CapTech Trends

Preparing Brands for the Metaverse

March 17, 2022 CapTech
CapTech Trends
Preparing Brands for the Metaverse
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Vinnie talks with Clinton Teegarden, a Director in CapTech’s System Integration practice, about what companies can do today to successfully prepare for the metaverse. Listen to learn more about: 

  • Why it's important to understand crypto now.
  • How to start thinking about unique customer experiences without the constraints of a physical store. 
  • How the metaverse is creating completely new opportunities, particularly in banking and financial institutions. 

Vinnie  

Hello, and welcome to CapTech Trends. Today we're doing something a little bit different. We're doing a video recording in studio.  If you want to take a look at this, you can check us out on our website captechconsulting.com. Today we're looking at the metaverse, there's a lot of hype recently. We want to look past that hype and look more into the reality of the metaverse and what companies can be doing today. I have with me Clinton Teegarden, a director at CapTech focused on innovative technologies. Clinton, welcome.

 

Clinton  

Thanks for having me.

 

Vinnie  

This is going to be more of a back and forth, as opposed to a direct interview like we do in previous ones. I wanted to start with a little bit of my history in VR so people can know where that is, and then kind of get into where we are today and get into the hype and the reality. I started in 1992.  Noah, behind the cameras as we were preparing for this, let me know that he wasn't born yet.  I was looking at it in 1992. I did a paper on it in school. In research for that paper, I was at Roanoke College. I actually drove to see my friend Kevin at UVA and he got me into the VR lab.  They were hanging like tennis balls from the ceiling and putting the goggles on and trying to map the optics. So that where the ball is in physical space is where it isn't in virtual space. It was very cool, very exciting. That was the same year Snow Crash came out and then that's where the metaverse term came from.  I wrote like my favorite paper I ever wrote for college, and I got a C.  I went and talked to the professor. She was like, this is science fiction, I asked for something that was real. I kind of want to get into a car now and find out where she is. Long story to say I've been involved with this for a long time. As soon as the HTC VIVE came out, I was on board bought 5 VIVE Pro Quest. I've really been active in using the technology as well as doing some sample development in the technology. For CapTech, about three or four years ago, we made the prediction to focus on augmented reality, not virtual reality and we did that not because we think it's a more immersive experience. It isn't but it’s because everyone has a phone.  So, you have any like it and you're in you're comfortable using it. One of the early things we found out was that the physical barrier to the hardware was a limiting factor. Any thoughts on that?

 

Clinton  

No, I totally agree. And I think we're still there, right?  If you have all these devices that you've mentioned, you still have to take it off eventually, because it is too hot or doesn't fit right. So, it hurts   if you don't wear it quite right. You get a little dizzy on the inside. I think we're still there.

 

Vinnie  

Yeah, the barrier that gets me is the Quest 2 and that's the one that Facebook has bought, right?

 

Clinton  

Right, I own that one.

 

Vinnie  

Yes. It's pretty good. What I mean by that it's an all in one. You can set it on your head, far better than the VIVE where we must go into a PC, log into steam, do all these additional steps set up the lighthouses to get outside and tracking all that stuff, but because it fits on your head, the GPU is not that powerful. Anything fast motion drops frames, you can get more motion sickness, but for slow moving things, it's getting pretty close, and the resolution is good.

 

Clinton  

I totally agree. In fact, the first time I rode a roller coaster on it, I thought, am I dizzy because the roller coaster or am I dizzy because of just some of the lag or some of the weird?

 

Vinnie

 It’s choppy. 

 

Clinton 

Right.

 

Vinnie  

On the VIVE Pro, it is very smooth, and it’s proprioception, right, where you are in physical space. To the degree that doesn't match that in virtual space. You get sick or you fall down. It's very, for those who haven't tried it, it can be very scary, when that starts to happen. I was doing something the other day, and I was in a bedroom virtually. I was looking for clues to something I was solving. I was looking under the bed and I went to get up and I tried to put my full weight on the bed, which wasn't there.

 

Clinton 

 Right through.

 

Vinnie

(laughs) Right through and fell. Right, and that can happen. It is that immersive. I guess my I want to be excited about the metaverse. I've been waiting for this for a very long time. I'm sort of having this strange reaction to the metaverse term, because there's been no breakthrough in technology before or after that term.

 

Clinton  

Right. In fact, a lot of the current meta verses have been around since 2016 & 2017. The actual places Decentraland being the biggest.  It's been around for you know, at least five or six years. So, what's changed that now we're actually talking about it here and just in the last months?

 

Vinnie  

It's got a name, that was changed. That should be a good thing. Right? Getting more people aware of it and interested in it. 2003, I think that’s when Second Life came out. We've been through this before this digital twin attempt.

 

Clinton

 I think Noah was alive then. 

 

Vinnie

Noah were you alive then?  Yes. (laughs)  Noah is shaking his head yes. I remember companies, we worked with retail companies, putting assets in that area of buying land, and it fizzled out quickly. I like to think about what's changed between now and then.

 

Clinton  

Blockchain. Is really the only a difference if you look at the current land. 

 

Vinnie

 Well with NF Ts.

 

Clinton

 Yeah. That's really the major difference. You own a piece of land, and you have a permanent token saying, you have this and you're in that history forever.

 

Vinnie  

Well, the blockchain also leads to a decentralized right model versus a centralized right mode.

 

Clinton  

Which has a lot of great positives. But as we were mentioning earlier, there's some impacts, you know, to our actual physical world because of that. Global warming and things like that. The amount of CPU that it takes to run something like that.

 

Vinnie  

That's something people don't consider. I read something recently that Bitcoin mining to be specific, uses more energy a year than the entire country of Sweden.  It's crazy. Right, and NFTs are falling into another bucket of high energy usage as well. There is a cost. There's a real-world carbon footprint cost to building out a metaverse.  By the way, when I say a metaverse, we mean more than one.

 

Clinton  

Yeah, there's at least four major ones right now.

 

Vinnie  

It's interesting to me from our client’s perspective, what does it mean to be present in the metaverse? Right, because it's plural. Does that mean you're going to choose a meta verse in which to be in or you're going to have some sort of abstraction that allows you to be present in multiple metaverses? Where do you choose to buy land? Right? Where do you choose to have a physical or a virtual presence?

 

Clinton  

Right now, everything is one metaverse, they're all built. The current ones are built off the Ethereum platform, but they're still physically different places.  You would have to choose just to pick your pick the one that you think is going to be the most successful, or maybe you're going for the one that's going to give you the most bang for your buck from land prices.

 

Vinnie  

What should happen is there should be an abstraction broker, whereby I have stores, I have products, I have services. I have NFTs of goods that people want. All the metaverses have subscribed to my content. With coordinates to know where to place them and do that kind of stuff, as opposed to me having to go out and physically buy, quote, land and property in real estate in these multiple metaverses.

 

Clinton  

Yeah, I agree. I think the one perks since they are all, at least the current ones are all built on Ethereum, you might end up with this world where we have contractors, so to speak, then the digital space where they can go in and build in these in these various locations for you to build your buildings or your storefronts, or whatever it may be.

 

Vinnie  

Right, let's talk about the storefront a bit because I've gone back and forth a couple of people on this. The reason why Amazon is great for buying stuff, right? Is I can go out there find something really quickly using filters, and searches and search history and personalization. All those things in a couple clicks get what I want, and it shows up sometimes the same day. Sometimes the next day. The idea that I'm going to walk down the street by walking in place virtually in my house and go into a store and walk up and down aisles that does that very skeuomorphic approach. I do think that brands will want to have a presence.  They may want to have a store; they may want to have some kind of presence then. One thing we've learned from other technologies is when we went from print to web, it was a direct copy, and it was kind of bad. Then people realized, oh, what can we do in web that you can't do in print? Yep, made it better? Absolutely. Then you went from web to mobile. They tried to put an entire webpage on a small phone, and it was fine, but kind of horrible. Then it was, oh, how do we personalize and customize the experience and make it responsive to this platform? Right? Same thing with wearables, we keep making that same mistake over and over again. I think we're going to make that mistake again with the metaverse and be a linear translation. What companies should be thinking about is when I come into something, how can they reimagine what that experience can be without the constraints of a physical store? You know me, you know my size, you know my preferences, you know what I bought before at other places. My store experience should be different than yours.

 

Clinton  

Yeah, that should be totally possible. I mean, they'll be able to build a decentralized application so that essentially runs when they go into your store your physical, whatever your land presence is, it's possible but right now they are making that same mistake. We're just building outlet malls with billboards and the same physical world but we're just putting it digitally. In these new spaces.

 

Vinnie  

How often do I see something in reality and decide I want it without having been in a store?  I see Dave Grohl, play his Gibson 335 on stage. I like that guitar.  I was at a meeting the other night, and someone had a new pair of shoes on, and I wondered what kind of shoes they were I'd never seen them before. In a metaverse environment, I should then have to go to the shoe store and try to find them. I should be able to have some sort of gesture that takes whatever they're wearing or whatever they're holding and pulls it up. I can inspect it and I can purchase it right there. That changes the customer experience. 

 

Clinton  

Imagine that's where Facebook probably wants to take it. They make their money off those analytics.  Maybe their goal is to create that not, only the Quest devices, but to create that that connection point between what you want and based on what you see.

 

Vinnie  

Well, the advertising is going to be really in your face. Right now, you buy something, and then you get ads for that thing you bought for the next month. That's going to be even more irritating (laughs) in the metaverse. Going back to Facebook, and the multiple metaverses, one of the things I'm concerned about is right now in Facebook and other social media not singling anybody out. There's a tendency for everyone to go off to their own tribe, echo chamber. When someone says I've done my own research, and this is not political. This is both sides of the aisle.  When they say, “I did my own research”, what that typically means is I drank a half a bottle of wine, while I searched the internet to find a blog post that agreed with me. That's not research. That's confirmation bias. So, what we're going to find with multiple metaverses is I'm afraid as people go in being fed this, you know, the red meat that they don’t want to eat. They're going to go further and further away from each other, as opposed to challenging their ideas. They're going to go to where it's comfortable and easy.

 

Clinton  

Yeah, absolutely. Even if they we land on one metaverse, if we're talking about advertisements, or things that are geared towards us, we're still going to see that. Now all the billboards and political advertisements, or maybe even non-political, or just any general information that you wanted, that you're looking for information about, it's going to be right there for you. And you might not be getting both sides of the story.

 

Vinnie  

Yeah, I hadn't thought about it in exactly that term. But personalization is a way to introduce confirmation bias. 

 

Clinton  

That’s right. The more you see it, the more you believe it. 

 

Vinnie  

That's a little bit scary. One of the things I wanted to talk about with you is the barrier between where we are now and when the metaverse will be common. I want to read something to you if I have it handy. It was from the Decentraland website that you had. There was a very pretty website, it looks like it's approachable. You click on what is land, and it goes into land is a non-fungible token comprised of XY Cartesian product, it goes all this math like within the first sentence. I know what they mean, I know the words. You do too. which anyone in our industry is going to know what they're talking about but anyone outside our industry is going to not understand. Yeah, and this is the most popular platform. It's got to be easier. It's got to be less technical; the wearables must be less bulky. I think there's still a physical aspect to this as well as a user experience aspect to it.

 

Clinton  

I agree, they're all built off some sort of blockchain. If you ask, I will say probably the majority of people on the street, they heard the word. They've heard it tossed around, they know it's something about crypto, but what that means or how it works, or how it means that you have something, that's physically yours. They don't understand that. To the average person, or anybody else that I've talked to you about this really, there's like, well, how's the metaverse different than the Sims game that I played when I was in fifth grade?  It's like, well, it's a bit different but there's a lot of the same. It's a tough answer to, to come up with when there is so much common with them other than really blockchain.

 

Vinnie  

Yeah, for sure. An interesting thing I noticed when I was getting into VR early on, I would have people over and everybody wanted to try it. It really is cool. It's great. The second you start doing that, you kill the party because one person's having fun, doing something immersive for them and everybody else is sitting around waiting for their turn.  You stop talking to each other. It's not a good party.

 

Clinton  

No, unless they do something funny, like, you know, try to put their hand on a bed and fall.

 

Vinnie  

Then it is funny (laughs). Thanks for reminding me. I have done a lot of social things. I have attended concerts. You are social with other people in the metaverse, but you are completely cut out of your current reality. That's another reason why I thought AR was going to take off first is because it's a more shareable experience. Right?

 

Clinton

 We have platforms for that. 

 

Vinnie

For sure. I think those are things are going to have to change. One of the things we're thinking about what companies need to do, buying land, buying real estate buying, buying clothing. That's going to be real dollars. I think there's going to be some interesting hurdle. There's some digital twinning that can happen, where if I do buy a pair of virtual Nikes, I also get that physical pair at home. Maybe I'm buying a pair of shoes, and I get the NFT for that pair of shoes, and at the same time.

 

Clinton  

Nikes doing that already. It's out there and happening. The buying land and buying these, I guess when you say real dollars, you can exchange that for, in Decentraland, it's MANA as it was their currency, or you can use your crypto wallet, Bitcoin or Ethereum, or whatever it might be that you have. I guess the definition of real dollars may become a little loose eventually, you could essentially cash out. 

 

Vinnie  

It's an asset. I start thinking about land. I haven't gone into Decentraland yet. I probably will check it out. When you buy land there, and when you buy a house there, what does that cost? I don't know yet.

 

Clinton  

I actually did a lot of research on this because I thought eventually, when the land was first created, who got the money? How was that? If you think about back to, you know, three or 400 years ago, you know, the land was just taken, and there was there was a cost to that, but it was more humanitarian costs. This, it's like, well, digitally there. What was the cost, and it actually just went to an auction, and they went pretty cheap. In Decentraland, you saw the prices really, they've been very volatile, especially since Facebook, announced that they were changing their name to Meta, you know, that they spiked way up, and they've been down. They're a little bit all over the place. It's almost like you're just kind of biding your time, hoping that you get the right price.

 

Vinnie  

Right. I hope that doesn't ruin it. Speculators have ruined other things. That could make it challenging. I start to think as it gets more and more and more expensive. Are we going to have banks and financial institutions giving you loans to buy virtual real estate?

 

Clinton  

Yeah, I was reading a whitepaper from Chase. They're creating an actual bank in Decentraland, where you can go through this process and take out loans. In fact, in Decentraland, you can buy land and then lease it out to a company, if you happen to want to do that. There's a completely new industry that has just been created really, or not just created, but became a little bit more popular the last few months.

 

Vinnie  

So the bank is going to give me a loan to buy virtual assets, can I use virtual assets as collateral, or do I have to use physical assets as collateral?

 

Clinton  

Yeah, there's going to be a lot of a lot of interesting conversations as that happens and comes up or can I use my house, too, as collateral for, to buy this digital? 

 

Vinnie  

To the extent that it's very volatile, and it's driven by speculation. I don't know how that collateral could be reliable.

 

Clinton  

And I wonder how much of that depends upon, you know, crypto currencies, whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum, or any other major ones becoming a little bit more stable. Before that starts to be more acceptable, so that there's a better exchange rate that's a little bit more known between the dollars and, and one crypto coin or whatever.

 

Vinnie  

Right, for sure. Looking at the clients we have now and maybe even more broad than that. I started thinking about what needs to happen now. It's going to happen faster than I think I made a thought a year ago. There is going to be an adoption curve. There's a technology hurdle, there's a hardware hurdle but once that starts to roll. I think there's going to be some things happening quickly. What can companies do today? I don't think you have to be in the metaverse today to be successful, but most companies couldn't be right. They're not ready to be. So how do they get ready?

 

Clinton  

I believe they just start need to get their digital assets correct. That can have immediate impacts, AR is out there. You want to view you know, your shoes on your feet or anything like that. You need to have those digital assets created. Those same digital assets can be used in any of these metaverses, and essentially converted, so that when you go and buy those shoes, or whatever there, they're showing up in the correct form and to your brand specs. That's really, really important. By doing that you're not putting all your eggs in this basket of okay, I hope Decentraland or any of these metaverses work out. You're saying okay, what can we do now? That's, beneficial to us now, but also setting us up for the future in case that starts to take off more than what it is currently.

 

Vinnie  

Yeah. That reminds me that the metaverse can extend conceptually beyond virtual reality. It goes into augmented reality. It can go into standard gaming. It can go to a standard web interface.

 

Clinton  

Yep, there's a lot. You could go to Decentraland on a web interface now.

 

Vinnie  

Right, and on your phone, so if I have these digital assets, 3D digital assets, they can appear in video games. I could sell them off. It's a much it's a bigger thing. When I start to think about that, is getting that digital representation of that object. Thinking of all the color variations, size variations, what does that add to the unit cost of that item? 

 

Clinton  

That's a great question.

 

Vinnie  

Right? So now what so what are you talking about? Do you digitize a subset that you think have high importance? Do you have a base model that you apply variations to?  This is what companies have to start thinking about.

 

Clinton  

It's that architecture behind your digital assets, which really hasn't been a problem before now. What's our folder structure going to be for our assets?  Now it's like, okay, how can we actually architect this one asset so that we can apply these variations, sizes, etc., to meet all of our needs without a restart over and over again.

 

Vinnie  

There's a difference between an asset and the asset. I know that sounds funny. I was talking about a national car retailer recently, and how do you get a picture of a 2020 Toyota Corolla? Is a picture of that car in that color and in that model good enough? Or just for that model range - could be a four-year run of that model, is one scan good enough? Or do I need the actual scan of the actual car? So, I can check for any blemishes or dents or whatever else. One is way more expensive than the other, from a workflow perspective, scanning a car versus scanning the car. The same thing is going to happen with all other retail items and products.

 

Clinton  

Yeah, that specific scenario, you're telling me like maybe a used car versus those brand-new models or just variations of those models. Absolutely.

 

Vinnie  

I think about a guitar. Every guitar is different. Am I looking at a Martin D28 or the actual one that I'm buying? Then the NFTs, around that. This gets into that. Another interesting thing, too. And maybe this has been already solved. If so, please comment on this. When I think of NFTs, I get the value of the originality of it.  If you got Michael Jordan's Nikes, right, tag that way, but this happened to my son, as like three or four years ago, a friend of his was in the game, and spent $100 on a hat. I asked does the hat, it was a League of Legends type of game. Does it give you any abilities? It's it gives you more strength and more resiliency, any more dexterity? Nope, it's just cosmetic. It's false scarcity. Especially when you have multi metaverses the idea of false scarcity, goes into volatility and all these other things. My question on NFTs is if I have a hat that cost $100. It's essentially a series of ones and zeros. How many of those have to change before it's a different hat?  If I change the color by 10%, or 5%, or 1%, and the human eye can't tell the difference, but all the ones and zeros are different? Is that a different hat? Who's right?  It's like with music today, if I have the same song progression, the same chord progression, and the same melody, at what point does happy birthday not become happy birthday? I don't know who's deciding that.

 

Clinton  

I think the customers decide that right? I mean, ultimately, like, what are you willing to buy? If I'm Nike, and I'm selling you a pair of shoes, and this, and you know, I've got Air Force ones that are white, and they look the same, but they're, this v1, for simplicity, and then I sell you v2, they look identical, well, if I don't buy those, because those look identical, then their values is not there. We see in the real world, people go out and buy those, they stand in lines to do just that. The question then is, does that translate to this digital world that we're going to be in?  Will the I have to have every version of this so that I can have the entire collection still drive us in that space? I think the answer is going to be yes. 

 

Vinnie  

The first thing we talked about for getting ready, we kind of drifted there. It was 3D assets, an asset versus the asset, and the NFT around the assets, if that's applicable. The second thing, and I think we mentioned this earlier, is companies have to understand how to work with cryptocurrency because they're selling things in the metaverse. They have to have a way to use cryptocurrency. 

 

Clinton  

They need to understand the risk of the volatility around the cryptocurrencies. Anybody that's kind of paid attention over the last year or two have seen Bitcoin and Ethereum and Dogecoin go up and down like it just, it's wild, how much money is wiped away overnight.

 

Vinnie  

What's their strategy with that? The third one then goes to financial institutions will they mortgage a virtual home; will they mortgage property assets? We talked about that. Financial institutions have a lot of strategy to think about. The last one I think of is really the customer experience, which we've started with that. If I was a company now and I had physical assets, I would be thinking about digitizing them in an affordable way. I'd be thinking about crypto, and I would be thinking about how in a non-skeuomorphic way, how are we going to engage with our customers differently on this platform and leverage the unique capabilities of that platform? All those things can happen today. I think they should. I think this is coming. There's a little bit of skepticism. We saw what happened the Second Life, it came out, it was a big boom companies invested a lot of money and it fell away pretty quickly. I think it finally went out of business a couple years ago, but a private company still owns it. You could still go there. It’s a whisper from where it was. Well, maybe they'll get into this game.

 

Clinton

Maybe Meta is going to buy it.

 

Vinnie

Yeah. I know there's some skepticism around it. Even if there is skepticism, or even if it has an arc similar to Second Life, which I don't think it will, having 3D assets, and a workflow around that. That makes sense. Understanding crypto, understanding how those two affect a customer experience that's independent than any particular implementation.

 

Clinton  

That's right. I agree. 100%. I mean, AR is not going anywhere. There's a lot of benefits. I think still one of the biggest barriers that our clients see is just having the assets or not even know where to start and in getting that created. They don't have the talent, or the resources or anything to create that, just the understanding in general. If you look even further, if you want to back away from AR and even from VR, how to holograms fit in, if you get into that type of space, which is coming.

 

Vinnie  

I've seen some pretty convincing demos.

 

Clinton

 Yeah, you still need assets. Right?

 

Vinnie

Right and there's still the customer experience. Crypto, maybe not so much in that because you're not in an altered state. Yeah, for sure, the hologram is coming.  This preparation, think of it more generically as digital twinning than a particular metaverse implementation. That's a one type of implementation. Last thought is, what are we going to be seeing, I guess over the next year or two? I think you're going to see people making some big splashes in music and entertainment. We saw like after the Super Bowl Foo Fighters, it didn't go well. You looked at fans weren't happy with it. They opened the doors all at once and it’s kind of crashed systems and such. The idea of a virtual concert, the idea of participating in a virtual event, imagine watching your favorite golfer tee off, and you're six feet away. It's not an avatar, you could have an avatar, but you could also have an actual 360 view track.

 

Clinton  

You can look around. You're there.

 

Vinnie  

Right, and so, you know, being at a basketball game, all these things are things we can do now. I've gone to concerts. I went to a recorded concert. I was on the center of the stage of sale. Right. Still great stuff.  I think we're going to see music and entertainment rush to that.  I think that's a place where retail, and banks we can get involved on the peripheral, because they can be supportive of that, again if they have the assets, and they understand crypto. That's really sort of VR without the metaverse social part of it.

 

Clinton  

Right, and I would hope that we see the VR take a leap so that I can look down the aisle and see my family sitting next to me at the concert or at the baseball game. So, we're cheering on, you know.

 

Vinnie  

 Even if your kids are at a college somewhere, right?

 

Vinnie  

Your kids will virtually be sitting in a different section (laughing). Trust me. It'll be just as uncool to sit next to your parents virtually. Any closing thoughts you would have?

 

Clinton  

No, I think I think we've covered it all. I think ultimately, it's really what can you do now that is an investment that is not just putting everything in this metaverse basket and taking a step back, taking a break and saying, okay let's get these, these ducks in a row, these digital assets, this type of architecture, ready for whatever may happen and knowing that we can still put them to use in  all these other personalization options. All these in AR and anything else that might come down because they're going to be needed regardless of what happens in the metaverse.

 

Vinnie  

I'll wrap up with a similar concept. metaverse as it was defined or termed in ‘92. And if you've ever read Snow Crash, it's a good book. It's scary how accurate they got it. I mean, they basically describe Google Earth perfectly in 1992.  It's been around a long time, as you said, there's four or five metaverses already. It's interesting that Facebook can change their name and now all of sudden companies are saying that now it's a trend because it has a name. There's been no change, except for recognition, threat exposure, which may be the most important change. What's going to be interesting to see over the next year, what the adoption rates are and how hardware companies respond, how traditional brick and mortar, and e-commerce responds.

 

Clinton  

I think we're going to see Facebook, or Meta, take some sizable investments, where they're going to have to really kind of will into existence. They're going to take a lot of hits for a while, but they're a large company, I think they will bounce, and I think it will go somewhere. It's just a matter of getting everything right, and how long it takes to get there.

 

Vinnie  

I've been waiting for this for a long time ( laughs). I really hope it works.

 

Clinton

 Noah’s whole life. (laughs)

 

Vinnie

Exactly, exactly (laughs). So yeah, I think it'll happen. I hope it happens. Final thought the stuff you have to do to prepare for it will prepare you for many, many other things that will happen. Don't prepare for the one, prepare for the many and everything's going to work out. 

 

Clinton

That's right. 

 

Vinnie

 Thank you, Clinton. Thank you.

 

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