MANNA is an interactive 3D media production network. Manna pioneered real-time intuitive control of lifelike avatars making it easy for anyone to co-create XR content with their community and interact in 3D Web. The platform has studio tools and NFT marketplace, monetization of digital assets, services, content and revenue sharing with a utility token. Creators get rewards for ad impressions helping brands reach their audiences more effectively.
Our ultimate mission is to help people have deeper and more enjoyable online experiences together, share with others what their inner world looks like, get virtual literacy and supportive communities. To achieve this mission in the shortest time frame, our team develops a scalable consumer technology platform that is able to render all graphics in real-time, enable the most instinctive ways for realistic presence and content crowdsourcing in 3D, and facilitate the transferability of virtual assets to give them ‘real world value’.
Tell us about yourself?
Oleg Dre is a Ukrainian-Israeli repeat tech founder and a former investment banker. He was a wealth manager and worked with HNWIs and corporations in Dragon Capital (with a minority stake owned by Goldman Sachs) and executed operations improvement programs and M&A for a few leading industrial and investment groups in Europe and CIS. Oleg was an advisor to the SOE corporate governance reform in the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and a member of the Nomination Committee, whose mission was to find and select talented entrepreneurs and managers to lead the restructure the State-Owned Enterprises. He noticed that the most brilliant candidates were founders of technology companies and this sector caught his attention.
His ventures in the technology sector include Israeli spatial computing startup Carpe Diem Solutions and Geostorm Technology which improves extreme weather forecasting with innovative radar technology. Geostorm Technology has received a “Top Innovator 2020” award from The World Bank and Draper University. Carpe Diem Solutions was named among “Top Machine Learning companies in Israel” in 2021 by FUTUROLOGY.LIFE and “Top Virtual Reality Companies in Israel” in 2021 by Welp Magazine. This team has been in deep tech R&D and computer graphics almost 16 years which allowed them to see through a few innovations that were going to explode the media and entertainment market. This is how they started to work on their Metaverse project – Manna.
Currently, Oleg is a co-founder and CEO of Manna, an interactive 3D media production network which enables intuitive control and interaction of lifelike avatars in 3D Metaverse.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
You need to go ‘all in’ and be the fastest, what you think and what you say matters.
What problem does your business solve?
The 3D Web will urge a terrific amount of animated content that all studios in the world can not conceive and produce. To fill the gap with user- animated content, it is critical to enable lifelike avatars, control them intuitively and interact in XR amazingly frictionless. That’s the goal of Manna. More info available here – https://docsend.com/view/snf7r26inna7h6f5
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Back in 2013, I participated in a filmmaking program from the New York Film Academy. It was a breath of fresh air in my corporate career and something that I thought would take on the masses very soon. It was a few years before social media and short-form video content went mainstream.
The last 3 years people have been increasingly teased by the promise of AR/VR and now the Metaverse. But the technology platforms think of the Metaverse as a far off destination and do not address the fundamental design choices and principles. Pouring billions into the shiny “hi-fi” infrastructure, they overlook the systems, devices and grassroot mechanisms which do not require a decade-long learning curve.
In fact, no company has been able to design a truly scalable, inclusive and instantly available metaverse yet. So, we decided to fix that.
To address these principles, MANNA combines the improvement of massively popular products (smartphones) and activities (social media, movies, gaming etc.) alongside product innovation (real-time virtual production + motion capture + open economy + transmedia storytelling). This technique is effective because it maintains the same level of familiarity while ushering in a completely new product experience.
This becomes possible due to the ongoing fusion of game development and filmmaking also dubbed as virtual production. And to ensure the natural and sustainable scaling of such an ecosystem (embedding network or flywheel effects), huge volumes of animated content are required, which sets the case for broad motion capture technology application and content crowdsourcing.
What is your magic sauce?
Our team of award-winning scientists and engineers has built a leading edge spatial computing tech stack that allows us to develop real-time interfaces, systems and devices which are crucial for seamless operation of next-gen XR and blockchain platforms.
We also build a community-first open network with focus on XR content creators, collaboration and financial alignment with ecosystem contributors. Legacy technology giants just can not endure the challenges of Web 3 with their walled garden-type economies.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We plan to become a premiere transmedia platform where anyone can express themselves in the most creative way collaborating with their fans, peer creators, artists, actors, musicians, gamers etc. using the power of 3D technologies. We also want to raise the bar for the quality of visual content and help everyone make money in the virtual economy in the most entertaining way.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
To get immersed in 3D and enable lifelike avatars, hardware is inevitable. Many investors and developers are looking to avoid it, but there is no other way around. VR headsets are not palatable that is why we initially build for smartphones which constitute the biggest installed device base – nearly 4.5 billion devices.
Our users can navigate in 3D just by waving their smartphone, and AR mode is already comprehensible. Wearable sensors provide full-body motion capture but the chances of broad adoption are yet to be figured out.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We are working on a launchpad for the developers which are looking for better interfaces for their Web 3 apps. If you are building for Oculus/Vive you should as well consider partnering with Manna with numerous value added benefits like early access to our motion capture interface, integration of the app into Manna platform and revenue sharing, interoperability of assets and tokens etc. Click the button on the home page at http://mannaapp.us and put your email into the whitelist. Our team will be in contact with you shortly.
