Going Rogue… Farhan Qureshi
The conviction to be the person you need to be.
We met with Farhan Qureshi to explore his work with extended reality, his thoughts on innovation, and what it is like to swim against the current as a creative. Farhan lives in London and loves to cheer for the underdog.
“I created two humans in 40 minutes”, shares Farhan. “The first one was harder, but creating the second was much easier.”
It takes me a second to put in full context the meaning of those words; To create humans! To select the way they look, their body features, and their facial expressions! Wasn’t that a power reserved for Gods?
Of course, we are not talking about flesh and bones humans. We are referring to MetaHumans; photorealistic digital humans ready to populate advertising, social media, and of course, games.
To create his humans, Farhan is using Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman Creator, where you can create life-like digital humans in minutes. Epic Games, creators of the popular game Fortnite, has been constantly pushing the boundaries of digital human creation, and most importantly, it’s all open-source.
Farhan Qureshi is a creative lead at Extended Reality Studio part of Accenture Interactive.
“I like being creative. I’ve learned at Accenture, not to pinhole myself. I want people to think: Farhan can do it!” And as a creative person, I get to play in a larger playground.”
The thing is, Farhan was not supposed to be playing with super-advanced technology creating MetaHumans. He wasn’t even supposed to work in the creative field. His cultural background and family expectations determined that he had three career options: medicine, finance, and IT.
“I studied mechanical engineering with Business management and I made everyone nice and happy”, but… it wasn’t the career he wanted.
“I was always part of the underdog team. The people who, against most popular belief, find themselves swimming upstream knowing that there is where the action is.”
You know what we call the type: Troublemakers, disruptors, or mavericks! They rock the boat because they’re constantly bumping up against the status quo. They are also known as Catalyst, and their natural state of being is seeing how things could be better, so they tend to spend a lot of time exploring around the edges. The Metaverse is one of those edges and Farhan has his eyes set on it.
“My background is in filmmaking, computer graphics, and animation, and I am familiar with the complications of working with large crowds, the challenges of working with rendering times, and how convenient it is to be able to create your own characters. When you look at the evolution of storytelling and technology, MetaHumans are a natural extension, the logical next step for me.”
The Metaverse is not a new concept, it’s been around at least since 1992, by the pen of Neal Stephenson who invented the word. But emerging technology, the cloud, and pure computing power make the Metaverse possible and more exciting today: Ubiquitous networking, Blockchain with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Extended Reality (XR) with VR and AR.
Mathew Ball is one of the biggest advocates for what the Metaverse could become: “It will revolutionize nearly every industry and function. From healthcare to payments, consumer products, entertainment, hourly labor, and even sex work. — The collective value of these changes will be in the trillions.”
The Metaverses began to grow through large brands such Roblox, Unity, Epic Games, or Decentraland and are now boasting over 3 billion monthly users across all of them. And the expectation is that in 5 years' time, all brands will have to have a Metaverse strategy just like social media strategies are standard around the world. Farhan sees it as a -can’t-be-missed- opportunity “Accenture Interactive is a business of businesses, in constant growth, and in terms of the innovation, I can’t think of many things that are pushing the boundaries like The Metaverse”
Pursuing and exploring edge technologies that create the Metaverse is important because someone somewhere is already playing with it, creating and launching new services, products, and platforms. “At Accenture, we speak often about how what we do will become a commodity at one point, and someone eventually will find a way to do it cheaper, faster or bigger.”
When you create the right conditions to invite people within your company to explore the unconventional, interesting things happen. “What makes a company great is the 10% that swim against the tide, and the 90% that swim with the flow of things. you need both kinds of people.”
“It takes a lot of extra work to challenge the status quo, and you are going to hear a lot of ‘No’s”, Farhan says reflectively, almost visualizing each moment when that happened. “But it comes down to a moment, this very moment in your life when you can choose to wield, give up and yield, or you can keep going and keep pushing for it because this is what you believe in.”
Innovators in Interactive are willing to be outcasts because they understand the role they play for the community.
“We don’t need permission to do these new, unpopular, and disrupting things. I do them for myself. Because the reward comes from living the life I want to live. And in a company of this size, there is room for people like me.”
And even if Farhan spends his days creating virtual humans without any limit to their abilities, looks, and attributes, Farhan still has time to build an incredible and real portfolio of accomplishments.
Farhan lives in London and has kickstarted a comic book, he is a book author, an engineer, and a filmmaker.
“Never live the life others decide you need to live.”
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