The son of a music teacher and a noted writer, Arabian Prince, born Kim Renard Nazel, was from and raised in South Central. Yes, that South Central--the birthplace of gangsta rap and a once-thriving middle-class community that was been devastated by what some call “the crack plague of the Black Community."
Prince first met Dr. Dre through a mutual friend while Dre was working with his group at the time, The World Class Wrecking Crew. Prince was also DJ and producer who work with a then-unknown female group, JJ Fad, who hit it big with their song "Supersonic."
Dre and Prince hit it off and was introduced to Eazy-E who had the money to bring the entire group together.
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Prince was heavily involved in 1987’s N.W.A. & Posse, a compilation on Macola Records, a label were Jerry Heller worked before partnering with Eazy. In those days, Prince recalls the member of N.W.A. selling early singles such as “Panic Zone” b/w “Dope Man” and “8 Ball” independently. He says group members divided copies records and each kept the resulting dollars from sales.
That loose business model changed as Ruthless had a new leader. “When Jerry Heller got involved, the money wasn’t coming to you direct no more,” he said. “You had to go ask for money. And I’m like, ‘This is my money. Why am I asking you for my money?’ And with ‘Supersonic,’ this is a big hit. It’s selling major records and it’s my record, and the girls’ records, and we can’t get paid? I’m out. So I did my little deal, and I got out because I don’t trust you, and I’m not gonna stay here regardless of the fame of N.W.A. or ‘Supersonic’ and deal with this. I just need to get paid and move on and do my own thing.”
When N.W.A. first went out on tour, Arab brought along the latest object of his fascination — an early laptop. His first was a Texas Instruments T199. After that, he bought a Tandy from RadioShack, then a Commodore 64, and so on. In his spare time, he taught himself how to code. As the computer revolution came to the entertainment business, Arab used his hip-hop connections to get in on the ground floor.
After working for a time on computerized special effects for movies, Arab eventually scored a job at Fox Interactive. “I worked on 30, 40 video games,” he says. “At one point I was heading up some of the Barbie titles. I would have all this Barbie stuff sitting on my desk — like a Barbie boat and a Barbie car. “People would walk by and look at me. I’d get all hard and be like, ‘What? You got something to say about my Barbies?’”
Now, when he’s not touring as a rap artist or DJ, or doing special effects — he’s worked on movies like the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and The Addams Family, cartoon series like Silver Surfer and video games like Crash Bandicoot and Lord of the Rings — he likes to race his cars at Willow Springs International and the Auto Club Raceway at Pomona.
Arabian Prince's love for technology only got bigger when news of the Metaverse, or Web 3.0--the online universe, started coming on the scene.
But unlike his music counterparts like Snoop Dogg and Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man who are using the metaverse as a gateway to exclusive entertainment and gaming experiences, Prince wants to use the digital world for more than a form of escapism: He’s looking to create a “photo-realistic, digital twin” of the U.S. health-care system — one where patients can interact with doctors, get prescriptions, and obtain feedback on care more easily, quickly, and cheaply than in real life.
“We didn’t want to do something that looks like the other metaverses, that looks very cartoony,” Prince told MarketWatch. “And we knew with health care, you have to be serious about it. You can’t have somebody that looks like Luigi from Mario Brothers talking to you as a doctor.”
A self-described nerd for technology, Prince is now 56 and living in Marina del Rey.
He says he’s using Nvidia Corp.’s 3-D platform Omniverse and Epic Games Inc.’s Unreal Engine to build the first medical metaverse, known as MdDao.
In an email, Richard Kerris, vice president of Nvidia’s Omniverse Platform Development, said: “We have been speaking with Arabian Prince about his project and their plans to use Omniverse for building their virtual world. It’s not a partnership as of now, it’s first about working together. We’re excited about his project.”
Prince estimates it could take up to eight months to a year for the platform to be fully ready. He envisions a future in which the only times anyone would need to go to a hospital is for surgery or a hands-on exam.
By creating what he calls “digital twins” of healthcare organizations and portals connecting patients to doctors, consultations could be shifted into the digital world.
Patients would get their questions answered by real-life doctors privately or, if one isn’t available, talk to a digital avatar that would take down the information and relay it. Meanwhile, patients could also get input on care from a broader, public group of members.
Investors from big to small are rushing for a piece of the metaverse — also known as Web 3.0, or the next generation of the Internet, where non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are used to create an alternative reality — which may be worth $8 trillion to $13 trillion by 2030, according to an estimate by Citigroup Inc. Researchers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. JPM say the metaverse could also foreshadow “a paradigm shift in human behavior.”
