It’s clear to see, browsing MAD Global’s website, that founder and CEO Ashumi Sanghvi is at the cutting edge of her game. A multidisciplinary creative, producer, curator and innovator based in London, she’s always been one to push the boundaries, executing intangible creative ideas into tangible content and productions. With an impressive career spanning four continents from Mumbai, New York, Florence and London, she leverages fifteen years’ experience with producing award-winning omnichannel multimedia content for fashion, luxury, beauty and lifestyle clients. It’s not unusual to see a well-known film star featured in her productions.
Long before the term ‘Metaverse’ was coined, Ashumi had been producing creative projects using technologies like holograms and augmented reality (AR). In 2019, while conducting a pilot project for a global luxury brand, the R&D led her to delve further into exploring use cases for the application of immersive technology across the verticals they worked with – fashion, luxury, beauty and art.
“We developed an AR app to visualize photorealistic fashion experiences and won ‘Ones to Watch’ Top 100 CreaTech companies in the UK,” says Ashumi. “My personal interest and research into blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies as well as investing in early NFT projects, all culminated with entering the web3/Metaverse space.” This led to the formation of the second leg of her company, MAD-XR.
MAD-XR is an innovation-focused, full service creative production agency that is bringing projects to life in the Metaverse (3D, AR, VR, NFT) from ideation, curation and strategy through to production and delivery across IRL<>URL.
What’s unique about Ashumi’s service offering in the extended reality (XR), Metaverse and NFT space, is the forming of that red thread that bridges the gap between the creative process and the nuanced technology. Added to this, her clients benefit from considerable consultation and advice with each project being approached from a holistic standpoint.
Ashumi believes the Metaverse has the potential to connect people closer together in more meaningful ways, but that it can also potentially drive us further away from human emotion. She feels strongly that it’s our responsibility to build on new immersive technologies and digital realities with the awareness and understanding of the positive and negative impacts on our mental, social and emotional health. “If we work together more collaboratively, bringing together more collectives with shared values and purpose driven initiatives, I believe we will be working together towards a lasting positive impact in the Metaverse and the future of technology.”
Bridging creative with technology and production, she works across a variety of projects at the intersection of where culture and community meets fashion, luxury and art. Her mission is to help clients find meaningful ways to engage with new audiences by creating, curating, developing and producing new digital realities and physical activations.
Commenting about the change and evolution of the web3/Metaverse space in the past year, Ashumi remarks that it continues to evolve at a rapid pace with many technological advancements moving the space forward. “At the same time, communities are coming together to share knowledge and collaborate. We have increasingly observed how important ‘In Real Life’ (IRL) activations are in bringing new digital realities to the forefront of where immersive technologies meet user experience.”
Invited to speak at Houses of Parliament at the House of Lord for the event ‘Films in the Metaverse’ regarding ‘how the Metaverse revolution is changing the film industry’, Ashumi confidently spoke of the web3 being about the three ‘C’s’: contribution, connection, collaboration.
In Ashumi’s view, the biggest barriers to mass adoption remain education, regulation and user experience. The many Metaverse platforms are still nascent, she believes, when it comes to onboarding mass audiences as a large amount of computing power is required to access them and have a visually impactful experience. Moreover, VR headsets remain costly thereby limiting the number of people access to fully immersive worlds.
Ashumi shares her most pivotal memory since entering the web3/Metaverse space: “For me it was experiencing the power of community at the first NFT conference I attended in Lisbon. It was this experience which cemented my commitment to drive meaningful change and bring exciting purpose-driven projects to life.”
ASHUMI SANGHVI’S METAVERSE & WEB3 TIPS AND RESOURCES
