybody here next year. Tell me about your experience. Oh, it’s been very awesome. I’ve met a lot of incredible investors, a lot of incredible people that are really great.
Connections and collaborator, collaborators with us people that just love what we’re doing. I mean we are, it seems to be the only video game group or ecosystem here for sure, but yeah, there’s a lot, a lot of people that are interested in what we’re doing. That’s amazing. So talk a little bit more about what brought you out today.
Well, we’re part of fusion 42 and they called us up and said, Hey, bring all your stuff out. We’ve got this great investor conference to go to. So. That did bring us amazing. So Kirk Walker, I’ll give a shout out out there, but you know, we’re part of that ecosystem of the startup ecosystem, the Startup alley group in that it’s very tight knit group here in Vegas.
It really helps founders get off the ground and get off the ground. Right. And so you’re located in Las Vegas, like the business, the company. Yeah, we got, we got moved here by Nevada themselves. They, through Battle Born Ventures they did deal with us to, with, remove the corporate office out here and brought some officers that they would It’s a match funding up and we did that a little bit over a year ago.
So I’m a little bit new to Vegas. I want to be here more. I’m in, I’ll tell you, I’m, I’m located out at LA and I make it here sometimes just for fun, but I’ve just started covering conferences and doing shows out here, but I’m excited. So you said that the start of community is pretty vibrant, like a little bit about that, like I’m learning the ropes, man.
I don’t know. Well, I mean, it, it. It has a way to go, but it is, it is far better than most any place I’ve been, except for, you know, Silicon Valley. I was out there and part of Started, wasn’t part of developing it, but started at Hacker Dojo in its first year at the tail end of its first year. And that startup ecosystem was phenomenal and always been looking for things that are close to it.
This has been as close to it as it’s come. Wow, that’s interesting. Since Tony, Tony Hsieh was out here, I think it was far more, You know you know, that produced a lot of growth in this area, but they’re really, they’re really with the Fusion 42 group mm-hmm . And the Tech Alley. It’s really good. And Fusion 42, just so I’m, I’m clear that’s a, ’cause you mentioned it more than once, that’s a, a startup group or, oh yeah.
There’s they’ve got a really good telegram channel. You can find ’em on LinkedIn under Kirk Walker. And they have. I’d say well over you know, two or 3, 000 members, I’d say almost half, half of which are, you know founder investors and the other and the other half are are kind of startups.
And they’ll put you through your paces and they’ll tell you what you’re doing right on your pitches and what you’re doing wrong and how to do. You know how to raise money properly and, you know, everything that you’d want to know, they’ve got, they’ve got a room for it’s pretty cool. Talk a little bit more about your company.
Yeah. So convergence, we have the Silica Nexus video game ecosystem. We have figured out how to remove customer acquisition costs from consumer games. And if you don’t know much about the consumer game industry, Machine zone built a cell phone game for 200, 000, 44 million to make it one of the top sellers.
So if you do the math, that’s 99. 5 percent of that game’s budget went towards player acquisition. What we’ve figured out is how to reduce that down to next to or close to nothing. What’s the secret sauce? Like, what can you tell me? Well, games, once they produce the game, it costs them nothing to make another a hundred thousand or a hundred million items of a certain type.
It’s just, you know, change the number in the database. They give us those video game items And then we put them in there’s 500 million players a month The trade prize tickets for prizes that suck in 80, 000 facilities around the world. You’re smiling because you said 500 million players a month in 80, 000 facilities around the world, facilities similar to, or Dave and Buster’s Chuck cheese, time zone, you know, all these places where you take your skeeball tickets, you trade them in for the.
For the vampire teeth or the, you know, now you can use our digital collectible vending machine, you trade your prize. And that’s what we call it. Digital collectible. It’s a digital collectible video game item. Yes. Yes. Okay. For those that are blockchain savvy, it is an NFT, but don’t worry about that.
It’s a video game. I understand. That’s being traded outside the video game. So you know, we basically say that we have prizes that don’t suck because every, those 500 million people, no tagline prizes, they don’t surprise us. They don’t suck, man. I love that. I’ve got a like little sidebar here. Who thought of that one, man?
That’s amazing. when gmail came out, gmail came out with. Basically email that doesn’t suck. That was his tagline. Yeah. You know, I didn’t know that by the way. That’s great. Great history lesson. Thank you. I knew that. And then, about, once we figured out what we had here, it’s like, well, everybody’s trading these price tickets for prizes that they know upfront suck.
They do. You walk into it and you’re like, not to pick and Dave and Buster’s or this is that, but I’m like, you know, you got 95 sunk into the vampire. Okay. Yeah, I got you. I got some expensive teeth, man. You had fun doing it. Yes, yes, yes. So video game items, those are prizes that, that don’t. I mean, kids want those.
That’s what the, the modern day consumer lives his life in the digital world. And we give them, we give them items from that. Now. What do you do when you choose a new toy? Because realize this is the only time in retail that people have spent their money. Their money is now gone. And now they have a choice on what they spent their money on and we catch them right at that decision.
Yeah And we have the advantage of a 22nd sizzle reel to grab their attention away from those hot vampire teeth or the, you know, Chinese finger cuffs. Yeah. Or would you rather have a fortnight dance or skin from counter strike, you know, things that can hold value and gain in value rather than Immediately lose their value.
Yeah. So that’s our phase one is our player acquisition engine and that gets us, that’ll get us hundreds of millions of players into our system. Well, phase two then is our augmented reality app. Now that they’re trading in our system and they’re using these video game items, we know what they like, what they’re looking for, what they’re missing.
We can send them on quests. So just think of like Pokemon go. If it was married to world of Warcraft, that’s our Silicon Express augmented reality app or Sarah. So we can send you a message that says, Hey, you want this item? Do this quest. Yeah. You go and do that quest. You might end up at like a. Laser tag arena somewhere, or someplace that wanted us to get you there.
You finish out the quest, you kill the big boss at the end. You know, you’re the hero that you get the piece of bubblegum that we, we, you know, taunted you with to get you to do the quest. Well, now, Blazer Blaze might thank you for saving their facility from this big, bad boss. And they’ll say, you want a free game of LazyTown?
Hmm. Yeah. And you’re like, absolutely. Don’t mind if I do. We’ll put you in the next queue. Starts in 25 minutes. Hmm. Now you’re at Lazy Blaze for 25 minutes. You’re going to buy a drink. Yeah. You’re going to play a couple games. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re not going to sit on your hands for 25 minutes. We’ve just engaged you with that business.
Yeah. So that’s our phase two. Which people have me talking about now. We weren’t talking about this at all. When we started this up, we knew what we wanted. We knew all the phases and there’s far more than three phases. But phase three is where we take that augmented reality. And now we use it as a fan engagement tool in large arenas.
So one thing that irritates me, know, the Las Vegas sphere. Yeah, of course. Cause it’s like a mini sphere in Las Vegas and Dallas. Okay. I’ve been to that, but it doesn’t have the outside parts. I understand. their run off of like Unreal Engine. Mm hmm Sphere is a 2.
3 billion dollar game peripherals. Mm hmm that they use is a really big TV Yeah, it’s run off of Unreal Engine. That thing’s made to be interactive. Yeah, but yet Yeah, They use it as a big TV show. Everything they’ve ever done is static. Well, we can use our augmented reality app, engage with that unreal engine and have, this is a fan engagement tool.
We’ve already designed content around that. We’ve got a big picture world, a few others that are very interested in that content and helping us develop and create that content for more facilities like that around the world. Because. You know, if you just think of the inner dome, almost every major city around the world has a center like that, or a development studio like that, you can use for public things.
So we could do these venues everywhere. And that’s, and that’s getting more towards that full cross reality space. Yeah. But what we’re going to do with it is, is beyond your imagination. Have you ever, have you ever done a quest in like a world of Warcraft or anything like that? Been a while, but yes. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. How big was the biggest quest? It was a, it was a long time ago. So I haven’t, I’m not cleaning up. What was the biggest quest that you ever, was on? How many people were in it? Oh my gosh. Not, not that many. Like I’ve seen some big ones, like, I don’t know, like double digits. Not definitely not like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like they’re not like. Okay. So that was your one team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine if the person in the sphere was the leader of that team. Wow. And now you have 15, 000 teams. That’s insane. Going on a quest together with their team outside connecting. Didian from their gaming machine, supporting them to try to beat the other 14, 999 teams.
Oh, you just hurt my head. Thank you, Albert. My head, my brain just went. That’s the kind of stuff we’ve been playing out, mapped out and that we’re working towards. You know, think of like the fortnight Travis Scott concert. Okay. We, that was 12 million people participating at one time, watching that one concert.
But that was all in the virtual world. We’re talking about having the physical world interlaced with the virtual world and true cross reality or shared reality type of. Convergence. And that’s where we’re going. That’s our phase three. So you can imagine where we go with phase four, five, and six. But anyway, Andrew, man, I’m telling you, this has been a lot of fun.
Last thing I want you to do. and I want you to tell people how they can follow up, how they can learn more, how they can follow you through these phases. Well, you can, you can watch us on, YouTube. We have some of our content up YouTube under the Silicon Nexus.
Channel, you can look at silicon nexus. com and you can find me on LinkedIn and follow some of us on, on Twitter. You know, Silicon nexus is the platform and that’s where we’re at where I’m on all the channels under the Silicon nexus platform. Amazing. And for everybody watching at home, just so you know we’ll put the links in the show notes so you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters, and if you haven’t done it yet. Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re releasing new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Andrew appreciate you make some time for us. No problem. Thank you.
