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.”