Callaghan companies: the comfortable shoes of the presidents are from La Rioja and they invoice 30 million
Metaverse technology, the new digital gold rush
The story of
Edgar Martín-Blas
begins in a
filthy Toledo macro
-neighborhood where the Police did not enter, among mountains of rubble, syringes and shit, a lot of shit.
Between blocks of flats with cigarette paper walls where the beatings of the downstairs neighbor slipped into his wife and the rats, who took advantage of the silence of the night to pierce through those thin walls and enter the flat where he lived with his parents and with his sister Cintia.
That was the moment of maximum terror, when he, muffled up in bed, heard the rodents' feet and their shrieks when they managed to make the hole to sneak in.
It is the only trauma of a childhood that he describes, despite everything, as "very happy".
"I still have that sound in my head, it was very heavy", sums up Edgar.
In that
neighborhood of Santa María de Benquerencia
, better known as
the Polígono
or
the Malvinas
(in those years he competed in squalor with another nicknamed
Corea
), that boy had
such intense training in survival
that he ended up developing an
enormous intuitive capacity
and tools that, years later, they have ended up embodied in
Virtual Voyager,
a pioneering company in virtual reality, the famous metaverse where
Edgar moves like a fish in water.
His company, founded together with five other partners in 2018, has worked on more than 200 projects with major brands such as Vodafone, Facebook, Acciona, Ferrari or Telefónica.
They make the content.
"We are
on fire,
everyone is investing in the virtual world and
many incredible things are coming, such as the mixed metaverse
", summarizes Edgar, who defines himself as a "technological wave surfer".
It's not easy to understand, we know, that's why he explains it in the
Metaverse.
Pioneers on a journey beyond reality
(Editorial LID), a 132-page book with a very peculiar perspective, that of
his personal history, marked by that wild childhood
"That I wouldn't change for anything."
Because it was precisely in those years of escapades when
he began to apply virtual reality, imagination,
to his childhood world.
With his friend Javi
he turned mountains of rubble into war trenches
, junkies into zombies and abandoned washing machines into spaceships.
THE HIPPIE AND THE GOOD GIRL
It all started with his parents, who got married very young.
Gregorio was a math teacher and Silvia was one of the students
in his private classes.
He came from a family of farmers from Toledo, humble but aware of the value of education.
She, on the other hand, belonged to a
wealthy and extensive military family with a pedigree
, a house in the Salamanca neighborhood, properties throughout the Spanish geography and with some heroes of the Philippine War among her ancestors.
Two antagonistic worlds that they united.
Gregorio, the hippie teacher, and Silvia, the very rebellious girl, got married, but
her family did not see that wedding favorably.
Their parents did not help them and they ended up moving to Toledo, where they signed him up as a professor at the seminary.
Image of one of the blocks of the neighborhood.EM
With two kids in tow, they ended up in that neighborhood that was going to be a kind of
Soviet-style urbanization for the industrial estate workers
, a happy arcade that
ended up abandoned with the crisis of the 1980s
and turned into a ghetto.
Half-finished buildings, a wasteland full of garbage, junkies and rats like cats.
And cubbyholes they called flats.
"The worst thing was that there was no privacy, because everything, absolutely everything, could be heard: the screams, the fights, the beatings... it was surreal,
there were even families who brought the donkey into the house for heating,"
he recalls.
Edgar and his sister Cintia were taken from time to time
to visit their maternal grandparents or the military club,
with their cousins, where they rode horses, the pool was blue and they ate Coca-colas that they took to the deckchair .
maddening
"When I told my friends they didn't believe it. But I also soon discovered that
in that world of the rich everything is masks
and that there are
many more psychological weaknesses than in the poor
. For me growing up in the
Malvinas
was a gift," he summarizes, although acknowledges that not all of his friends did well.
Some were trapped in the polygon.
Others died.
Edgar de Nilo with his father and two of his brothers.EM
It was great for him, especially after
his father was given a computer
and he became one of the first computer scientists in Toledo.
Money began to come in regularly,
the family moved to another neighborhood
, two more brothers were born, and the wild side disappeared, although Edgar missed it.
In his new life he grew up as a highly capable kid with an intuition that led him to invest in technology.
When the first virtual reality glasses
fell into his hands ,
he discovered that this was his thing and that he had already lived through the metaverse.
In the Falklands war.
Conforms to The Trust Project criteria
Know more