XR for Business

Regular listeners know that folks like Alan and his guests attend a number of XR-related conventions, events, and symposia. Well, one — VR Days in Amsterdam — is right around the corner! Festival director Benjamin de Wit drops in to talk a little bit about what there will be to see — and what attendees can expect to take away — from this year’s lustrum shindig.

Alan: My name’s Alan Smithson. In today’s show, we speak with the one and only Benjamin De Wit, founder and co-producer of VR Days Amsterdam, celebrating their fifth anniversary. All this and more on the XR for Business Podcast. VR Days is a three-day conference and exhibition on virtual, augmented, and mixed reality content, creativity, and innovation, running from November 13th to 15th in Amsterdam. Today, we discuss the speakers, exhibitors, and festival that make up the most incredible event known as VR Days.

Benjamin, welcome to the show, my

Benjamin: Well, thanks for

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure

Benjamin: So much, man. It’s

Alan: When you figure that out,

Benjamin: [laughs] Yes!

Alan: So who’s going to be on

Benjamin: Well… for sure,

Alan: That’s super exciting, I’m

Benjamin: Well, we think we’re about a hundred exhibitors. Plus we have– within these, we have the startup zone, where we have a couple of cool startups. We have what we call the Revolution Pavilion, and this is for projects that aren’t really commercial yet, projects that aren’t purely artistic, but they are super exciting, technology or content-wise. So they may come from universities, they may come from artists, they may come from startups. But it’s–

Alan: Awesome.

Benjamin: Yeah. That I’m really

Alan: That part’s the exciting

Benjamin: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Alan: What is it? Okay, hold on,

Benjamin: Well, the Church of VR

Alan: That’s so exciting. It’s

Benjamin: Exactly. You know, it was like the holiest of holies of great content.

Alan: I love it. I actually–

Benjamin: Nice, nice.

Alan: Amsterdam Dance Event.

Benjamin: Yeah, yeah. It was

Alan: It’s a super fun party if

Benjamin: Yes.

Alan: The next part that I’m

Benjamin: Training and

Alan: Oh, from Shell. He’s one

Benjamin: From Shell?

Alan: Yeah.

Benjamin: Well, there you go. So

Alan: Yeah, I just connected

Benjamin: Yeah. And now he’s in

Alan: Amazing.

Benjamin: –on all these

Alan: Then you have also– you’ve got so– we talked about the Vision and Impact Conference, so talking about how real-world revolutions, we’ve got the exhibition hall with over 100 leaders, you’ve got the Church of VR with the best of the best of storytelling in VR, Training and Simulation Summit. And then you’ve also got the Location-Based Entertainment Summit. LBE is just really taking off right now. What can we expect at the Location-Based Entertainment Summit?

Benjamin: What we will do there.

Alan: Can you give us a teaser?

Benjamin: So, well, the guys

Alan: Hologate. Oh, that’s

Benjamin: They are doing amazing. So that’s– I saw live last week at AWE. So they’re doing super well. And let me see what we have there. Alex Moretti of Fallen Planet Studios. We will talk about how the impact of influencers. So Nathie — Nathie VR, he has 500,000 followers — he will be there, talking about how they play a role in the success of certain titles. And we will kick off with a pilot version of the XR gaming and location-based VR content market. Because if there’s one thing we at VR Days like to do is to connect projects, connect startups with investors, with the money. Because we have to drive this industry, we have to drive projects, we have to drive content creation. So we want to make the connection. So we’ve been doing the XR based investor event for startups for three years now. We do content market. We’re also doing it for three years now. More an artsy space, artistic space with the International Film Festival Rotterdam. And this year we kick off with a pilot version of an XR gaming and location-based VR content market. We’re on the lookout for projects in development that have not been published yet, that are still looking for distribution or publishers or funding.

Alan: Getting excited. Oh my

Benjamin: Yeah.

Alan: How virtual reality is

Benjamin: VR is a wonderful, meaningful medium for a lot of crazy stuff, but it’s also a wonderful medium for stuff that’s really– I said it’s a great– it can be used for great positive causes. And we’ve always had a focus on the healthcare part, and we saw that within the pain domain, VR can really mean a lot. And you have the– there’s pain, there’s the physical pain, there’s the mental pain, there’s acute pain. So there’s different types of pains. But pain relief is a big part of what medicine is about. And VR can be a great tool to relieve pain or at least reduce it, to a certain extent. And we have some top-notch speakers there, like JoAnn Difede, director of the Virtual Reality Lab in New York. We have Louis Derungs, a great speaker who works with Mindmaze. Charles Nduka, a surgeon and technologist. Skip Rizzo is speaking here also. And this will be moderated by Bob Fine of the International Virtual Reality Healthcare Association. It’s a tough topic, but I think it’s important that we give it a good enough attention.

Alan: I completely agree.

Benjamin: So the Halo Awards, we’ll combine it this year with the Lustrum dinner, because the lustrum in the Netherlands is a period of five years, and this is the fifth edition of VR Days, so we’re celebrating that. So the first night after the Vision and Impact Conference, we go with boats to this beautiful restaurant, where we have the Lustrum dinner and Halo Awards. People keep sending us applications for Halo Awards, but we cannot say anything about that at this moment. We will have seven categories of Halo Awards: for content, best applied, best student project, best use of tech. There’s seven Halo Awards for great pieces and it’s gonna be a fun and celebratory night.

Alan: Wonderful. It sounds like

Benjamin: So we’re seeing that

Alan: Oh, matchmaking! The other

Benjamin: Oh, yeah, matchmaking.

Alan: Incredible. That’s so

Benjamin: Yeah.

Alan: Well, my friend, I’m so

Benjamin: Well, yeah, so much, man. We missed the museum morning. We missed the future storytelling session. We missed a session on brain-computer interface. We missed the session that we’re doing for students here, because all the higher educations here have created the VR Academy. We missed that we organized a session for universities, because we see in a lot of universities across the world, scientists are getting together to start these VR/AR groups, either to study what’s happening in the space, or how they’re going to use VR and AR to conduct research. So we said, “OK, we’re gonna make a space for you, as well.” And then I’m probably forgetting another.

Alan: Well, here’s the thing.

Benjamin: Yeah.

Alan: You– I don’t know what

Benjamin: Yeah.

Alan: VRdays.co,

Benjamin: Yes, definitely. And

Ask someone with enough experience

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Michael, welcome to the show, my

Michael: Thank you so much for

Alan: All right. Tell us what

Michael: It’s been quite a ride that the last couple of years. Insta360 actually started off as a very tiny company in the dorm room of our founder and his name is JK Liu. And what he wanted to do was create a product that was simple and easy to use and had 360-degree capabilities. And he didn’t really see an all-in-one product in market like that at the time, four years ago. And so he created the hardware and wrote the software to make 360 truly a consumer product. And in that four years, Insta360 has grown to become the global leader in 360-degree cameras, whether it’s on the consumer, prosumer, or professional side. We now have 11 products in market today that, again, range from tiny little portable cameras that are fun for social media, all the way through to cinematic cameras that now shoot 11k. We run the gamut in terms of what cameras are in market, could we cater these cameras, too. And at the end of the day, it’s really all about the user experience. So how do you create a powerful, strong camera, 360 camera tool, but also give it the ease of use of a consumer product, and not have to spend too much time in post and all those things?

Alan: Insta360 in my mind really stands out above the crowd, is for you guys to be the number one 360 camera company is saying a lot because there have been a lot of entrants into this market. Samsung, Nokia entered with their OZO, Jaunt — which recently just got sold to Verizon — they had their Jaunt One camera. There’s been a ton of companies try to come to market with a 360 camera. There was even the Bubble Cam out of Toronto. But where you guys, in my opinion, have really made a big impact — and I love this about it — is two things. One, ease of use. I can take a photo, it stitches on my phone. I can take a video, it stitches on my phone. But then, the user experience on my phone is absolutely spectacular. I can create a tiny planet, I can create an animation, I can post it directly to all my social media platforms, instantly. And that’s where I think some of the other larger companies have failed. They’ve created amazing hardware, but they failed on the delivery of the actual experience, from the hardware to the software, out to how people actually want to use it. Where did you guys come up with the idea of the stabilization? Because this is key to VR. One of the key things about the Insta360 platform is that I can run down the street with a 360 camera, and the software automatically stabilizes it. That’s pretty badass.

Michael: I completely agree. I think stabilization is what kind of brought the technology full circle, and what started enabling it to be widely used by not just VR content creators, but also by traditional filmmakers who just want special angles or to capture certain moments in a much easier way. And just kind of backing up for a second, what most people don’t see us as, and what Insta360 truly is, is a software company. And that’s what you were talking about as being the difference in creating a product that from a hardware standpoint is powerful, but also from a software standpoint, it’s easy enough to use where it’s not going to hold you back, or create these lengthy postproduction delivery timelines. And that’s something that really dipped the whole industry several years ago, is that the hardware was there with some of these companies, but when it came to actually deliver this content or edit it or share it across any platform, that’s kind of where all the roadblocks were. And so what we decided was we need to blur the lines. We need to make 360 content creation just as simple and easy as traditional 2D flat capture. And a big thing in doing that was adding cinema-grade stabilization. And with a 360 camera, it’s a little bit different than stabilizing for a traditional flat camera, because you’re essentially capturing everything. And since you’re capturing everything, the stabilization, the way it works and the algorithm that you need to program is a little bit different. And not getting too many technical details — which my engineers, I’m sure, would love to chat about — but with our One X camera, which is the world’s most popular consumer-grade 360 camera, it’s actually doing two things at the stabilization level. The first is we’re packing insanely powerful gyroscopes directly into the cameras.

Alan: That makes sense. I

Michael: There are two types of stabilization happening in this small little camera. There’s the stabilization at the capture level, which is essentially just using the gyro and the data to stabilize that in capture. And the second way is through a post-processing stabilization algorithm, that we call FlowState. And FlowState is something that we came out with the last generation of our camera, but we were constantly taking it in, perfecting it, and making it an even better, more dynamic stabilization algorithm. And so with FlowState now, you’re stabilizing again during post. And that’s something that’s available in our app, whether you’re using an Android or an iOS device or if you want to stabilize through our desktop software, you’re taking that and you’re essentially making cinema-grade stabilization at the touch of a couple of buttons right from your phone. And that’s something that’s created a really smooth and dynamic workflow with all of our users. You don’t need to be a super well-trained videographer or you don’t need a buy or rent tons of stabilization gear to stabilize your camera. All you need is the actual device, our invisible selfie stick, or whatever you’re mounting it on, and the willpower to actually do it. So now we’re seeing all of these folks in the action sports industry, in the filmmaking space. They’re now incorporating the One X into their workflows, whether it’s specifically around 360 capture for VR, or just adding special angles and pulling off really unique shots.

Alan: Like the flying one where you can attach a camera to little plane wings and fly it through a scene.

Michael: Exactly.

Alan: That’s so badass.

Michael: And that shows that at

Alan: For sure. It’s just

Michael: It’s incredible how

Alan: It really is. Your team–

Michael: Sure. So the Evo is one of our newer products. It came out a little less than a year ago, I believe it was last April. And what the Evo is, it’s a consumer-sized camera. It fits in the palm of your hand and it’s a convertible. So it converts from 180 degree 3D to full 360 degrees. And the great part about this is how simply it goes from mode to mode. One challenge that we started with was, well, when you’re flipping it from 180 degrees to 360, how do you account for the calibration? How does the camera get to know that it’s going from this mode to the other mode? And how simply is it going to be for the end-user to actually go through that process? And so what we did was we–

Alan: How easy it is: as a user,

Michael: And that’s the exact

Alan: Yeah. And the 180’s interesting because I have to also call out your packaging of this product. When I got the box, first of all, it’s a beautiful small box, size of a consumer electronics box. You flip it over and there’s a lenticular image on the back of the box of some people at a birthday party. But it’s fully 3D and it just has this depth and feeling to it that’s absolutely incredible. And that was a photo taken using the 180 mode. Like, this is really incredible marketing. When you open the box, camera’s inside, but there’s also a VR viewer, like a little Google Cardboard kind of thing, a little plastic thing that you slap on your phone. So I took a picture in 180 and I was like, okay, what is this 3D all about? Put it into VR. And I couldn’t believe– It just brought the photo fully to life in three dimensions. It was just really, really cool. And so I don’t know how people– how are people using this?

Michael: So it’s actually

Alan: Lenticular

Michael: Yeah. And–

Alan: We had lenticular business

Michael: And so it’s so

Alan: [explosion sound] That was

Michael: [laughs]

Alan: So basically what you’re saying is I can take a 3D 180-degree video, and then play it back on my phone with this case. It’ll– I guess I assume it’s like a lenticular case that allows me to see it in 3D.

Michael: That’s exactly it.

Alan: That’s badass. I

Michael: So we have one on the way for you, and we’re excited to get your feedback on it. That’s one really cool niche, unique way of using a 180 3D camera. But overall, I would say there’s this mega push happening right now from some of the biggest tech companies in the world. You see Facebook with Oculus. You see Adobe. You see Google. So I’m talking like all the tech giants right now are making this huge push for 180. And as a result of that, we decided to work with them to create the Evo. And we’ve done countless workshops now, we’ve done some really great introductions with the YouTube VR Creator Lab, where we actually saw creators get a choice between an Evo and some of these more high end expensive 180 3D solutions. And once we had a chance to intro the Evo and talk about what it can do and how it can make their content capture easier, we saw mouths drop and we saw people actually taking the $400 camera over the $2,500 camera. And it was incredible to see, because one challenge — especially with YouTube content creators — is that when they first started dabbling in 360 or just 180 3D, there were a lot of roadblocks along the way. And those roadblocks ranged from simple things like not even– not getting a live view on what you’re recording, to connectivity issues, having to be too far away from the camera, and then not seeing the image that you’re recording. And then when it comes time to actual post-production and delivery, they were having to go through this whole long workflow where you had to stitch your footage. You had to–

Alan: I remember those days.

Michael: And so after they’ve

Alan: Stabilizing.

Michael: Yeah. And there’s like

Alan: Yeah, 360’s too hard.

Michael: Yeah. I’ve spent a week just exporting this video. And when I finally put it into my Oculus or whatever I’m viewing it in, it doesn’t look good. And they don’t want to spend the time to go back and do it again. And so what we thought of was, “Well, how do we make every step of the production and post-production process easier for these folks?” And once we showed them that, like, “hey, you can actually connect your Evo through Wi-Fi to an Oculus Go headset or to an HTC Vive and you can adjust your exposure and your camera settings, live in-headset and see where you’re actually recording,” it was a huge game-changer. And then when we showed them that you can after you record, you can stream whatever you just shot directly into your headset so that you don’t need to go home and put it in your computer and go through the process. And if you need to reshoot something, you’ve already lost your location, you’ve lost your talent, lost everything that you had on production day, and you simply just can’t go back and do it without more budget. This has revolutionized the industry for them, because now the pipeline for delivery is much shorter and you’re not getting as many headaches throughout the entire production process. So we’re really listening to our end-users and learning about what their problems are. And we’re trying to solve each problem every step of the way.

Alan: And it shows, it really

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. It’s completely non-dependent on which phone you have. We support most models of newer phones, the workflow and the user experience is a little bit different with Android and iOS, just in terms of how both operating systems interact with the products. But the experience in the app is is the exact same. And where we started was the Nano and the Nano S are obviously our older product lines. But what we proved with those is that you can have this small phone attachment and you can simply and easily capture, edit, and share photos and videos in 360 to social media without ever having to pull out the microSD card from your camera. So showing that you can actually upload 360 videos and photos faster in some cases than you would from a traditional camera or even editing from your cell phone, is a huge milestone for not just our company but for the whole industry. And with cameras like the Nano S, it had some really unique features in that you can live chat with somebody like FaceTime in 360 and you can give the person on the other end of the camera full control of your 360 camera, so they can actually pan and scan around your 360 without having to have one themselves. So we’ve had these really unique features that we’ve come out with that just aren’t achievable with a normal camera.

Alan: It’s incredible. Absolutely. And I mean, if I wasn’t– if I wasn’t a user of this, I wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. But I’ve been using these cameras. The first time I met Max from your team was at the UploadVR party, maybe four years ago now, when they launched their studio in LA. And you guys had the Insta Pro there. The very first Insta360 Pro. So let’s kind of move away from the consumer side. And then I would recommend that anybody if you’re in marketing, you’re in sales, you want to create, capture, and develop great content, kind of the lower level content you can use the Go, the Evo, the One X, all of those, the Nano. But when you want to go the next level up and you want to put something in VR and you want something to be future-proofed, you guys have the 360 Pro, the Pro 2 and the Titan. So walk me through that, because the first time I saw it, it was in a low light little show within Upload’s studio. It was dark and I put the headset on, in real-time I was seeing three dimensional 360 stereoscopic. It was just incredible. And now you guys have made it even better. It’s– the Pro is what, 8K?

Michael: Yes, the Pro shoots up

Alan: And the Titan is 11K. To

Michael: And that’s the goal. It’s– there’s– the challenge in our industry is definitely on the headset and the viewing side. The technology just isn’t quite keeping up with the camera tech. But we’ve gone above and beyond and undercut the system a little bit. So– and I know I’m jumping forward, but I think this is kind of important to make that distinction. So there’s three inherent challenges from a professional VR content capture perspective. The first is obviously production and we can get into that. The second is post-production. And then the third is delivery and viewing. So it’s basically there’s problems at every step of the way, right? On the viewing side, what we did about a year ago was we came out with a technology called Crystal View. And Crystal View allows us to play 8K videos — or higher, now — in a non-8K device and that’s available in iOS, Android devices, their smartphones, your tablets, and headsets like Oculus Go and HTC Vive. What this does is it uses a technology that Google made popular some years ago and it uses something called dynamic rendering. And so what it’s doing is, it’s packing as many pixels as possible into your immediate field of view and diluting everything else that you’re not looking at. And if you whip your head side to side and you’re looking at other perspectives in your 360 headset, it’s doing this live. So you’re not seeing any lag, you’re not seeing any latency. And so we’re basically what we call it is our version of playing higher res and non 8K and 10K and 11K devices. And so you’re actually getting higher resolution, when the device itself is maxed out at 4K.

Alan: So you’re basically using

Michael: It’s– that’s exactly

Alan: Wow. So for people to understand what that means: in order to render the full scene of 360, think of how much data has to be put into a headset to make everything super crystal clear behind you, that you’re not looking at ever until you turn around. So you’re basically saying, most people’s eyes — well, everybody’s eyes — only see in the middle 5 percent of what you’re looking at any given time. So I would assume that as we progressed with these headsets to have eye-tracking, your Crystal View will actually get more refined into that five degrees rather than whatever it is now, maybe 50 degrees, I would think. But that would be even more so as we get eye-tracking involved. Is that correct?

Michael: That’s it. And it’s

Alan: Absolutely. So you’re basically– you’re able to shoot these cameras in super high res. Future-proofing is acknowledged. So something you shoot today on the Titan is going to be as relevant today as it is five years from now, by the time the headsets actually catch up to this. If they ever catch up, and by then you’ll be shooting in 600K or something or.

Michael: [laughs] Yeah. That’s

Alan: [chuckles] It was a pipe

Michael: Yeah. So the idea is

Alan: And let me remind

Michael: And you had to have the skill to be able to do that. It’s not just like anybody can pick up these unstitched files and just seamlessly put them together. It actually required a lot of knowledge and skill, and so it was limited to only a few people. And that’s one of the reasons, in addition to just being time-consuming, it was a drain on your budget. Nobody wanted to do it. So what we came out with and a lot of other companies have this now is auto-stitching. So you’re looking at the camera, you’re looking at the live view and it’s already being stitched in front of you. So that was kind of the revolution on that side. But then we took it one step further. So let’s say you’re shooting an hour of 8K content and you’re on a MacBook Pro like I am. That can take you overnight. It can take you even if at times it could take you a couple of days to stitch that out in full resolution. And so you’re still– even though you’re not sitting there in front of your computer and stitching it yourself, it’s still time-consuming. It’s still– it’s taking a lot of time to get that done. So what we decided was, OK, well, why don’t we partner with Adobe and why don’t we give people the chance to before they even export, you can trim out everything that you don’t care about. So if you only want five minutes of your one hour, or if you want three minutes or 10 minutes or however much you want, you can actually now export out only the parts that you care about in full resolution. And we did this in two ways. So we actually enabled the Pro 2 to record proxies simultaneously, as it’s recording the full resolution videos. And in doing so, you can now import the proxies directly into Premier and then you can trim and edit based off that.

Alan: Ah, so you don’t have to

Michael: But it will also bring in the whole giant file as well. So if you’re doing something like motion graphics and you need to be frame specific, you can toggle between the full-res and the proxy. So everything’s there for you. It’s just all about the user individual preference and how you want to edit and how you want to export and do all of your work. We’re very flexible and not forcing people into using our software, per se.

Alan: Wow, it’s really incredible. I got to ask you a question. So I’m looking at the Insta360 Titan website for a second. It says “8× Micro Four Thirds Sensors.” What the hell does that mean?

Michael: So with the Titan, it’s an incredible piece of technology, because we took what we learned from the Pro and the Pro 2, and we applied it to something that’s even higher resolution. So one thing that the Pro and the Pro 2are somewhat limited in, is low light shoot8ing.

Alan: Ah, OK.

Michael: We took that learning and we just built in higher resolution sensors and higher and micro four thirds will enable you to shoot in low light. And you won’t see a lot of pixelation, you won’t see a lot of blues or purples in the blacks. It’s making it the ultimate low light 360 camera. And we’ve taken this thing everywhere and we’ve tested it, and we’ve had our partners test it in low light. And the feedback that we’ve gotten from it has been absolutely remarkable.

Alan: Yeah, I can believe it. I can’t wait to see stuff shot on this. And the great thing– it’s interesting because today, my first interview this morning was with Michael Mansouri from Radiant Images. And I mean, they’ve been pioneering 360 cameras and that sort of thing since the very beginning. And I believe they’re one of your resellers as well. The cameras that they put together two years ago were the– I wouldn’t say the equivalent to the Titan, because they’re not, but they were basically hacking together this, using full digital SLR cameras in a custom mounted rig, whereas you guys have it all in a unibody construction that allows you just pull it out, film with it, put it away, put your SD cards in. I even think there’s hot-swappable batteries in these, aren’t there?

Michael: So you can have the titan on house power and you don’t even need to have a battery in it. So, yeah. And Michael’s a very good friend. We worked together quite a bit and we do some great projects together. We actually just did the world’s first 8K livestream in 360 into a dome. That was a– it’s a project that we’ve been working on to promote our new 8K live stitching software. That was about a month and a half ago. And so if you think about that, we’re barely just now getting 8K TV sets, 8K headsets are still a year or two off.

Alan: Minimum.

Michael: The fact that we’re

Alan: That’s amazing. So let’s talk about some use cases, because we’ve talked about the technology quite a bit. What are people using this for in business, in enterprise? What are the best use cases that you’ve seen other than entertainment, which is the obvious one man?

Michael: I can talk about this

Alan: [laughs] We’ve got 15

Michael: Oh my goodness. Well, I

Alan: Is your camera able–

Michael: It’s mostly our partner

Alan: Very cool.

Michael: But beyond that, we’re

We worked with a psychologist in New York City who is using exposure therapy to help cure people of PTSD, phobias and other traumatic events that happen in their lives. And the really great part is how you see the treatment evolving. They used to actually just build virtual experiences and it would use gaming engines like Unity and Unreal. And it wasn’t realistic enough. It was basically like a cartoon or almost like gamified people that you were interacting with, and it wasn’t working. And so when the psychologists started taking real 360 footage and he had a person that was scared of flying, or driving over bridges, or even walking downstairs, he would put himself in these environments. He would shoot the whole thing in 360 and then he would put his patients in those same experiences over and over and over again until they finally felt at peace with whatever phobia or traumatic disorder they had. And he’s seeing a huge success rate in this type of treatment over the past two years.

Alan: That’s incredible. To

Michael: The Titan is $15,000,

Alan: So $15,000 to– and how

Michael: Well, in the past it may have cost quite a bit, but today you can do it with a $400 camera and $10 a month with Matterport.

Alan: No, I know. But what I’m

Michael: It’s a no-brainer. It

Alan: Amazing. What is one

Michael: One big issue that we’re having right now is in the journalism space, in the newsgathering space. There’s so many different ways of telling your story. And right now, with everything that’s happening politically around the world, we just need real news and we need to see what’s actually going on. With 360, you can’t get any more real. And we’re seeing the journalism space being a huge beneficiary of 360 technology, whether it’s live broadcasting from disaster events like CNN has been doing, or just telling immersive stories that really hit home with whatever you’re trying to get across. I think that’s the future of all news and stories and coverage that’s going to be shared across the world.

In the late 19th century, Eadweard

Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Michael Mansouri, co-founder and vice president of Radiant Images. Michael is known as one of the industry’s most knowledgeable, inventive, and passionate technologists. Born into a family of filmmakers, he has produced and directed several high impact documentaries, most recently for the United Nations Geneva Summit for Human Rights. His documentaries help raise awareness of human and animal rights violations around the world, to provide a voice for the voiceless. He’s been always interested in the overlap of film and technology, so he co-founded Radiant Images in 2005. Mr. Mansouri’s efforts in filmmaking led to NASA and JPL’s 2018 Emmy win for outstanding original interactive program for Cassini’s grand finale, which was NASA’s first recognition in the film community. At Hawk-Eye, he hopes to break through the technology barriers surrounding digital innovation and provide a more meaningful impact that connects and engages humanity. You can learn more about the great work that Michael and his team are doing at radiantimages.com.

Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael: Hey, good morning,

Alan: I am super excited. You

Michael: That’s a great

Alan: Say that again? What?

Michael: Yeah. It’s a fact. [chuckles] The average American sees between 4,000 to 10,000 pieces of content every single day.

Alan: Okay, we’ve got to unpack.

Michael: It’s the truth. And the

Alan: When I grew up, I had to

Michael: But it’s interesting to actually look at that because we move in such a fast-paced world. We’re living in a world that is completely changed. The script is completely flipped, where the largest taxi company in the world owns no taxis, the largest media company on the planet owns no media, and largest hotel chains right now own no hotels, and those are AirBNBs. So everything’s changed, digital technology has shifted a lot. But a byproduct, an outcome is that we’re bombarded with content. It’s not the times of content was king. Less and less is content king, but more and more is platforms, communication devices, how we engage. So Radiant switched its focus. We strategically decided to change our focus from just being part of what we call the status quo — the safety, the comforts — and move into something more daring. And the new daring is where the technology shift is going, and where the communication devices are moving towards, and the patterns of where communications moving forward. So what we started looking at is what’s happening in the technology cycles. And what we’ve discovered is that every 10 years there are technology cycles. If we go back from the 80s — that I remember — we had the personal computers, PCs. And in the 90s we had the laptops. And year 2000 we had the smartphones. 2010, we had wearable technologies like the Fitbits, the Apple Watch, so forth and so on. And if we’re predictors of the technology cycles, it’s swinging towards smart displays. And that’s what we’re facing now.

What we’re seeing now is that the new

Alan: Nreal, Vuzix, there’s a

Michael: Yes, and that is exactly what we called. So most people think that this is like a fad or 3D, entertainment fads. This isn’t. The play’s also bigger than just headsets. The play’s really owning the next generation of operating systems. The big players, their mission is to get rid of the keyboard, the mouse, computer monitors, and heads-up display. And this interactivity that belongs between human beings, each other, products, devices, anything that is connected. Now this is where it becomes incredibly powerful, is that we’re no longer watching things on a flat-screen where we’re not connected to it. The reason you’re connected emotionally to things is because if there’s a coffee cup on your desk and you move left and right, you’re connected to that subject matter. And there is no other format yet does that, all of it is on a flat screen and you’re not connected to it. So what Radiant decided to do is to create technologies that people need, that is part of the operating systems, that is heads-up displays, holographic videos, those holographic videos are classified in the following order, whether they’re either known as 6DOF, volumetric or, Light Field. And Radiant is always and always will be agnostic to technology. and more into methods of capture. So we try to take very complicated problems and simplify it so that it can scale.

Alan: So you mentioned 6DOF, and

Michael: So they’re all forms of holographic videos and I think you did a great job describing it the way I usually describe. What is the impact of volumetric or Light Field or 6DOF is that, let’s pretend we’re in a boxing match. The audience is no longer sitting next to Jay-Z and Beyonce at the premium silver house. They’re now a referee inside the boxing match. So they have full agency to interact inside this new medium, this new video file. So the main difference is that it allows a much stronger sense of presence than you normally get from a 360 video, whereas immersive as it can be, you just don’t have any agency to move. You’re in a room and your interactions is really limited to just looking left, right, up, and down. Whereas in volumetric, Light Field or any of the holographic video files — or what we call freeform videos — your audience, or you, are now able to have full agencies to navigate that location and interact with subjects, people, or anything that’s been photographed in that method.

So our main focus at Radiant now is how

Alan: But from a filmmaker standpoint, it’s like, how do you deal with the fact that now your audience is not looking at a rectangle? They’re in the rectangle. They’re inside the film. How do you manage that?

Michael: It’s actually pretty interesting. And it does take a different form of thinking about how do we create entertainment? How do we do this now? Because we’ve struggled with this a lot. That’s a question that we’ve contemplated a lot, because part of us really thinks that, yeah, how do filmmakers operate in a medium where the user and the audience has full agency to navigate in the story? How do you direct them? What’s the purpose of direction, if anyone can create stories? That’s not really storytelling. It doesn’t really tap into our core DNA. Our DNA is, we’re programmed to be told stories. We’re not hunter-gatherers of stories. We’re mostly exponential. We want to gather around a fire and be told stories from our ancestors, from the caveman days, right? We were entertained.

Alan: There’s also a big shift

Michael: Yeah.

Alan: People making content at scale. YouTube is unleashed. An entire generation of Americans who want to be YouTube influencers.

Michael: Exactly. And so that’s

We have the same capacity with these

Alan: So let’s unpack this a bit

Michael: So let’s just start right away really quickly to get it off the plate. How does entertainment use us entertainment companies? So a lot of the studios — some of the studios, not a lot of them — we’re very fortunate to have actually sold our new award-winning AXA stages of volumetric Light Field stage to one of the world’s largest, oldest motion picture studios. One of the first technology company that’s embedded inside one of the motion picture studios.

Alan: What’s it called, your

Michael: Our stage is called AXA and the AXA stage is a volumetric *and* Light Field capture system. It’s about five meters, about 16 and a half feet. And it’s a sphere that precisely positions cameras, hundreds of cameras, inward-looking at the subject so that it can be viewed from all the different variations and create volume. And that’s how we create either volumetric or Light Field through our stage.

Alan: Can you walk us through

Michael: So with a volumetric, what we’re in a sense doing is we’re capturing subjects from multiple camera points and that creates what we call a point cloud. A point cloud is a volume, it has depth properties in it. Some companies, some software solves just take the point cloud and then texturize it, and there are other companies that take the point cloud and they put a mesh, basically a skin. And then on top of the skin they put texture on. Where Light Field is different is that it’s not based on a point cloud volume. It’s basic. The re-interpretation, re-vantage point of all the different light rays that’s viewed from that camera prospectus. So if the camera’s seeing my shadows from– or my highlights from the top of my head, it will regenerate that viewpoint. So it’s more video-based than volume-based. Generates a different type of effect. And for your case uses, we would recommend volumetric versus Light Field, but they’re both three-dimensional navigatable video fonts.

Alan: So what would– here,

Michael: Yeah. So Metastage uses Microsoft’s volumetric Hcap, holographic capture. Intel has it. And then there’s other companies that also have volumetric studios. Fraunhofer, there’s several handfuls of volumetric studios that create–

Alan: There’s 55 of them

Michael: Ah, good! Yeah, there’s an absolutely huge rush for this new way of communicating.

Alan: Yeah, and I think Verizon

Michael: Yes.

Alan: For their volumetric

Michael: And we’ll get into why

Alan: We’ve got to figure out

Michael: Well, it’s the freeway system. So you have a freeway system, much bigger freeway system with very little latency. It has a lot of bandwidth that doesn’t require the headsets. Remember the smart displays that we talked about? So if you want to make it a smart display, you can’t put huge GPU/CPU power on top of someone’s head. Obviously, you can’t do that. So if you want to make it as lightweight and small as possible, that connects to a cloud and it streams the video files. This is why the timing is great. There has been a lot of great technology that was developed many, many years ago, but they just were not perfectly timed for the infrastructure. Imagine if someone created the cellphone technology back in 1950s, it wouldn’t be impactful as it is now, because there’s the infrastructure that makes it possible for us to get there. So the reality is why 5G is essential is because, yeah, we have a freeway system that’s wide open, that has no latency, that has connective tissues that connect a lot of devices to a lot of devices. And that’s where we go to Internet of Things, that’s where we go to smart factories, industry 4.0. This is the fiber, fiber-fiber of connectivity that devices need in order to access big data streamed to them. So the timing couldn’t be any better. And I think for people who are looking at this technology of volumetric, Light Field and 5G, they’re pretty much all needed. Very few people are going to be able to download 10 gigs or 20 gigs of a video file on their mobile phone. They want to get it streamed to them. And that’s why the telco companies are really looking at 5G as an enabler to take data moved through devices, to those new smart glasses that we talked about.

Alan: It’s interesting that you say that, because we’re actually building our new product platform based on the thought or the prediction that in 10 years from now everybody will wear glasses, those glasses will run on cloud computing. So the cost of the glasses themselves will be relatively negligible. The data will be streamed at a hundred to a thousand times speeds and we’ll be able to get content to everybody, anywhere in the world, immediately. And so in that content will be in context to the world around you. You’ll look at an object, it will know what it is and be able to inform you of that object. So real-time, contextualized, hyper-personalized learning, anywhere you are in the world.

Michael: That’s absolutely true.

Alan: It’s hard to explain to somebody like, OK, you know, we got these big bulky VR headsets and that’s cool. But if you look out 10 years from now, these are going to be the size and lightweight of a pair of normal glasses. They will have VR and AR kind of built-in. And anything you look at will be in context. Have you read “The Age of Smart Information” by Mike Pell?

Michael: No, I haven’t.

Alan: You need to read that,

Michael: Well, yeah. And the analogy I always give is like early days of the cellphone. Yes, cellphone technology was bounded by car. It would– only way you had access to it, was it was inside of a car. Or then when it became–

Alan: Hey, remember those giant

Michael: Then you had the

Alan: Then the brick. Come on,

Michael: Exactly. But that’s

Alan: I really wish I could say

Michael: Everyone is. We are so

Alan: [laughs] I wish we could

Michael: I think we will. But

Alan: It’s interesting you said that, because I just read somewhere recently where the whole idea of this is obviously to make a squirter. But one of the things that politicians use is they have an assistant beside them walking through an event or whatever, and they whisper in their ear, Oh, this is so-and-so. And they do this and this. And then the daughter’s name is Sally and like just literally running down this stuff so that they can immediately walk up and say,” Hey, Bob, how you doing?” We need the power for everybody.

Michael: Yeah. It just makes

Alan: The Internet.

Michael: Exactly.

Alan: “The Internet is a fad,

Michael: I know there was a lot

Alan: Yeah, it was the size of a

Michael: Same thing with cinema.

Alan: Wait a second. Didn’t you

Michael: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah,

Alan: So cool. I honestly– I

Michael: So we talked about

So we’re seeing RGB plus that and we’re able to now use it for analysis, for AI to train what’s the difference between this part that just came out of the factory line, or this piece of artwork that just was produced, versus a fake one, versus a luxury brand that’s making products and they want to make sure no one’s counterfeiting it. How does volume help of that? Well, volume helps a lot in a lot of verticals. If you could see things in depth and detail, high resolution from multiple perspectives the artificial intelligence just gets smarter and bigger. And that’s where Radiant’s new focuses is. How do we develop these methods and scale and simplify the processes of this? And that’s something we’re very good at. We can take hundreds of cameras like you saw in our full-time demonstration, and we make it a one bend operation. We make it very simple, very scalable, very easy to use. So you don’t need specialty engineers. How do you deploy it into factory lines and then how– this is the most important question, is how do you make it scalable? Because there are a lot of companies that– or amazing companies that paved the way for us, all of us, like Lytro and all these amazing companies that make groundbreaking breakthroughs, but what they were focused on was on a very high-end scale.

What we’re doing is on a very low — in principle — of consumer-grade cameras. Synchronizing those is much, much harder, but it’s also a lot more important, because now we can install these in factories for $20,000 versus $2-million. Now we can scale it, and innovations happen when you give things to people outside of your comfort zones and you let them do things beyond what you dreamed of. You can only do that if it’s not tied into big infrastructure like a huge stage, studios, servers, big computer systems, tons of resources. And that’s what our main focus is, is purely how to take something that’s complicated, simplify it down to its core, deploy it, and let that scale, just because of its cost factor is so accessible that people could use it for innovation. They could experiment, they could try new methods without saying, “Wow, if we did this test, it’s going to cost us a couple hundred grand. So let’s not do it. We have one bullet. Let’s just keep it safe. Let’s keep in our lane. Let’s not try to fix until it’s broken.” So this allows people to try new things. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ve created a method for capture that is very automated, scalable, and it can be installed in factory lines, there’s so many verticals.

Alan: Alright, let’s talk about the different verticals, because you’ve talked about manufacturing. So let’s just kind of very simplify this. A product comes off the end of the line, and maybe one every one in every hundred gets put into a volumetric capturer. Maybe everyone does. And it takes a picture, test for tolerances. All of those images in 3D information gets fed into AI. So AI then gets smarter and smarter as it does it, but it can also be used for the manufacturing facility itself. So you can capture volumetrically the entire facility and allow a manager in a different part of the world to put on a headset and stand inside the manufacturing facility and look around. And then if you overlay the IOT data, they can now do a real-time inspection of that manufacturing facility. What other ways can this be used in different realms, I guess, of different parts of business?

Michael: Ok, so here’s some of the other businesses that we’re working with. We’re also working with health and education. I can’t tell you who the institution is, but it’s a very large institution that is looking at future communications. Where they’re going, communications is impossible. The distance that they travel sometimes is beyond millions of miles, a hundred thousand miles away, and they can’t communicate. So how do they prepare themselves for emergencies, human life emergencies, and create simulations, and do it all through AI? And do it in a way where now it really makes sense, because if I want to train someone how to do a process, one of the best methods ever to do this is not just to see it from left to right or free-viewpoint video, but what you can do with volumetrics that you can’t do with almost anything else, is that if you’re, let’s say, solving the Rubik’s Cube. And if I had to shoot it with my traditional 2D method, I would put the camera over your shoulder and get that. Then I would get it under your hand, but it wouldn’t give you the same sense of being there. And if I did in VR, I would stand next to you and see you do it, and I see the room, but that’s still not good enough. But here’s what you can do in volumetric and free-viewpoint videos. I could step inside your presence. I could become you. I embody you. I see your hands move as if they were mine. And there are incredible new headset manufacturers are doing hand tracking, where you can put your hand right on top of that. So you now could really guide the trainee, could train simulations in a much better way. And the great thing is–

Alan: The Quest is now doing

Michael: Well, again, remember,

Alan: All right, so last week in

Michael: Now, imagine this.

Alan: It seems so obsolete!

Michael: Our education method that we’ve inherited. That’s why it’s sometimes legacy, we need to shadow it and truly break the status quo in a lot of ways. Is that one person stands up in a room, recites their knowledge, and whoever captures and can regurgitate it and hold onto the rest of the life is now got the pedigree.

Alan: That’s the next person to

Michael: It’s actually flawed and I’m very fortunate as I’ve worked in documentaries and I’ve worked on an incredible documentary about the Rubik’s Cube. Rubik’s Cube was invented by an inventor, his name is Ernő Rubik. In 1970, he was a professor, wanted to teach students about three-dimensional volume. So he created a cube and then he put these different colors on it. And then when he scrambled it, he moved it, he couldn’t put it back together. Now, the Rubik’s Cube is one of the most complex puzzles. There’s one in 43 quintillion wrong answers to one right answer. But yet you have little five-year-old kids doing speedcubing day, which is–

Alan: I know, it’s nuts.

Michael: Why is that? And we

Alan: I saw a clip with two at

Michael: Yeah.

Alan: I was like, what?

Michael: You have like five-year-old kids that can do this. And we asked like these incredible– we went around the world asking professors. And they all said the same thing: they said without having the algorithm, just on the core of taking a Rubik’s Cube and trying to solve it on your own without any algorithms, there’s less than 500 people in the world, mathematically, that can solve it. It’s really difficult. One in 43 quintillion. Yet you have a five-year-old doing this. The reason is this: it’s the same time you and I just talked about. A five-year-old could see someone else do this and I’m watching a textbook, then I read the book. It’s a tactile thing. It’s three dimensional. They could see it repeated and do it. Monkey see, monkey do. It taps into our core DNA. We are the trained monkeys that see others do something. And then we want to do it immediately and repeat it.

Alan: So, Michael, we’re getting

Michael: We can have a part 2.

Alan: We’re gonna have to have a

Michael: Wow. That’s a really good question. I wish it was just one problem in the world that we could solve. [chuckles] There’s so many. Where do we start? But I think the thing that really taps into our core belief, why we feel that this technology has the capability of breaking barriers and really making an impact, because to us at Radiant’s core philosophy, there are three guiding words that we are driven by and are our philosophies. Is what we’re doing, it’s basically divided up to three, it’s spirited, purposeful, and human. So we ask ourselves this question every day of what we’re doing, what we’re creating. Is it human? Is it spirited? And is it purposeful? What we’re doing now is incredibly human, because it creates connectivity between human beings in a world that we’re so disjointed. There’s so much information. There’s 4,000 to 9,000 pieces of content. We’re here to break that clutter and give a participant this new language that doesn’t require new learning, it gives us equality. Spirited because it lifts people’s spirit, it gives us hope when there is no hope. And purpose because we were driven by purpose. We don’t just– “cool” doesn’t cut it. “Cool” is for the surface and just for the obvious. People would just like to be entertained. We all want more than just be entertained. Those are our bylines. And that’s why we’re driven every day. It’s not easy. Everyone that’s trying to do cutting edge, trying to change people’s perspectives and get them energized to believe in something that is a little bit more challenging and new, like people before us did. But it gives us the purpose, gives us the drive. And it’s just three words: human, purposeful, and spirited.

Paul Travers has been in the XR

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Paul: Hey, Alan. Thanks for

Alan: It’s my absolute honor.

Paul: Yeah, Alan. I mean, we’ve

Alan: I can totally relate

Paul: Thanks, Alan. I appreciate

Alan: Most to them.

Paul: Yeah, most of them don’t.

Alan: So you you said that

Paul: They haven’t been,

Alan: Let’s unpack that for a

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: That’s awesome. I want

Paul: It is. And I know that it

Alan: Not nice things.

Paul: Yeah, many, many rounds in

Alan: And if you unpack that

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: It’s crazy.

Paul: You’re absolutely right.

Alan: It’s true. Listen, you get

Paul: Yeah, they do.

Alan: So, being able to laser

Paul: Well, that’s where I was

Alan: Medical seems to be that

Paul: Yeah. It’s wonderful.

Alan: So what are some other use

Paul: So we all the way back to

Alan: Wow.

Paul: Yeah, it’s really

Matt: 13.

Paul: 13 megapixel camera, image

Alan: So, OK, so let’s just stop

Paul: They do. And they do an

Alan: OK.

Paul: Then there are guys like

Alan: Oh, that’s right. Because,

Paul: Yes.

Alan: So you can use that assist

Paul: Yeah. And there’s a lot of

Alan: It’s interesting you say

Paul: Yes, no doubt about it.

Alan: Yeah. Or ten times over. I

Paul: Right, right. And I think

Alan: I have a really great pair

Paul: That’s a step in the right

Alan: A step in the right

Paul: And it has a pupil that’s

Alan: I had to go and get them

Paul: There’s mix. There’s a

Alan: Right in the middle. And

Paul: Yes.

Alan: So let’s talk about the

Paul: Yes. Well, so– if you

Alan: Sure. Please do.

Paul: We talked about a few

Alan: Wow. That’s an amazing use

Paul: You are going to see a lot

Alan: No, of course not.

Paul: And that’s again, you can

Alan: All right. I’ve read a lot

Paul: Yes. So this is how it

Unlike North, where they are a little

Now, the Blade itself, because it’s got

Alan: [laughs] You’d look like

Paul: Yeah, that’s right. You

Alan: But the question really

Paul: It’s so funny you say

Matt: [laughs]

Paul: And he just loved them.

Alan: Oh, that’s so cool.

Paul: But he won’t let us. He’s

Alan: Yeah.

Paul: But yeah, no, he’d be a

Alan: That’s awesome. Yeah, I

Paul: They are, actually.

[laughs]

We’re almost made after him, frankly.

Alan: And I love that the

Paul: Yeah, yeah. They’re– my

Alan: Wow.

Paul: But, you know, everybody’s

Alan: Agreed. Yeah. But I mean,

Paul: Yeah, we’re with you. I

Alan: Oh, so cool.

Paul: It is really cool because

Alan: Oh my god, that’s so cool.

Paul: Yeah. And it’s with a

Alan: Oh man. This is so cool.

Paul: Yes. I think most–

Alan: It takes a special person

Paul: A lot of those were

Alan: Yeah. OK. So one of the

Paul: Sure. I mean, we have done

Alan: Incredible.

Paul: On that software front, if

Alan: You can read barcode

Paul: Yeah, we have. We work

Alan: Actually, one at one of

Paul: I rather like that, too.

Alan: Yeah. I mean, it can

Paul: Yes, that’s correct.

Alan: The one eye– so you’ve

Paul: The number of car

Alan: You know it’s a plain bad

Paul: In this case, there’s

Alan: Yeah, I think so. I mean,

Paul: You learn that pretty

Alan: Yeah.

Paul: Based on focus, there are

Alan: You know, I haven’t taken

Paul: [chuckles] Yeah. And maybe

Alan: Hey, I’m going to go with

Paul: You know the story of the

Alan: Yep.

Paul: This industry is going to

Alan: Okay. Let’s just put our

Paul: Yeah.

Alan: And AR glasses. I mean,

Paul: It’s very true. And the

Alan: And you power all that

Paul: Right.

Alan: My last interview was with

Paul: That’s a great vision. And

Alan: Great. Because then I

Paul: I tell you, Alan.

Alan: I agree.

Paul: There’s a lot of people

Alan: Agreed. You know what?

Paul: Yeah, radio is a case in

Alan: Yeah, we still have radios

Paul: Yep.

Alan: And I think your Vuzix

Paul: Well, it’s off to a good

Alan: Well, I can’t wait to see

Paul: Thanks, Alan. We like to

Alan: Well, it’s a great story.

Paul: [laughs] Touché!

Alan: You know, I promised my

Paul: Yes. Thank you very much,

Nuclear energy is no joke, and to

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Vice, welcome to the show, my friend.

Vice: Hey, good morning. Thanks

Alan: It’s my pleasure. I’m

Vice: Well, as most things in

Alan: VRTO, it’s a small

Vice: It’s getting smaller and

Alan: Yeah, it’s amazing. This

Vice: Well, there’s a lot of

Alan: And one thing, there’s a

Vice: We learned a lot from that

Alan: What other senses are you

Vice: [chuckles] I don’t think

Alan: Yeah, it seems for now,

Vice: Yeah. Some things work and

Alan: Indeed. So have they ruled

Vice: They did a bunch of tests.

Alan: But let’s talk about the

Vice: Absolutely, yes.

Alan: Wow. That’s incredible.

Vice: I don’t think any other

Alan: That’s amazing. So let’s

Vice: Yeah, that was the most

Alan: It is really tedious.

Vice: Yes. Because really, there

Alan: Yeah.

Vice: In VR, this works perfect.

Alan: And it decreases the

Vice: Yeah. It decreases it to

Alan: You’ve explored a lot

Vice: That was an augmented

Alan: It’s all public knowledge.

Vice: I totally Googled it, just

Alan: You don’t want to step in

Vice: Generally, it is not

I’ll talk about the end result and then

Alan: It’s pretty amazing the

Vice: And the cone, the

Alan: You know, normally we talk

Vice: Yeah, that’s a nice thing

Alan: [laughs] Profits aside, I

Vice: For them, we’re working on

Alan: OK. So what other projects

Vice: Yeah, there’s a bunch of

Alan: You know, I’ve never had.

Vice: And there’s more than

Alan: Wow.

Vice: And kids– and it is a

Alan: I like it. Emma Rye, I

Vice: Yeah, it’s very clever. We

Alan: Would be very bad.

Vice: And we’ve run a bunch of

Alan: So if you can use this

Vice: Just one child, yes.

Alan: Wow. That’s incredible. Oh

Vice: Exactly. So we’re working

Alan: I want this for needles,

Vice: Yes. I also have a son

Alan: With something like VR, I

Vice: Yeah, it is actually. But

Alan: It’s true.

Vice: –it involves kids. You

Alan: You’re working on this–

Vice: That’s name of the other

Alan: I love it, I love it. Emma

Vice: The VR experience itself

Alan: I mean, what an amazing

Vice: We did a bunch of things.

Alan: Oh, that’s right.

Vice: But you can record inside

Alan: Oh, OK.

Vice: It takes a few days. So

Alan: How did you find that?

Vice: Again, my partner’s a

Alan: Ah, he’s like “Hey, I

Vice: “I have a guy who has

Alan: “I got a guy.”

Vice: Yeah.

Alan: Amazing. So you’re working

Vice: I don’t know. I mean,

Alan: [laughs] No kidding.

Vice: Of course it was a mockup.

Alan: We have to use that. You

Vice: Sure, I’ll sent it to you,

Alan: Amazing. So what are the

Vice: That’s an excellent

Alan: Yeah. Let’s talk about

Vice: Yep.

Alan: And I actually went

Vice: Yes, a little bit. We’ve

Alan: Yeah, I saw it today. You

Vice: Exactly. We did a fluffy

Alan: Were these– they used

Vice: I think so, yes. They used

Alan: Cool. Very cool. Yeah. We

Vice: Right.

Alan: So what do you think is

Vice: So very much capture, in

Alan: It’s interesting that this

Vice: Exactly. Everything is

Alan: Yeah, absolutely. There’s

Vice: Well, actually, you know,

Alan: And it has to. Here’s the

Vice: Google Glass.

Alan: [That’s]

Vice: You know, there’s a place

Alan: Absolutely. And I think

Vice: Yes.

Alan: And the technologies

Vice: Yeah. Open it up for

Alan: Exactly. And if you look

Vice: Amen.

Alan: All right, my friend.

Vice: I would say keep an open

Alan: That’s a great question.

Vice: You get this a lot, where

Alan: Yeah, I agree. And the

Vice: Yes. And “Vice”,

Alan: All right. Got it. I’m

Vice: It’s easy. Everybody does.

Alan: [laughs] Amazing, man. So

Vice: Ooh, of course. Sedation

Alan: Just to take all the money

Vice: It was my pleasure. Thanks

Sound effects sourced here,