DoorLabs co-founder and current advisor Kunho Kim and digital creator Yiran Shu

Kunho Kim: We wanted to make projects that relate to people; projects that can actually impact people's lives. I truly believe that technology was made to improve people's lives. Using these new technologies to sponsor people, their schooling, or helping them help other people with disabilities, that means a lot to us.

Yiran Shu: In the metaverse, it's more of a matter of representation. We want to make people feel welcome, to feel that you are not ignored, you're not just another avatar. We acknowledge your superpower in this world. I think that's the difference: it's a step we choose to take, to represent.

Kunho Kim: It all started with the same thought: [I created] this inclusive metaverse, concert hall or space because I myself am in a wheelchair. I’ve been in the blockchain space for three or four years, but I've never really seen a project that specifically deals with people with disabilities. I think Web3 will be an important aspect of our lives, but whenever I go to these blockchain conferences, I often find myself the only one in a wheelchair or only one with a visible disability.

When NFTs came out, I thought: ohh, these are exactly like the baseball cards or Pokémon stickers that I used to collect when I was young, but it would be really nice if there was a collection that I can collect for people with wheelchairs. I thought that it would be fun for young kids to feel included if they're in wheelchairs or have different types of abilities. That's why we started the project, and Yiran helped a lot with designing and the concept to make these wheelchairs even better and more interesting for everyone.

Kunho Kim: We donated the proceeds from the Wheel Card NFTs to Fulbright University in Vietnam. From what we know, this is the world's first scholarship program sold from NFT proceeds. Our donations supported tuitions for two college students: Yen, a Vietnamese Paralympian participant studying social sciences, used a bit of her tuition to help visually impaired students who study psychology find jobs to become professional online counselors. The second student that we supported was Hoang: he's studying economics and computer science at Fulbright University and used our funding to buy a math player, and audio graphing calculator, and an Orion TI-30XS calculator.

The scholarships will support these students annually for the four years at Fulbright University. We want to make sure that this information can be shared with our sponsors or people who bought the NFT.

Kunho Kim: The metaverse, as Yiran has said, is dictated by different laws of physics and gravity, so we can overcome a lot of the physical limitations that people face in this world. What we want to do is increase the representation of these people by making characters that resemble the users.

We actually helped Gather [a digital space and video chat platform] to come up with a wheelchair. We reached out to them to say, hey, we're doing this inclusive metaverse project, and we would love to help Gather Town design [digital] wheelchairs [for its users]. We had a few meetings and now, they have a wheelchair character.

I think people get a little confused when we talk about accessibility or inclusive products in this world. In the physical, it’s more about how we can make physical ramps so people can [move freely]. When people think about digital worlds, they don’t think we actually need any of those. But, as a person who is in a wheelchair, this representation matters a lot. Even if I don't choose to play around with the character, just seeing one wheelchair makes me feel very welcome in that platform. We're very proud to pioneer accessibility and representation in this space, especially when people are busy building the physical metaverse. We want to help anyone who wants to include accessibility or inclusivity in their metaverse.