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Metaverse Makeovers is the brainchild of Australian digital artist, inventor, and technologist Thea Mai Bauman. The company is a convergence of Thea’s many interests, including wearable tech, fashion and pop culture, transmedia design, and emerging social media patterns in Asia. Starting with nail art, the Metaverse aims to offer a completely augmented reality experience in the future, making over the entire person.
Metaverse Makeovers是澳大利亚数码艺术家、发明家、技术专家Thea Mai Bauman的独创品牌。它集合了她的多种兴趣，诸如：可穿戴技术、时尚流行文化、跨媒体设计，以及亚洲新兴的社交媒体模式。以美甲开起步，Metaverse Makeovers的目标是在未来提供全身式改造以体验一个更广义的现实。
Growing up with anime, hackers, and cyberpunk culture, Thea went on to study art. After graduation, she landed in China in 2006 to do surveying work on the Three Gorges Dam. Her experiences traveling in Asia since then led to the founding of Metaverse Makeovers. Noting China’s unique social media culture that spans young and old alike, as well as its rapid pace of changing technology and platforms, Thea says, “It’s a very hyper-accelerated digital ecosystem. We have to be as hyper-agile as possible. Our mantra is to innovate around unknowns.”
在动漫，黑客和数字朋克文化中成长的Thea继续学习了美术。毕业后，2006年她来到中国做三峡大坝的调查工作。自此之后，她在亚洲的游历最终促成了Metaverse Makeovers的诞生。Thea 注意到中国独特的社交媒体文化，它跨度穿越各个年龄层，同时它的技术和平台也在风驰电掣地发展。她说:“它是个超加速的数码生态系统。我们必须尽可能的保持随机应变。我们的准则是在未知中创新。”
For the past two years, Thea has been working on fashion pattern recognition technology. Unique patterns get printed onto wearable surfaces which can then trigger 3D holograms that appear in the Metaverse mobile app. Built with 3D gaming engines, the Metaverse app integrates gaming features such as powering up, leveling up, trading, and sharing holograms for Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo. Eventually, the app will enable users to create custom content such as secret hologram messages, customized avatars which can be dressed up and other user-generated features.
在过去的两年，Thea一直在开发时尚图案识别技术。在可穿戴物品表面打印上独有的图案，并通过Metaverse手机APP触发3D全息影像的显现。Metaverse手机APP的建设用的是3D游戏引擎，功能包含了技能提升，升级，交易，分享全息影像到微信和微博等中文社交媒体上。这个软件最后会发展到允许用户制作自定义内容作为私密全息信息，以及制作可以进行装扮的定制头像，还有其他各种用于用户生成的功能。
“How do I put the latest most emerging technologies onto girls’ fingers in a way that speaks to them, their culture, and their modes of self expression that is also cool? I think there’s a lot of technology products that are introduced that are not very hot. So how do I create something that is like Glamtech? How do we create desirable technology in a way that speaks to them?”
“我要怎么把这种最新兴的技术应用到女生们的指尖上，并且让它能够在某种程度上与她们以及她们的文化和自我表现方式产生共鸣。我觉得现在有非常多不那么吸引人的产品。所以，我要怎么做出GlamTech这样的东西？我们要怎么创造一个能让人产生共鸣和渴望的技术。”
For Thea, it’s not really about nail art, it’s about using emerging technologies as a form as self-expression. While other companies are more focused on wearable technology that can track health and productivity, Bauman says, “Metaverse is the counterweight to that. We are not interested in measuring your heart rate or in quantifying yourself.” Glamtech exists more as a means of self-expression, as art and as an extension of digital identities.
对于Thea来说，这其实不关乎美甲艺术，是关乎利用新兴技术作为自我表现的一种方式。当其他公司都致力于监测健康和效率的可穿戴技术，Thea 说道：“Metaverse是作为一种对重装置存在。我们对测量你的心跳频率或者量化你自己并没有兴趣。” GlamTech的存在意义更多是自我表现、艺术与数字身份的延展。
“I’d watch a lot of anime and think, why doesn’t it exist? Like why doesn’t Sailor Moon’s wand exist? That should be real. The challenge is that we’re so ahead of our time in many ways, that we have to wait for people to catch up. We have to make sure that we’re working ahead of the curve but also that what we create can be adopted for this time now, so we don’t push it too fast but that we also have it in a form that can be used.”
“我会看很多动漫，会思考，为什么他们不是现实存在呢？为什么水冰月的魔棒不是现实存在呢？这些要是真的该多好！ 我们的挑战就是在众多方面我们都远远超越这个时代，只能等着人们去跟进。我们不得不确保在我们赶在时代浪潮之前的同时我们创造的东西也要被这个时代所接受，所以我们不会太激进，让它保持在一个可以实际使用的层面上。”
While working with a like-minded team of artists, designers, and engineers, Thea also brings in collaborators and local conceptual artists to create more localized content and exclusive collections. For the China market, they created a Year of the Sheep themed nail collection. They frequently tap into the local nail technicians to see what the newest trends are in nail art. While people may request everything from fruit themes to wearable porn holograms, Thea says that some of the most fascinating visuals actually come from bugs in the process of developing the app. As someone goes deep into the Metaverse technology, the images captured by the holograms glitching out are some of the most beautiful moments.
与志趣相投的艺术家，设计师，和工程师们工作的同时，Thea还引入一些创作合作者，和一些当地概念艺术家创作本土化的产品和独家系列作品。他们为中国市场创作了羊年主题指甲系列。他们常常混迹于当地美甲技师中，借此获取美甲艺术中最新的流行趋势。从水果到可穿戴的色情主题，虽然人们可能会有各色需求，Thea说有些最迷人的视像却是来自开发APP过程中的bug。在深入Metaverse的技术过程中，全息成像出故障时捕捉到的画面绝对是最美的瞬间之一。
