XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusiness Technology Arts

XR for Business episodes

December 23, 2019 Exploring the Vast Worlds of Immersive Entertainment, with The Stinger Report’s Kevin Williams
Most kids who grew up spending too much time at the video
arcade wound up with fewer quarters and a few earfuls from their
parents. That’s not the case for Kevin Williams, who turned his
arcade addiction into a career as an out-of-home entertainment guru.
He drops in to talk about how XR is taking old ideas and breathing
new life into them.
Alan: Hey, you’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. In this episode coming up is Kevin Williams. He is the out-of-home location-based entertainment expert, and he’s what’s coming up next. We’re going to talk about Disney vision, the 90s, immersive entertainment, dream craft, driving go-karts in augmented reality, Great Wolf Lodge and magical wands. All that and much more coming up on the XR for Business Podcast. Founder of the DNA conference and publisher of the ever-mindblowing Stinger Report and my guest today, Kevin Williams. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Kevin: Thank you, Alan, a real
pleasure to be here. The check’s in the post.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. You don’t know this, but you’re one of my very first mentors in this entire industry. You were the first person I reached out to and you were so gracious with helping me understand this world of VR and AR before anybody really caught on to this. That was back in 2014, and I’ll never forget it. So thank you for being there for me.
Kevin: Oh, thank you for
remembering. Our industry only grows by the new people that you can
introduce to it.
Alan: And with that, I want to make a challenge to everybody in the industry who owns some sort of VR or AR device — and I am included in this. It’s easy for us to not remember the journey and excitement of our first few times of trying these technologies. I implore everybody and make a challenge to everybody that owns a device — or many devices, in our case — in the next seven days, to put it on as many heads as possible; to get those reactions, to re-energize yourself to the fact that wow, this technology is revolutionary, it is mind-blowing. And we have it sitting in our backpacks, sitting on our desks, sitting in our labs. Let’s show everybody.
Kevin: Well, that’s part of the
reason why I’m so passionate about augmented reality and virtual
reality being used in out-of-home entertainment. We can get a lot
more heads in it, rather than it just sitting on a shelf in the
development studio.
Alan: I couldn’t agree more. I
had the opportunity to meet with Dream Craft Attractions on the
weekend, and oh my goodness, they’ve even solved the problem of
hygiene! How do you put people in those masks without having to
sterilize all of the devices? So they came up with this ingenious
plastic helmet. Like, so smart. And then the VR headsets lower down.
Kevin: It’s interesting; you
talk about how long this industry has been going. I was just having a
conversation. You do understand that that two-part liner system is
actually based on the original idea that Walt Disney’s Imagineerium
had for their Disney-bution system.
Alan: “Disney-bution
system!”
Kevin: So, Disneyvision was the system that was its Epcot in the 90s. That’s where a lot of people first heard about virtual reality in the theme park sector. And because Disney at the time was trying to work out which was the best way to get people into virtual reality — and this technology is clunky, was using CRTs — they came up with a two-part system where there was a liner that you put on first, and then the head-mounted display component clipped into that liner when you go to the right, standing in the queue line. As they say, nothing is new; it’s just the wrappers that change. Here we are, 2018-2019, and the same principle is being used by these guys. And it’s obviously at the Lions Gate theme park attraction in Asia.
Alan: So I got to ask this,
Kevin; you are literally the well of knowledge for all things
location-based entertainment. You’ve been hosting the Stinger report
for many years now?
Kevin: 25, now.
Alan: 25 years. Walk us through
where the single reporters come from, what your first episode was,
what you were covering, and then kind of walk us through — maybe by
five-year blocks or decades, even — where we’ve come from there?
Kevin: I’ve always been a fan of
immersive entertainment, since I opened both in the arcade industry.
That’s really back in the 80s. I got sucked into video amusements. It
was a hard drug, and a hard taskmaster. And then when I had to start
earning a living, I built upon… I had been a reviewer in my spare
time, of the early microcomputer video games. I’ve got into reviewing
and evaluating arcade machines. And that’s how I got sucked into that
sector. Without boring your listeners to death, the fundamental
Stinger Report is, I have always been writing in the trade magazines
— I’m an appalling writer — but my English teacher taught me the
only way that I can improve my English is by constantly exercising
the muscle. I’ve been writing for a lot of times, and I had been
writing up until — the Stinger Report was released in the 90s —
I’ve been writing a lot of the trade magazines that existed. I’ve
been also writing some consumer games mags. And I noticed that my
writing was being censored quite heavily, regarding “the dirt,”
as I like to call it; the interesting stuff. Like I just imparted
there, the reason why it’s interesting to look at what Dream Craft
operated, but also to use the lens of history to see how it has
evolved, and how we got from A to B.
Alan: Basically what you’re saying, Kevin, is you’re calling people’s bullshit.
Kevin: No. That’s unfair, because one man’s bullshit is another man’s caviar. I am not God. I do not have all the answers. I make mistakes like everybody else, and it’s unfair for me to say I am right and you are wrong. What I try and do is collect enough information. I was taught in college that the only way that you could try and get to the basics of any problem is by collecting enough facts, or enough information that you can treat as facts. And so, I love history. I am a super-nerd, and I also like playing detective. I like tracing the money in many of these projects. For example, we’re just finishing a Stinger Report where we’re talking about the developments of a brand new theory of augmented reality systems being deployed in a facility. It’s not a new idea. It’s just taking an older idea and utilizing new technology. That’s fundamentally what we have in the out-of-home entertainment sector. Nothing’s changed from the carnival, from the theme park. Walt Disney back in 1955 recognized everything that we’re doing in the current modern out-of-home entertainment industry. It’s just we’re applying the same metrics with new technology. So to your point, I don’t call bullshit. I just follow the lines.
Alan: And you’ve been following
these lines for 25 years. What’s so dramatically different now? I
look at the VR and AR industry as kind of the boy who cried wolf.
We’ve been screaming how great VR is for so many years. Nobody gives
a shit anymore, and rightfully so. Myself included, we’ve been
marketing this as a revolutionary technology for everything from
teeth brightening to Ginsu knives.
Kevin: Yes, I’m waiting for it
to do my laundry. They keep on promising.
Alan: So what are the real
things that are making a difference? What have you seen recently that
you’re like, “holy crap. We have rounded a corner. This is a
different time?”
Kevin: I work in the immersive entertainment industry. I don’t work in the VR industry. I don’t work in the augmented reality industry, in the CAVE industry, in the 3D projection mapping industry. I work in immersive. And what’s happened is connectivity, digital entertainment and interactivity have become understandable, controllable and repeatable to the point — courtesy of the consumer game, mobile phones, courtesy of digital entertainment and simulation and training — and all of this technology has now switched together., and certain dreams that we’ve had in the theme park industry are now achievable with the magic of the current technology. It’s achievable. I’m not saying what’s being successful; it’s achievable.
Alan: Give us an example.
Kevin: We’ve always wanted to be
able to know when a member of the audience wants to go left, rather
than right, in a digital attraction and take the audience along with
them. So if you ride Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom attraction,
there’s this fake steering wheel on the ride that makes people think
they’re steering the experience. But really, it’s a toss of a coin
whether you go right to the temple or left through a waterfall. Now,
with interactivity — with tracking, web entertainment, with
gamification — we can now have the audience do what they want to do.
And that makes a big difference because they can do what they want to
do, they can come back again and again, and it changes each time, and
we get repeat visitation and our prices go up.
Alan: It’s kind of like going to a video arcade. So we have a couple of them here. We’ve got Playdium and we’ve got the Rec Room, and you go there and you play some racing games, right? You sit down with some friends and you’re racing, and that’s fun. But then you step outside and then you’ve got a go-kart.
Kevin: Yeah.
Alan: And it’s a different visceral experience, driving a go-kart with your friends.
Kevin: Physicality.
Alan: There’s a physicality. There’s a bit of danger there. Which of the attractions that you’ve seen recently have kind of giving you that feeling like, “wow, I am I’m on a dragon,” or “I’m racing a motorbike?” What gives somebody that rush, that isn’t the physical footprint of an actual go-kart track, because that is expensive. A roller coaster is expensive to build. How can we deliver that in a digital means that is convincing enough? Or what have you seen that is?
Kevin: So in the go-karts we see companies like Meleap with their Hado Kart system, where you actually feel that you’re in Mario [Kart]. So I’m sitting in a normal go-kart, and I think environment. But when I put on the HoloLens headset, I see in front of me the bombs, coins, scores of the competitors. So that was an addition. So that, Alan, is the addition of technology to take a mundane experience and take it to a new level.
Alan: Hold on Kevin, did you just say, “I put on a HoloLens and I drive an actual go-kart and I get to go pick up coins and stuff?”
Kevin: Correct.
Alan: I want one, where can I
try this?
Kevin: Japan at the moment, and hopefully it’ll be at the IL show. But there is another company that has developed it one stage further. There’s an issue here in our industry that we have a concern about putting head-mounted displays and glasses on people’s heads if you’re dealing with thousands of guests. We now have two companies that developed a version of that where rather than using augmented reality, they use 3D projection mapping, and they’re actually projecting onto the surface of the go-cart course. The coins, the power-ups, boosters, the big stuff.
Alan: That’s incredible.
Kevin: This is immersion. This
is what’s really thrilling me, Alan, that we’re seeing these kinds of
applications. And this is going back to everybody thought they’d be
wearing AR glasses while driving their car to get the heads-up
display. Now all we do is we just project onto the windshield. That’s
the equivalent of making it really simple, stupid.
Alan: We’ve been overthinking
this stuff.
Kevin: Yes! We have been overthinking it! And we have been overthinking what the level of immersion some people want. Do you want to have a head-mounted display, or would you rather have the images projected onto the surface you can interact with? I’ve been looking at this augmented reality climbing wall, and it’s seamless, and it’s compelling. And the other nice thing about it is people standing around the climbing wall can see the experience that the individual’s having, where sadly, with some augmented reality and virtual reality experiences, all you’re looking at is some fool with a head mount on.
Alan: That’s not that exciting
until you fall down.
Kevin: Yeah, exactly. It’s that
aspect of, what are you trying to achieve? Is it to be fun, or are
you trying to sell technology? And a lot of my work as a consultant
is trying to get companies, investors and developers to look at what
we’re really here for, which is to create compelling immersive
entertainment environments.
Alan: I’m going to take it back just a little bit, because honestly, you nailed it when you said “fun.” That’s really all people want, to have fun; when they’re watching movies, when listening to music.
Kevin: They want to have fun
with their friends and family. Only people like me go to these
entertainment facilities on their own. 80 percent of people who walk
through the doors of family entertainment centers, urban
entertainment centers, bar and club, hospitality sites, theme parks,
casinos, visitor attractions, and retail-atainment are going there in
groups. And if they’re not going in there in groups, they’re using
social media to show their friends they’re having a good time.
Alan: I think we’re reaching
this point — and I think this is a great segment — because we’re
reaching a point in time where let’s call it the next 10 years. I
don’t know if it’s five, 10, whatever, but we’re going to really wear
glasses in our daily lives. They’ll game-ify and fun-ify our lives,
and we’ll be able to have different representations of ourselves to
the world, and this mass consumerism that we’ve built our entire
economic systems around — perhaps we can scale it back a bit, and
just enjoy the experiences with other people, and do things digitally
rather than physically and kind of slow the expansion of our minings
and physical objects?
Kevin: So it’s a fun domain. Even though I firmly wear an out-of-home entertainment hat, I also have to wear a futurist’s hat, which is, I have to keep up-to-date with technology. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is technology saturation and overload. So one of the things that companies are now talking about is how do they ease back on the technology and make the experience more personable? And I’ve noticed that it’s getting more and more that we’re trying to go for a frictionless experience. You’ve noticed now that we don’t want to put our hands in our pocket to pull out change or notes. We want to be able to just tap our phone and pay for small items — or even medium-sized items — with frictionless. We’re prepared to give away some of our, shall we say, freedoms — I don’t mean social freedoms, but I just mean control freedoms day to day life — for a simpler, more compelling experience. And so you’ll be seeing in the theme park industry the removal of the paper ticket, and the appearance of the wrist band. By giving away a little bit of my freedom by having that wrist band. That means that I don’t have to carry a key to my lockers. I don’t have to have a key to my door. I don’t have to have my wallet on me when I want to buy a burger. And I don’t have to stand in the queue for three hours to get to the front of the ride.
Alan: So I have children. And
one of the places we’ve taken them is a place called Great Wolf
Lodge.
Kevin: Oh, yes. Did they lock in
their wands?
Alan: They have figured it out,
man. Every kid gets — every person — gets a wristband. Then you can
go where you want in this giant hotel that’s a million square feet.
It’s got a water park the size of any major water park. And you’d
never have to leave for the three days you’re there, and your kids
are safe running around with a wristband because they can buy
anything they want, of course.
Kevin: So the wristband gives you the security that you know your kids, if they even migrate out of the coverage of that wristband, alarms go off. Number two, you can go to any member of staff and ask where they are. Number three, they feel empowered, children, because they’re now grown-ups, because you let them off the leash. You haven’t wrapped them in bubble wrap and won’t let them run away. You are allowing them to be themselves. And depending on which venue you went to, there is a fantastic wand game that was created, and the kids get it and the parents are beginning to get it. It’s an equivalent of, before Pokemon Go was Pokemon Go, these guys at Great Wolf created a really fun experience. And it’s so fun that the adults get into it. It’s usually — for those I haven’t seen it — it’s RFID wands. But when you do a special motion near certain game terminals, if you do your magic movement correctly, then it opens up a narrative and you try to learn all the special moves to create points. And in some cases, people are going back again and again to that experience. And it’s not high-tech by any means. It’s showing its age. But when a game works, and — remember this word — when it’s fun, they’ll keep on coming back.
Alan: Wow. I mean, that’s the
snippet. When it works and it’s fun, people will come back for more.
Kevin: That’ll be on my
gravestone. The fundamentals are, we’re at that point — I spend all
my time tracking the motions of technology and investments and
entertainment — and we’re at that point now where we’ve been
saturated with virtual reality and even a little bit of augmented
reality. We’re now getting to the when the rubber meets the road
moments in our industry. In my particular part of the industry.
Alan: So what attractions in
virtual and augmented reality have you seen that you think, “wow,
this has staying power?” I mean, for me, the first one comes to
mind is The Void. They’ve got all different experiences. Each one is
completely unique. They’re multiplayer. I get to play with my
friends. They’re not inexpensive. They have a monetization strategy
and they don’t take a lot of footprint in a venue.
Kevin: So, for the audience that
is not familiar with this, we’re talking about arena-scale VR. This
is putting a backpack on and traversing through an environments. The
Void is different compared to companies like Zero Latency, who just
have the backpack, and multiple players involved in game narrative.
The Void has gone down the path of trying to create virtual
environments — hyper realities, they like to call it — where you
put the backpack on, you put the head-mounted display, and then
you’re pushed into an environment, and something that you’re going to
see in our industry in the next couple of years is a lot of
intellectual property — movies, television, fantasy experiences —
being turned into arena-scale entertainment experiences, where you
and your friends go through this experience that they will recognize
from the movie. Our friends at The Void started with Ghostbusters and
are creating really compelling Ghostbusters experiences.
Alan: The Ghostbusters
experience blew my mind and changed my life.
Kevin: That smell of marshmallow.
Alan: Oh my god, the smell of
marshmallows. That was it. I was sold. OK, Void. Take my money. I’m
in.
Kevin: And then when they did
Star Wars, for those people that have done the Star Wars one, where
you’re playing a rebel, infiltrating a base, pretending to be
Stormtroopers; it was the smell of the ash and the volcanic pumice
that sucks a lot of people in, the feeling of the heat.
Alan: Crazy — the scent. I keep
telling people–
Kevin: And then we’ve Wreck-It
Ralph. The smell of the cookies and the sweets. So one of the things
you don’t understand is the physicality. I used that phrase earlier
on. Virtual reality is okay, but it don’t have that level of
physicality, be it olfactory smell. Audio is spatial sound. Decent
graphics, vibrating thralls and seats. If you don’t have that added
juice, then you have nothing. That’s a big difference between what we
do in the immersive entertainment industry and what you’re doing in
the consumer industry. It’s different to the VR experience you get in
our industry.
Alan: So Kevin, this is exactly
why location-based entertainment will always have the most powerful
experiences, because one, I can’t afford to have a complete motion
simulator in my house with scent machines and all of this craziness.
Not to say that I don’t want it, but I can’t afford it.
Kevin: Yeah. If you could, you
would.
Alan: But it’s not reasonable to
think about that. But I can go to a place, pay 25 bucks and I can go
and experience the most mind-blowing VR in the world. Now, you
mentioned feeling haptics, spatial audio, graphics scent. As many of
the listeners know, my passion is education and training, and I feel
that education and learning is really competing with Hollywood
movies, Triple A games, and of course, social media. So how do you
then take the best of those three worlds and this out-of-home
entertainment experience, and apply that to learning things? How do
we give learners the ability to fully, viscerally learn something in
a way that means something to them, and also challenges them to be
the best at what they do?
Kevin: Well, many of your listeners might not be familiar, but I come from a military simulation background, so I got sucked into military besome back in the early 90s because that was the only place that had the technology — the graphical processing technology — to create the high-level of engagement we wanted to achieve in the theme park industry. And so we called it the soul beating the swords into plowshares, taking the latest flight simulator computer systems and flight motion-based systems and creating Star Tours. That’s the kind of lineage. And so we are still stealing from the training industry, and putting that type of technology into our entertainment facilities’ next generation. I just did a presentation here in Mountain View for Technology Summit and they were talking about the latest CAVEs — computer augmented virtual environments — that allow you to walk into a projected box where you are literally dropped into the virtual experience. No need for a head-mounted display. No need 3D glasses, because you’re pushing the latest 8K projections onto every surface around me, including the floor that I’m standing on. And that is the kind of visceral emotion that we’re getting at the moment. And to your point, one day you’re running a virtual reality arcade facility. The next day, possibly when you have a downturn, you’re running experientials; you’re running virtual tours. We have a client at the moment that’s done a fantastic job with National Geographic to create an immersive and compelling virtual tour of unique locations around the world. So you have hundreds of people with head-mounted displays, sitting in an auditorium, going on a virtual field trip. That is the future. If we can create compelling immersive entertainment, then we can create a compelling immersive training.
Alan: We have to fix this
problem, because we’re about to enter a phase of humanity, of
exponential growth in everything we do, and every job will change —
and change rapidly. IBM is estimating 120 million people need to be
re-skilled, retrained and upskilled, due to AI robotics and
automation, only in the next three years.
Kevin: And IBM always goes for a
low number. So if they’re low-balling this, just imagine what the
reality is going to be.
Alan: I can’t even imagine;
we’re going to run into a problem. There’s a deficit of 7-million
trade workers a year in the US and that’s just the US. Kids don’t
want to [grow up to] be trade workers. This is a well-documented
fact.
Kevin: I try not to generalize,
but I know that the majority of kids have seen their peers making
easy money and easy lifestyles, and want to get their share of that.
I understand that. But I also meet a lot of creative individuals that
want to get into the industries that I work into, or want to get into
the industries that are associated with it. So we need to kill the
gatekeepers, open up the libraries, and improve the teaching tools.
Alan: One hundred percent, couldn’t have said it better myself. So speaking of learning and learning fast, one of the ways that I learn faster than anything is going to conferences. And you mentioned two things. You mentioned your modeling and simulation, or military simulations. There’s a conference coming up in Orlando called ITSEC. And it’s the world’s largest modeling simulation and training event. And then the second one is the IAAPA, the Global Association for the Attractions Industry. I believe that’s also in Orlando, actually.
Kevin: Same exhibition facility.
It’s a weird feeling; at the end of IAAPA, I then walk outside
slightly, adjust my tie, change my lanyard, then walk back into the
show and it’s changed into simulation. And in some cases, we have
exhibitors at the theme park show who also come from the military
simulation and training side. You know, companies like D-Box. They
make the motion seats, your cinemas. They also make motion seats for
some of the latest virtual reality immersive attractions like Virtual
Rabbids. But they also make the motion systems for your Abrahams tank
training.
Alan: It’s kind of crazy.
Orlando’s this little hub where you have attractions — Disney and
Universal and all these companies. Then you’ve got NASA making and
launching space shuttles, and then you’ve got all the branches of the
military.
Kevin: And then you’ve also got
all of the computer graphics companies, Lockheed Martin and I think
ES has still got their operations out there. The history of Florida
and Orlando especially, and how it is married to entertainment,
technology, space and military is an interesting one, but that would
take a long time.
Alan: That’s another podcast all
in itself. And you know what we’ll do?
Kevin: That’s all on its own.
Alan: We’ll get John Cunningham
and we’ll get some of the people from UCF and Lockheed Martin.
Kevin: Oh, yeah.
Alan: We’ll get them out. We’ll
have a joint podcast. We’ll see if we can do an Orlando
based-podcast, maybe from ITSEC and IAAPA. It’d be interesting.
Kevin: Some of your listeners may not know that I’m an ex-Walt Disney Imagineer. And so I love the history of what Disney sets out to do with this theme park business. And it’s interesting to find out that even military mission and military business has had tentacles into the Disney decision to open up in Orlando.
Alan: That’s incredible. Oh, my
goodness. Wow. Kevin, it is always a pleasure to speak with you, to
learn from you. This is a question that I think you’re uniquely
qualified to answer. What problem in the world do you want to see
solved using XR technologies?
Kevin: XR technologies?
Stupidity.
Alan: OK… Explain.
Kevin: I would like people to be
able to use the latest technology to get more information quicker so
they understand situations better.
Alan: All right.
Kevin: So I was always taught by
my parents to be situationally aware; don’t just walk into a place.
Understand where you, why you’re there. It’s important to be able to
just… what happens when the fire alarms go? Do you know where the
exits are? Just simple things like that are really useful. It’s
situational awareness. It’s not just knowing the layout of the
building that you’re sitting in, but also the reason why certain
things are the way they are. And so a lot of people like to use the
Internet to grab information quickly. But only having a little bit of
the information gives you no real pictures. As my dad always said,
“too little information is worse than too much.” And I’m a
little concerned now because we have limited information available to
our fingertips really quickly. We treat that as gospel. And the whole
point about XR technologies, hopefully it can give us even more
information, but simply presented to us. So rather than just knowing
that when I ask Siri what the weather is today, Siri tells me that
it’s going to be sunny and raining, a decent XR version of that would
be able to show you places where I’m walking today. The possibilities
of changeability, and also little understanding of do I need a coat
or an umbrella for the rest?
Alan: Yeah, I think in the case
of when we wear glasses all the time, less is more.
Kevin: There you go. Incumbant
technology. I’ve got this funny feeling, with the price drop in
projection technology and the new tracking technology, that we may
not be walking around with little pieces of plastic and glass in our
pockets in the future. It may be the other way round, where we are
walking around and the screens are following us.
Alan: Explain.
Kevin: Projection mapping. Just
think if you had automated projection systems in a space.
Alan: We have projection mapping
now. We even have a company…
Kevin: EyeClick?
Alan: No. It’s like a
camera-based system that allows you to projection map on anything
pretty easily.
Kevin: Oh, you mean castAR,
those guys?
Alan: No, it’s not AR.
Kevin: Tri-Fi’s the version
where you ever–
Alan: Lightform, Lightform!
Kevin: Oh yes. Well, yes, you
have that. But sadly, you still have to wear it, don’t you?
Alan: What I’m saying is if you
hit a LightForm everywhere, with a projector attached to it on…
let’s say you walking down the street and I could turn a wall or just
a standard pedestrian wall into anything. The thing is, we have these
technologies now to do–
Kevin: Yes we do.
Alan: –insanely amazing things,
and yet we don’t do it. I live in Toronto, and maybe other places —
Montreal has done a very good job at projection mapping, and some
other cities — but it’s almost like, we’re missing out on this very
simple way to communicate messages and I think maybe the reason why
it’s not exploded as it is because commercial entities tried to make
it commercial rather than art.
Kevin: Exactly.
Alan: And art is something
that’s visceral. And then we can all buy into. Ads are like, yeah,
OK, great. Show me something cool.
Kevin: So one of the best 3D
projection mapped environments that I’ve ever been in was for an art
exhibit. The Linked to MONIA. And it was beautiful, compelling and it
was visceral. And that’s it; no Coca-Cola or Pepsi or KFC are going
to fund that. They just want to be able to say “eat Coke”
and stick it on the side of the wall. “Drink KFC” and stick
on the wall and to be compelling. We have to look beyond the
technology and look at what we can deliver. And then what you
invigorate and excite people with the opportunities of what you
deliver, that’s when it gets driven. So when I say I expect every
service to be turned into a screen, I don’t see us wearing a headband
or contact lenses. I actually get the feeling that maybe the light
sockets in the future will not just be an illumination device, but it
also have a little Pico projector in there and it will track you when
you walk into the room. And if you look at the wall, you make the
hand gesture. It will project a lovely 8K display of that. And it
will do everything that my phone can do and more.
Alan: That’s insane.
Kevin: But that’s that’s what
people want. They don’t want to have to put on a cardboard box.
Alan: It may be practical in
closed spaces like museums; public spaces, maybe not.
Kevin: Alan! I work in the
out-of-home entertainment industry!
Alan: So places where you can
control it. So if you’re a Disney… oh I get it now. Oh, shit. Oh,
yeah. Cool. Why don’t we do that now? I don’t get it. What the hell?
Kevin: It’s expensive. It’s
expensive.
Alan: Yeah, for sure.
Kevin: Oh, the 8K projection
systems. So we’re working on a couple of projects that are based on
CAVE technology, Computer Augmented Virtual Environments, and they’re
using the latest projectors 8K and 4K max projectors. And it’s
expensive to fill that whole environment. The price is coming down.
But to answer your question about why technologists aren’t jumping on
projection mapping is much more. It’s not just the reason about the
content. It’s not just the reason about application. It’s also about
where you put your resources. One of the largest manufacturers of
projectors is also a very large manufacturer of digital displays of
OLED and LED displays going to mobile phones and into the laptops.
That would be essential. But you could also say the same of Sony. You
could also say the say of HTC. You know, there are companies that
have to marshal their resources with the Tokyo Olympics coming up
next year. You’re going to be seeing a lot of projection systems —
the latest projections — and you can see a lot of 8K projections.
First Olympics that will be broadcast 8K. Now, there’s not many
PLACES around–
Alan: That’s insane.
Kevin: Yeah, this is totally
insane, especially what you saw at CES this year. There’s not many
places in the consumer sector where you can have an 8K screen
outside.
Alan: I think the highlight of
my CES — besides the crazy helicopter — there was like a rolling 4K
display. It rolled out of a box. It’s nuts. I don’t think I saw
anything 8K — or very few anyway.
Kevin: Oh, yeah. There are a
couple. There are a couple of the super display systems. And you
know, you can always spot them because they’re the ones where people
are grilling meat on the boxes, as these things get HOT. And you can
see the big cables going into that. But these aren’t really
considered for consumer at the moment. These are being looked at as
commercial display systems. And so I think most people will get to
see the 8K presentation when they go to their local cinema and they
get to see the latest projection system pushing out the Olympic
experience. Again, horses for courses and it’s content driving this.
I wouldn’t be surprised that the interest that the Olympics next year
generates in this kind of high quality visuals will encourage people
in our sector. But there’s one thing to also understand about pushing
out high-quality visuals. Not always a success. We’ve seen the
problems that the high def screens have caused with production
quality; makeup has become much more dangerous. Warts and zits.
Zooming in on people’s faces are all issues that need to be avoided.
The higher the quality doesn’t mean always the better image.
Alan: Indeed, indeed. Well,
Kevin. This has been an amazing conversation. We could probably talk
about this forever. Where can people find you? Where where can people
learn more about what you’re doing?
Kevin: I’m always on Facebook, always on Twitter, always will. Linkedin: look up Kevin Williams of KWP and you should hunt me down. If you want to send us an email it’s [email protected], that will get me wherever I am, if you want to get onto the subscription list of the Stinger Reports. Just send me an email with subscription on it. I’ll make sure that you receive it. We write a lot of articles for the trade pubs. I also have a column in VR Focus that I’m going to be starting up again and I hope to have completed by the end of the year with our co-author Michael Mascioni, a sequel to a previous book. In 2013-14, we launched the first book, The Immersive Frontier, and a sequel to that is coming out at the beginning of next year, that goes into the details of the immersive opportunities and out-of-home entertainment, and also is looking a little bit towards the future. We like a little bit of crystal ball.
41 min
December 23, 2019 Exploring the Vast Worlds of Immersive Entertainment, with The Stinger Report’s Kevin Williams
Most kids who grew up spending too much time at the video
arcade wound up with fewer quarters and a few earfuls from their
parents. That’s not the case for Kevin Williams, who turned his
arcade addiction into a career as an out-of-home entertainment guru.
He drops in to talk about how XR is taking old ideas and breathing
new life into them.
Alan: Hey, you're listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. In this episode coming up is Kevin Williams. He is the out-of-home location-based entertainment expert, and he's what's coming up next. We're going to talk about Disney vision, the 90s, immersive entertainment, dream craft, driving go-karts in augmented reality, Great Wolf Lodge and magical wands. All that and much more coming up on the XR for Business Podcast. Founder of the DNA conference and publisher of the ever-mindblowing Stinger Report and my guest today, Kevin Williams. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Kevin: Thank you, Alan, a real
pleasure to be here. The check's in the post.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. You don't know this, but you're one of my very first mentors in this entire industry. You were the first person I reached out to and you were so gracious with helping me understand this world of VR and AR before anybody really caught on to this. That was back in 2014, and I'll never forget it. So thank you for being there for me.
Kevin: Oh, thank you for
remembering. Our industry only grows by the new people that you can
introduce to it.
Alan: And with that, I want to make a challenge to everybody in the industry who owns some sort of VR or AR device -- and I am included in this. It's easy for us to not remember the journey and excitement of our first few times of trying these technologies. I implore everybody and make a challenge to everybody that owns a device -- or many devices, in our case -- in the next seven days, to put it on as many heads as possible; to get those reactions, to re-energize yourself to the fact that wow, this technology is revolutionary, it is mind-blowing. And we have it sitting in our backpacks, sitting on our desks, sitting in our labs. Let's show everybody.
Kevin: Well, that's part of the
reason why I'm so passionate about augmented reality and virtual
reality being used in out-of-home entertainment. We can get a lot
more heads in it, rather than it just sitting on a shelf in the
development studio.
Alan: I couldn't agree more. I
had the opportunity to meet with Dream Craft Attractions on the
weekend, and oh my goodness, they've even solved the problem of
hygiene! How do you put people in those masks without having to
sterilize all of the devices? So they came up with this ingenious
plastic helmet. Like, so smart. And then the VR headsets lower down.
Kevin: It's interesting; you
talk about how long this industry has been going. I was just having a
conversation. You do understand that that two-part liner system is
actually based on the original idea that Walt Disney's Imagineerium
had for their Disney-bution system.
Alan: "Disney-bution
system!"
Kevin: So, Disneyvision was the system that was its Epcot in the 90s. That's where a lot of people first heard about virtual reality in the theme park sector. And because Disney at the time was trying to work out which was the best way to get people into virtual reality -- and this technology is clunky, was using CRTs -- they came up with a two-part system where there was a liner that you put on first, and then the head-mounted display component clipped into that liner when you go to the right, standing in the queue line. As they say, nothing is new; it's just the wrappers that change. Here we are, 2018-2019, and the same pri
41 min
December 20, 2019 Staking Claim to a Digital Plot in AR, with SuperWorld’s Hrish Lotlikar
Imagine owning the
digital real estate surrounding the Taj Mahal. Well, to be real with
you, you can’t have all of it – today’s guest, SuperWorld co-founder
Hrish Lotlikar, already has a piece. But he’s made it easy for anyone
who wants it to buy the rest, and other plots of digital real estate
around the world.
He also talks about The
Rogue Initiative and SingularityNET!
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is
Hrish Lotlikar from the Rogue Initiative, SuperWorld app, and
SingularityNET. Hrish is the co-founder and chief business
development officer for the Rogue Initiative, a Los Angeles based
entertainment company composed of award winning entertainment
industry professionals, including alumni from Amblin Entertainment,
Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Disney, Activision and they are creating
new original feature films, television, AAA cinematic interactive VR,
and gaming content. He’s also the co-founder of SuperWorld —
superworldapp.com — which is Foursquare meets Pokemon Go meets
Monopoly in the real world, building a community in AR, powered by
the blockchain. They’ve built an AR real estate marketplace, ad
marketplace on the blockchain, which also acts as a social AR app,
allowing users to personalize their real world by adding anything,
anywhere in augmented reality with photos, videos, texts, and 3D
objects, and share those experiences with their followers. He’s also
an advisor of SingularityNET, a decentralized marketplace for AI
algorithms allowing companies, organizations, and developers to buy
and sell AI at scale. Previously to this, he was in venture capital,
but he got better. If you want to learn more about Hrish’s
initiatives, you can go to the Rogue Initiative, which is
therogueinitiative.com,
SuperWorld, which is superworldapp.com,
and SingularityNET, which is singularitynet.io.
Hrish, welcome to the show, my friend.
Hrish: Hey, thanks so much for
having me, Alan. I appreciate it. Looking forward to having this
conversation.
Alan: Oh, absolute pleasure. You
do a lot in this space. And the first time we met was at– I think
it’s now called Global World Summit. But it was called– what was it
called before?
Hrish: The VR/AR Conference?
Alan: Yeah.The VR/AR Association
Conference. But let’s unpack these amazing initiatives that you’re
doing. Let’s start with the one that’s Rogue.
Hrish: Yeah.
Alan: Tell us about it.
Hrish: Sure, yeah. So, Rogue
Initiative we started back in late 2015. My co-founders, Pete Blumel
and Cathy Twigg. The goal of the Rogue Initiative was looking at the
convergence of linear, Hollywood, traditional entertainment and
interactive entertainment. And how could we — from the ground up —
create new original properties that brought those forms of
entertainment together? Because there is a confluence of technology
and Silicon Valley in Hollywood that was coming together. And how do
we how do we kind of leverage that, to create new original content
that goes across all of those medium? So building and developing a
new story that starts on the feature film side and then organically
moves to interactive all the way through TV, through all the way to
amusement park rides and toys. So building franchises from the ground
up, bringing in top Hollywood talent and interactive talent, and
knowing from the foundations of creating that content, that we’re
building it to go across all those mediums. And that’s the kind of
high level vision of the Rogue Initiative.
Alan: Very cool. So let’s move
on to SuperWorld app. Let’s talk about that. What is that about?
Hrish: So SuperWorld, I
co-founded with Max Woon. Max co-founded Xfire and sold it to Viacom,
and he’s been involved in several other companies at the very
foundational level. Even in the VR/AR side with Sliver, and he’s been
involved in toonstar, and SKIT, and Phizzle. And we got together
because we saw Pokemon Go become the fastest company to hit a billion
dollars in revenue, and just the growth and excitement around
location based AR and putting kind of gamification on that, and
bringing in a big license brand. And we thought if we can build the
next Pokemon Go, wouldn’t it be great to build a place where the next
thousand Pokemon Gos get built on? And that’s kind of the vision
behind SuperWorld. It’s an augmented reality platform, where users
and brands can create AR around them and put anything around them
anywhere. And then that would be characterized as kind of like
Pokemon Go meets Foursquare, right? Pokemon Go is putting digital
objects around you anywhere, Foursquare’s the data elements of that.
And we have a big data strategy at SuperWorld. And then the third
part of SuperWorld is Monopoly. So how do you basically sell or buy
the world? And if you buy the world, or buy parts of the world —
we’re selling the whole world in 100 meter by 100 meter plots of land
— you get a share of any of the XR commerce that happens on the land
that you own. And we built that on the Etherium blockchain. So each
plot of land is a non-fungible token, that once bought can be
repriced to whatever you want. So it’s a unique digital asset. We’re
getting people buying the world, and so the analogy is back to 2009,
with Bitcoin launching and there’s a finite amount of it, or domain
names back in ’95, if you had the opportunity to buy a really cool
domain name. And so that’s kind of the excitement around SuperWorld.
Alan: So what properties of you.
Hrish: But so far I’ve bought a
few select properties around the world, just places that I have
nostalgic kind of interest in, historical places. I think I have a
piece of the Taj Mahal, and the pyramids in Egypt, and some places in
Manhattan, but I definitely want to keep a lot of stuff for our users
to buy. So I didn’t buy too many, but we kind of see it as as a way
for people to buy things around their interests. So back to what I
was interested in, there’s other people that are interested in
sports. There’s a lot of people who come in and buy a lot of sports
stadiums. Other people buy downtown. Some people buy their apartment,
or where they live, or where they once lived. So it’s kind of
interesting when you think about the XR world, the digital land
around you, there’s different reasonings that people have to buy
things. So it’s kind of fun to watch that.
Alan: It’s pretty cool. I’m
actually just buying something right now. [laughs]
Hrish: [laughs] Awesome. And
remember, what’s really cool about this is when you buy a property —
it’s .1 ether, so about twenty five bucks or so right now — is you
can reprice it for whatever you want. So if you’re like, “This
is a valuable property,” you could say “Hey, that’s 500K
now.” And so what’s cool about this, is now you have 500K of
real world dollar property in SuperWorld, so you’re not just a user,
you’re like a stakeholder.
Alan: Cool. I have to buy some
etherium and bitcoins to do this.
Hrish: Yeah, yeah. You have to
transfer some ether to your account.
Alan: All right. I have to go to
in– this is going to be more than I can do just on the phone here.
Hrish: [laughs]
Alan: I’ll figure it out.
Awesome. Well, I’m definitely going to go buy a block of land,
because why not? What land should I buy? I feel like the Monopoly is
when you got me, I was like “I’m in!”
Hrish: Yeah.
Alan: I’m going to buy my
property!
Hrish: [laughs] You know, what’s
funny is that I haven’t seen anyone just buy one. When you buy one
and you get your head around what we’re trying to build, it’s very
hard to buy just one because, you’ll probably.
Alan: I’m going to make a
suggestion on the app.
Hrish: Yeah?
Alan: When you click the spot to
buy, the picture comes up over the spot. So I can’t really see what
spot it is.
Hrish: Yeah, you can adjust the
screen if you’re on your mouse, if you’re on your laptop or even on
your phone, you can kind of move it up and down. So you’ll be able to
kind of adjust that. But you’re right, it does do that sometimes. So
it’s something we’ve got to– yeah, definitely. If you adjust screen,
you’ll be able to see it. But the UX/UI is definitely one of the
things we’re working on improving.
Alan: I love it. I’m buying this
spot right here. Awesome. I got the perfect spot! I’m not telling
anybody where it is! But you’ll have to–
Hrish: Until you own it. Until
you own it. Then you’ll be telling everyone you own that spot.
Alan: Yeah! I own it! Pretty
cool.
Hrish: That’s what’s still going
on, is people talk about it naturally.
Alan: So yeah, let’s talk about
how businesses can start to kind of utilize this new idea of owning
virtual space.
Hrish: There is a lot of use cases for businesses as we think about the XR space around us. I think what’s wonderful about the medium is, you see through the success of Pokemon Go that there are people willing to — at this point, lift up their mobile phone — but definitely in the future with AR glasses coming around the corner, look around them and access contextual data. The way we think about it, — back to Pokemon Go for brands — it could be a brand like Coca-Cola or Nike who says, “Hey, why don’t you walk around your city or go around your city, and find all the rare Nike shoes that we have around the city.” And all of those shoes are interactive pieces of content. So you can collect points or play a game or all of that stuff is possible. But it also can be educational. It could be that I’m in my apartment, and I want to learn how to bake some cookies, I click on a button and I see Betty Crocker making cookies next to me.
Alan: Interesting. It’s really
exciting.
Hrish: It is a very different
way of thinking about building a social platform. And that’s what’s
kind of exciting about it, is thinking about how XR can be applied to
a decentralized type platform. I think decentralized media is a
concept that is going to become more and more important, as we see
issues with other more centralized forms of media and curation of
content, and news and other things. And so we’re really trying to
build SuperWorld and leverage the power of XR, but do it in a way
that takes into account people’s privacy, takes in account data
sharing, and it’s very permission[-based]. So that’s kind of all
parts of this vision, that we think about when we think about the XR
world around us. We don’t want to create a world where you’re being
bombarded with data and information that you don’t want, you can turn
it all off if you want, but you can also kind of in a very permission
way bring in XR type experiences into your environment that you want.
That’s all part of the vision that we’re going towards in SuperWorld.
Alan: So how will it work when
people want to create experiences? Then will you have like a set of
agencies or studios that you work with?
Hrish: Yeah. So that’s a good
point. So currently what we’re doing is working with brands that
we’re engaging with at SuperWorld. But ultimately we would like to
bring in other agencies and other developers on the AR creation side
into a marketplace where AR developers, individuals or companies can
work with brands and be able to create those experiences. At the end
of the day, what we would love to do is create an environment where
brands and developers can showcase their AR to users that want to
experience at AR and XR in all of its forms — whether it’s brands or
influencers or even just their friends — on the platform. So at this
stage, yeah, we’re kind of working on creating all the AR ourselves,
but ultimately we’d like to transition that to more of a marketplace
model.
Alan: Yeah, that makes sense.
So, there is one more company on the list of your incredible
companies here. SingularityNET.io, what’s that all about?
Hrish: Yeah, so
SingularityNET.io is a company founded by Dr. Ben Goertzel, who is
one of the top AI researchers in the world, well known for his role
as chief scientist at Hanson Robotics as well. Sofia — the humanoid
robot, if you’ve seen her — SingularityNET is Sofia’s software and
provides some of that software there. And so SingularityNET is an AI
marketplace. It’s a decentralized marketplace for AI algorithms. And
one of the things that we’re working on through SingularityNET —
where I serve as an advisor — is another company called Area 51,
which is a decentralized AI virtual avatar company. So, connecting
virtual avatars to the decentralized AI in order to make virtual
assistants, to make virtual influencers, to make virtual Hollywood
characters, there’s a lot of different use cases for virtual avatars
or virtual characters. And the point here is we’re connecting it all
to a decentralized artificial intelligence as part of SingularityNET.
Alan: Let’s go back to Rogue
Initiative for a minute. You guys are an entertainment company. What
are the experiences or things that you’ve done so far that people
could try?
Hrish: Sure. So we’ve launched
Crowe: The Drowned Armory on Oculus and HTC. HTC is also one of our
investors. We are in post-production with a cinematic VR experience
called Agent Emmerson, which should be released very soon. Actually,
we just got finished with that. So we’re working on getting it.
Alan: Is it volumetric or 360
video?
Hrish: It’s 360.
Alan: Right.
Hrish: Yeah.
Alan: And the Crowe one, is
that– it’s available on Steam, is it?
Hrish: Yes.
Alan: Great.
Hrish: That’s right. It’s on
Steam and Oculus.
Alan: Very cool. So those are
the new ones coming up. When is it coming out, the new one?
Hrish: It should be out soon. I
don’t have exact dates on it. We just got wrapped up on it, and we
announced it a while back. We had some delays in post-production. So
that just got finished. So we should have that, I’d say, out in the
next few months. We [were] planning on having it out earlier this
year, but we had some delays. The other thing that we’re working on
Rogue is a production with Michael Bay, the action director, which
has been announced. But we’ll have more announcements soon. And
that’s that’s going to be according to our model of building
franchises that go across interactive and linear production.
Alan: Very cool. That’s pretty
exciting. In one of my earlier interviews today, we were talking
about how Hollywood studios are starting to make these five to six
minute experiences to enhance the moviegoers’ experience. So you go
to the movies and watch the movie, then after the movie you can get
in VR and experience the movie as well.
Hrish: Yeah.
Alan: It’s– I think it’s really
interesting.
Hrish: It’s going to be going
beyond just a marketing vehicle, where people can experience aspects
of a movie. And I think we’re going to move towards fully interactive
entertainment, and that’s going to be very exciting. So I’m looking
forward to that. I know me personally would definitely enjoy an
experience where I have a lot more agency in entertainment. I’m very
excited about the future of that. But yeah, currently, it’s also a
really great marketing accompaniment to any kind of linear
entertainment on the feature film side.
Alan: Yes. Did you see the one
they did with– I think it was South By Southwest. It was a huge one
where you jumped out of a helicopter in VR and it was crazy.
Hrish: Was that this year?
Alan: Yeah, it was the Amazon
Prime show, Jack Something Or Other.
Hrish: OK. No, I didn’t see
that.
Alan: It was crazy, you have to
look it up. I’ll out it in the show notes. It was nuts. You literally
went on a– what’s the thing when you slide down the rope?
Hrish: Rappelling?
Alan: Rappelling, yeah. It was
like, you were rappelling across this vast thing in VR. You’re in VR
on a physical– it was nuts! Like, who thought this up?
Hrish: Crazy. I missed you at
South By this year. I didn’t see.
Alan: Yeah. I actually wasn’t at
South By this year, I didn’t go. I really wish I had been there, to
be honest. It was just a timing thing. I double-booked myself. I
didn’t realize.
Hrish: Ok. Yeah, there’s always
so much– I think GDC is going on at the same time. So it’s noise.
Alan: Yeah. Oh well. Next year,
I’ll be there. I was a judge for the South By Southwest Awards this
year.
Hrish: Oh really? Oh, that’s
right! I think I remember seeing that. That’s so cool. I’m sure you
saw a lot of good stuff.
Alan: Well, I was the judge for
AR or virtual and augmented reality and also blockchain. So I saw a
ton of blockchain companies, and a lot of them were working in the
kind of logistics and tracking where your food comes from and that
sort of thing. And I thought that was really cool.
Hrish: Wow. That’s– that is.
Yeah, there’s so much innovation going on around that.
Alan: Let me ask you a question.
What’s EastLabs?
Hrish: EastLabs is an early
stage accelerator that I founded about eight years ago in Ukraine.
The premise there is the region in Ukraine and Belarus and Russia
graduates some of the best and brightest technology programmers and
developers and designers. And the workforce over there — as you know
— is pretty amazing. And the top people end up working in
outsourcing for Facebook and Google and other top tech companies in
Silicon Valley. The ones that get to San Francisco, start Facebook
and Google and WhatsApp and the top tech companies. And so I started
EastLabs with two other partners, Eveline Buchatskiy and Olga
Belkova. Evelin ended up running TechStars in Boston and now runs a
venture capital fund called One Way Ventures, funding immigrant
entrepreneurs, and Olga’s in parliament now in Ukraine. But we got
backed by one of the biggest investors in the region, Victor Pinchuk,
and his EastOne Group, which is a large investor over there. And
basically the goal was, is how do we fund these awesome
technologists, these programmers, how do we get them together and
build world class companies that originate in Ukraine and then move
their front office to the US or Asia or wherever, whatever market
they’re targeting and keep their back office in that part of the
world? Which is where it should be, because they’re so good. And
that’s what we did. We invested in about 35 companies in Eastern
Europe, mainly in Ukraine. We sold one company, and two or three are
still doing very well and thriving. But most of all, a lot of the
founders that we invested in went on to start second or third
companies that have gotten funded by top theses in Silicon Valley and
gotten pretty well-known. So we kind of helped build the ecosystem
over there, and we’re really proud of that. Yeah, so EastLabs was
kind of one of the originators of the Ukrainian technology ecosystem.
Alan: That’s incredible. It’s
really interesting, because I do see a lot of talent coming out of
the Eastern Bloc and the talent is there. The cost to develop things
is a lot less. It’s up there in talent for sure.
Hrish: Yeah. The Soviet system
had a big emphasis on science and technology and mathematics. And I
think they graduate thousands and thousands of a very high level
programmers every year. It’s an awesome place to find engineering
talent, for sure.
Alan: Indeed. On that note, what
are one thing that you would want listeners to kind of think about in
each of the companies? Rogue Initiative, what do you want people to
think about?
Hrish: So, for Rogue Initiative,
I’d love people to imagine what they would think of as an
entertainment franchise. What do they think of when it comes to XR as
the ideal way to to experience entertainment? The way that it’s
happening right now is a mix of interactive and passive, and I think
we all have our own personal opinions about what kind of things that
we want. But I think ultimately what’s really great is the XR medium
allows entertainment to really evolve from what we think of now, and
to what it will be in the future. Imagine watching a movie on your
coffee table in AR, right? Or imagine playing a game around you that
is part of the movie. And some of that stuff you can see in Call of
Duty and other console games that have been around for years. But I
think we’re going to see a real evolution in terms of entertainment.
And so I think that as we all imagine what we would want in
entertainment, those are the kinds of things that we think about at
Rogue Initiative. Those are the things that we’re creating on the
entertainment sites. It’s a lot of fun to think about that, but that
would be my take away there.
Alan: Amazing. So what would the
takeaway be then for SuperWorld?
Hrish: The interesting thing is,
that it being a platform where XR in all of its forms in terms of our
vision, where we imagine a place that you can really kind of access,
not only games or kind of Pokémon Go-esque type experiences, but
also one day be able to experience other things like education or
more enterprise applications. I think the takeaway there is that all
of this in the XR world is is still very formative. I’d say it’s
very– the way that it’s being built is piecemeal by brands, and
brands have apps or brands are using WebAR. All of these different
forms of AR are kind of out there. But I think the take away is, is
how do we create an environment, where we can create a place where
all of these things can live. And as users, we can kind of experience
those things again, in an environment that’s very permissioned, where
we’re not being overloaded by AR, and it’s very curated. And that’s
kind of some of the things that we think about at SuperWorld is, as
we are building an AR world in an AR platform, how would we build
that if we could kind of build the ideal platform? And part of that
is the decentralization. So I would say go and buy some real estate
and and help us build SuperWorld. And that’s the point, is when you
buy some real estate, now you’re a stakeholder on the platform. You
know, eventually we plan on giving owners rights or privileges on the
platform. And we want to build it with kind of everyone involved. And
so that’s the back to the decentralized kind of approach there.
Alan: Awesome. And finally,
SingularityNET.
Hrish: SingularityNET, we’ve
been around with Ben, creating decentralized AI and again, my
involvement in the SingularityNET came from my interests in AI And
I’ve known Ben for a while. And we think that AI and decentralized AI
really has a place in SuperWorld. And as we’re thinking about virtual
avatars connected to decentralized AI, the benefit here is, you look
around at other virtual assistants or other assistants like Siri or
Alexa or others on the market. You’re kind of freely providing your
data to those assistants that and they are mining that data. And we
think that if we can kind of build this in a way where the data that
is used by these assistants is– you’re being compensated for that
data. And so there’s an exchange of data for her payment. And then
also having that data and that information be processed by in a
decentralized fashion also has benefits for us as users, because we
aren’t feeling like the information that we’re providing is to a
centralized source that’s controlled by one authority. And so, again,
SingularityNET being decentralized, utilizing decentralized
algorithms and then back to XR and how we’re interacting with those
XR avatars. There’s a lot of benefits to that decentralized AI
infrastructure. And so that’s kind of the thing I would say I would
say, is the takeaway is, how is your data being used currently? And
is there a better way to have an AI virtual assistant experience,
where you’re having all your own privacy and and your data that
you’re providing accounted for. And you’re monetizing that data as
well, so I would say that that’s the takeaway, and some of the things
that we’re thinking about there at SingularityBET and Area 51.
Alan: Really incredible stuff. I
can’t wait to see what you guys dream up for these, in terms of kind
of real use cases as it expands and as the platform expands and more
users come on board and brands start to kind of flex what’s possible,
it can be really interesting.
Hrish: Yeah, yeah. Ben Goertzel,
who’s the head of SingularityNET, and also involved in Area 51. He’s
been working on AI and for 20+ years, and is one of the leaders in
the field. So it’s a pleasure to be able to have him and others like
Cassio Pennachin, his longtime partner and co-founder. We’re kind of
thinking about how do you bring in AI into the XR world. And I’m
honored to be able to help them and provide my insights on that.
Alan: Really awesome. Well, I
want to thank you again, Hrish, for taking the time out of your busy
schedule. This has been great.
Hrish: Yeah. Thanks so much. I
really appreciate it.
Alan: Thank you so much.
Hrish: Thanks, man. Looking
forward to seeing you soon.
30 min
December 20, 2019 Staking Claim to a Digital Plot in AR, with SuperWorld's Hrish Lotlikar
Imagine owning the
digital real estate surrounding the Taj Mahal. Well, to be real with
you, you can't have all of it - today's guest, SuperWorld co-founder
Hrish Lotlikar, already has a piece. But he's made it easy for anyone
who wants it to buy the rest, and other plots of digital real estate
around the world.
He also talks about The
Rogue Initiative and SingularityNET!
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is
Hrish Lotlikar from the Rogue Initiative, SuperWorld app, and
SingularityNET. Hrish is the co-founder and chief business
development officer for the Rogue Initiative, a Los Angeles based
entertainment company composed of award winning entertainment
industry professionals, including alumni from Amblin Entertainment,
Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Disney, Activision and they are creating
new original feature films, television, AAA cinematic interactive VR,
and gaming content. He's also the co-founder of SuperWorld --
superworldapp.com -- which is Foursquare meets Pokemon Go meets
Monopoly in the real world, building a community in AR, powered by
the blockchain. They've built an AR real estate marketplace, ad
marketplace on the blockchain, which also acts as a social AR app,
allowing users to personalize their real world by adding anything,
anywhere in augmented reality with photos, videos, texts, and 3D
objects, and share those experiences with their followers. He's also
an advisor of SingularityNET, a decentralized marketplace for AI
algorithms allowing companies, organizations, and developers to buy
and sell AI at scale. Previously to this, he was in venture capital,
but he got better. If you want to learn more about Hrish's
initiatives, you can go to the Rogue Initiative, which is
therogueinitiative.com,
SuperWorld, which is superworldapp.com,
and SingularityNET, which is singularitynet.io.
Hrish, welcome to the show, my friend.
Hrish: Hey, thanks so much for
having me, Alan. I appreciate it. Looking forward to having this
conversation.
Alan: Oh, absolute pleasure. You
do a lot in this space. And the first time we met was at-- I think
it's now called Global World Summit. But it was called-- what was it
called before?
Hrish: The VR/AR Conference?
Alan: Yeah.The VR/AR Association
Conference. But let's unpack these amazing initiatives that you're
doing. Let's start with the one that's Rogue.
Hrish: Yeah.
Alan: Tell us about it.
Hrish: Sure, yeah. So, Rogue
Initiative we started back in late 2015. My co-founders, Pete Blumel
and Cathy Twigg. The goal of the Rogue Initiative was looking at the
convergence of linear, Hollywood, traditional entertainment and
interactive entertainment. And how could we -- from the ground up --
create new original properties that brought those forms of
entertainment together? Because there is a confluence of technology
and Silicon Valley in Hollywood that was coming together. And how do
we how do we kind of leverage that, to create new original content
that goes across all of those medium? So building and developing a
new story that starts on the feature film side and then organically
moves to interactive all the way through TV, through all the way to
amusement park rides and toys. So building franchises from the ground
up, bringing in top Hollywood talent and interactive talent, and
knowing from the foundations of creating that content, that we're
building it to go across all those mediums. And that's the kind of
high level vision of the Rogue Initiative.
Alan: Very cool. So let's move
on to SuperWorld app. Let's
30 min
December 19, 2019 XR for Business at the Ritossa Family Office Summit
In between your regularly-scheduled
XR for Businesses episodes, Alan has a brief update and recap of his
recent trip to the Ritossa Family Office Summit in Dubai
Hey there, it’s Alan Smithson with the
XR for Business Podcast. And today’s episode is a very special recap
of a conference that I just spent two days at, called the Ritossa
Family Office Summit. This is a gathering of elite family offices, a
total of 600 prominent business owners, sheiks, royal families,
private investment companies, and international business people,
getting together to discuss the future of investing. Now, to put it
in perspective, the people that attend this represent about
$4.5-trillion in investable wealth. And this conference is the
world’s largest and most exclusive gathering of elite family office
decision makers.
This year’s topic was “East Meets
West”, and the theme of Dubai summit will act as a bridge
between Middle East families and their European, Asian, US, and Latin
American counterparts. This was an amazing experience for us. We were
there as a vendor. We were the only company there bringing virtual
and augmented reality to these people. And the interest level around
virtual and augmented reality was insane. People were asking all
sorts of questions, “How long is this going to take? What is the
roadmap now? Who’s using it? What companies are doing it? How can we
involve our company portfolios in this?”
And really, we came at this from a
training standpoint. Virtual and augmented reality training is the
most effective, efficient training solutions we’ve ever created as
humans. Everything from being able to track where the user’s looking,
to their biometrics, their heart rate, all of these things combined
create what we are hoping will be the future of all education and
training. And at MetaVRse, what we’re really focusing on now is
building out a platform marketplace to help businesses navigate the
technology, figure out what technology works best for the needs of
their employees.
Because as we enter into this kind of
age of exponential growth, what we’re seeing now is a massive change
in how we work. Over the next three years alone, IBM estimates that
over 120 million people will need to be reskilled and retrained due
to AI and automation. And from a strictly monetizable standpoint, PWC
— the global conglomerate — they’ve just earmarked $3-billion to
reskill, upskill, and retrain their staff.
AI and robotics and automation are
coming faster than we can possibly think about. And virtual and
augmented reality give us this kind of unique perspective as to how
we can train people in a way that is easier, faster, more efficient.
And I think we’re going to need that as we enter into exponential
growth.
Back to the Dubai summit. First of all,
I want to say a huge thank you to Anthony Ritossa — the host of the
summit — who brought together these incredible people. It was under
the patronage of His Highness, Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, the ruler and
prime minister of Dubai, and the ruling family. And it was really
amazing to meet their chief investment officer, Mohammed Al Ali —
who actually today is being knighted in London — and he is the CEO
and advisor of their International Investments Enterprise. We met
with Adam, the judge from the private office of His Highness, Sheikh
Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Nahyan. We met with Faris, and his team from
the office of Sheikh Sultan Bin Abdullah Al Qasimi.Qasimi.
And all of these sheikhs represent
family offices from different parts of the UAE. You have Dubai, you
have Sharjah, you have Abu Dhabi, and all of these different
emirates. There’s investments where they’re looking not just to
invest in oil and gas and these things, they’re really looking
towards investing in world changing things. Education is on the top
of mind of everybody right now because as an investor, if you own
several companies, you realize already that there is a skills
shortage.
In America alone, there’s about a 6
million person skills shortage in skilled trades. So things like
plumbing, HVAC, electrical, all of these things. Kids, it turns out,
don’t want to be in these types of things anymore. They really want
to be YouTube influencers. And actually, a study was recently
released where they studied 3,000 kids in America and 3,000 kids in
China. And they told them, “Just simply rank these seven jobs.”
And the seven jobs were– in America, the number one job was YouTube
influencer. The number seven job was astronaut scientist. And in
China, the list was actually completely flipped.
So if you look at our priorization of
learning, it’s more important for people to be on social media than
it is to learn truly transformational skillsets, and I think we need
to take what we’re learning with virtual and augmented reality — and
even things in entertainment — and apply these to our new learning
procedures. If you look at education as competing with Hollywood
movies, blockbuster AAA video games, and social media, these have
teams of people designed around just making these things addictive.
Netflix has AI algorithms that give you
better shows to watch. What we need to do is really take all of this
knowledge of AI and machine learning, and apply it to learning. And
that’s really what we’re hoping to do with MetaVRse. Some of the
other people that we met this year at the Ritossa summit were just
incredible. Sheila Driscoll, the founder of Driscoll– or I guess
founding family of Driscoll’s Berries. I don’t know if you’ve eaten
their raspberries, but I have. They’re delicious. But she was on a
panel talking about giving back, and philanthropy.
And all of these people are looking at
investments that not only serve their wallet — because once you have
enough money, you have enough money, you don’t need that — what
they’re looking for is investments that make positive change in the
world. Some of the panel discussions were around artificial
intelligence and machine based learning. Why are people invested in
it? And what we realized is that there’s a lot of misunderstanding
going on with that. And one of these things are that people just
don’t understand. So they need to– there’s a lot of education that
needs to be done around. What are these technologies? How do they–
how are they interrelated? AI, and machine learning, and computer
vision, and virtual and augmented reality, and mixed reality, and IOT
sensors, and cloud computing, and edge computing, and quantum
computers. All of these things are interconnected, they’re
intertwined. And we’re seeing a convergence of technologies.
And really, being able to talk to these
philanthropy arms of these massive investment companies, you start to
realize that they’re getting bombarded with people in blockchain, and
cryptocoins, and these types of things. There’s tons of presentations
on investible digital assets. “What’s to come in 2019,”
with Nick Ayton from Chainstarter Ventures. One of the other things
was interactive roundtables, and art as an investment asset class,
building global businesses in partnership with family offices,
investing in blockchain, machine learning, and artificial
intelligence.
I went to that one — the roundtable on
artificial intelligence — and the question came up around the table,
was “When will artificial intelligence replace bankers?”
And everybody had their different answers: 2030, 2040. And the real
answer that I gave is, “as soon as possible.”. And it’s not
that people don’t want bankers, it’s that as soon as you have an
algorithm that takes out the emotion of banking and does the job more
efficiently than a human, this is where AI becomes a replacement for
what we do. And if you look at how many jobs are in the financial
services sector, and how many jobs are already changing around quants
and around artificial intelligence algorithms, it’s really going to
be revolutionary.
Some of the other things that we saw
there at the Rotossa Summit, this one really got me, I love this one.
This is “Buckle your seat belt. What options do families have
for insurance against market volatility?” Having President Trump
and China at this trade war leaves a lot of uncertainty for the
world. And we are in a time of volatile markets, and really being
able to invest financially secure investments against real estate or
against other assets. It was really a great eye opener on what are
the insurances that investors are taking, to make sure that market
volatility does not affect their returns.
One of the panel sessions was on
blockchain and business delivering real world benefits. And we’re
talking about how blockchain can be used for medical records, it can
be used for education records. In fact, one of the things that we’re
building as part of our platform marketplace is a blockchain
component that allows you to have an immutable transcript of your
record. So if you take a course at work, or you take a course on
Coursera, or you take a degree at Harvard, or a microdegree in
Udacity, these can be locked into a blockchain and really secure
there. So that’s a great use case there.
I know it’s being used a lot in
shipping, in logistics, being able to track where your food comes
from, and where everything is sourced from ethically. One of the the
panels that I really, really enjoyed was “Philanthropy, impact,
and social responsibility investment opportunities.” And this
one was big for me, because on the panel was Justin Rockefeller from
the Rockefeller family. And here’s a descendant of one of the
wealthiest people on the planet to ever live in humanity, and talking
about how their family wealth is being preserved and reinvested, and
how they have a moral obligation to invest in philanthropy and impact
and social investments.
And it really resonated with me,
because everybody there has the ability to fund all sorts of
philanthropy efforts. And it was really wonderful to understand how
these people invest, how they think, and more so, what is important
to them from a standpoint of their long term visions and their long
term dynasties, I guess is the right word. So what is it about their
dynasty that they want to be remembered by and listen, making a lot
of money is easy, easier for people that have it. Making more money
is easy, but making money while doing good in the world, I think is
going to be the new way of doing business. And I’m really excited for
it.
One of the things, my purpose in life
is to inspire and educate future leaders to think and act in a
socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable way. And by
being networked with these wonderful people at the Ritossa Summit,
and having deep conversations around the ways we can use
virtual/augmented/mixed reality technologies combined with the other
technologies — AI, blockchain — combining these to serve humanity
and especially from our side, from the eyes of learning, and really
creating education. I’m going to throw this out here, because our
mission — and we’ll be announcing this outside of the podcast soon
— but our mission at MetaVRse is to democratize education globally
by 2040, using spatial technologies.
And we believe that as these
technologies become more mature and more ubiquitous, the future of
learning isn’t going to be looking at a YouTube screen. It’s going to
be looking at a YouTube screen, it’s can be listening to a podcast,
it’s going to be doing something in spatial computing. All of it
combines to create a learning environment, where each individual
learner can learn the best possible way for them. And being able to
incorporate data like eye tracking and biometrics and head pose and
hand tracking, we’ll be able to deliver learning at a scale and
efficiency never, ever thought of in human history. So we’re really
excited about building that future.
With that, I want to just say a huge
thank you again to Vanessa Eriksson from the Ritossa Summit, and also
to Sir Anthony Ritossa for the invite to this incredible gathering.
And I can’t wait to the next one, in Riyadh. So thank you again. And
thank you guys for listening. This has been the XR for Business
Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Oh, one more thing, if you
haven’t subscribed to the podcast, hit the subscribe button, so you
get all the updates and also you can sign up for our email
newsletter, we email out once a week some news on the industry, at
xrforbusiness.io.
14 min
December 19, 2019 XR for Business at the Ritossa Family Office Summit
In between your regularly-scheduled
XR for Businesses episodes, Alan has a brief update and recap of his
recent trip to the Ritossa Family Office Summit in Dubai
Hey there, it's Alan Smithson with the
XR for Business Podcast. And today's episode is a very special recap
of a conference that I just spent two days at, called the Ritossa
Family Office Summit. This is a gathering of elite family offices, a
total of 600 prominent business owners, sheiks, royal families,
private investment companies, and international business people,
getting together to discuss the future of investing. Now, to put it
in perspective, the people that attend this represent about
$4.5-trillion in investable wealth. And this conference is the
world's largest and most exclusive gathering of elite family office
decision makers.
This year's topic was "East Meets
West", and the theme of Dubai summit will act as a bridge
between Middle East families and their European, Asian, US, and Latin
American counterparts. This was an amazing experience for us. We were
there as a vendor. We were the only company there bringing virtual
and augmented reality to these people. And the interest level around
virtual and augmented reality was insane. People were asking all
sorts of questions, "How long is this going to take? What is the
roadmap now? Who's using it? What companies are doing it? How can we
involve our company portfolios in this?"
And really, we came at this from a
training standpoint. Virtual and augmented reality training is the
most effective, efficient training solutions we've ever created as
humans. Everything from being able to track where the user's looking,
to their biometrics, their heart rate, all of these things combined
create what we are hoping will be the future of all education and
training. And at MetaVRse, what we're really focusing on now is
building out a platform marketplace to help businesses navigate the
technology, figure out what technology works best for the needs of
their employees.
Because as we enter into this kind of
age of exponential growth, what we're seeing now is a massive change
in how we work. Over the next three years alone, IBM estimates that
over 120 million people will need to be reskilled and retrained due
to AI and automation. And from a strictly monetizable standpoint, PWC
-- the global conglomerate -- they've just earmarked $3-billion to
reskill, upskill, and retrain their staff.
AI and robotics and automation are
coming faster than we can possibly think about. And virtual and
augmented reality give us this kind of unique perspective as to how
we can train people in a way that is easier, faster, more efficient.
And I think we're going to need that as we enter into exponential
growth.
Back to the Dubai summit. First of all,
I want to say a huge thank you to Anthony Ritossa -- the host of the
summit -- who brought together these incredible people. It was under
the patronage of His Highness, Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, the ruler and
prime minister of Dubai, and the ruling family. And it was really
amazing to meet their chief investment officer, Mohammed Al Ali --
who actually today is being knighted in London -- and he is the CEO
and advisor of their International Investments Enterprise. We met
with Adam, the judge from the private office of His Highness, Sheikh
Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Nahyan. We met with Faris, and his team from
the office of Sheikh Sultan Bin Abdullah Al Qasimi.Qasimi.
And all of these sheikhs represent
family offices from different parts of the UAE. You have Dubai, you
have Sharjah, you have Abu Dhabi, and all of these different
emirates. There's investments where they're looking not just to
invest in oil and gas and these things, they're really looking
towards investing in world changing things. Education is on the top
of mind of everybody right now because as an investor, if you own
several companies, you realize alr
14 min
December 18, 2019 On the XR Beat, with VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi
When you’ve been a journalist on the
XR technology beat for 20 years, like VentureBeat’s lead writer Dean
Takahashi has, you develop a hunch or two about the direction the
industry might go. Alan picks Dean’s brain for a few such scoops.
Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson, today’s guest is the one and only Dean Takahashi, the lead writer for VentureBeat. He’s been a tech journalist for more than 28 years, and he’s covered games for a twenty one of those years. He’s authored two books: Opening the XBox, and The XBox 360 Uncloaked. He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. To learn more, you can visit games beat dot com or venture beat dot com.
Dean, welcome to the show, my friend.
Dean: Thank you. And thank you
for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
We had the distinct opportunity to meet at AWE this year for a very
short amount of time. I think we rode the escalator down? But I’ve
been a big fan of yours for a long time. I read the articles that you
write, and they’re very insightful. They’re very factual. I’m just
very honored to have you on the show. So, thank you very much.
Dean: Thank you. Nice, and happy
to hear.
Alan: How did you start… first
of all, I guess you’ve been in the games world for a long time. How
did you kind of pivot over to VentureBeat, and what is VentureBeat?
Let’s let’s unpack what VentureBeat is, for people that may or may
not know?
Dean: Yeah, I was sort of a traditional newspaper and magazine journalist for a long time, and then, when the web came along and people started podcasting and blogging, I looked around and felt like it was less of a risk to go try something new than it was to stay at a newspaper. I was at the San Jose newspaper at the time. So about 11 years ago, I joined VentureBeat, and it had been started two years earlier by Matt Marshall, who was a venture capital writer for the Mercury News and an early blogger as well. And so, we were a tech news blog and competed at the time with likes of GIGO, and TechCrunch. They have been either… gone away, or they they’ve been acquired by larger companies. So we’re still one of the last, larger independent tech blogs.
And then within that, when I joined about eleven years ago, we started GamesBeat as well, as sort of a subsection that focused on games. At the very beginning, we were sort of a startup and venture capital site. But now we pretty much cover the gamut of tech news and game news. And then, our particular vertical focuses are artificial intelligence on the tech side, and then the whole game sector. And then, I guess as far as getting into VR and AR, I’ve really followed the news. I remember seeing the Oculus guys — Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell and Brendan (Iribe) over at one of their CES tables in the early years, well before they were acquired. I think I even tried to get an interview with John Carmack, like, the day after he did a demo at E3. The next day, he was gone. So I was on the hunt kind of early. Never quite the absolute first person to dive into VR.
Alan: But very close. You’ve
seen it from pre-DK1 days — where [it was] probably a
cobbled-together a collection of flat screens, wires, and duct tape
— and what it is today, where you have real consumer-grade virtual
reality that’s not even connected to computers. You’ve seen a lot
over the years. You’ve written countless articles on virtual and
augmented reality. Is there anything that you may have written about
before that you couldn’t have predicted, that has happened already?
Dean: I didn’t really anticipate
that Enterprise was actually going to take off as well as it has. It
was always sort of there as something that might be a market someday.
I expected, like everybody else, that consumer VR was going to catch
on. Wasn’t sure how big it would be, but it would catch on first, and
then all of the other markets that people were talking about would
fall. It sort of seems like t slower-than-expected acceptance of
consumer VR in reality has sort of paved the way for bigger
opportunities on the enterprise side. I think there were people early
on, like the folks at Sixth Sense who have the hand controllers. They
were talking about there are a wide variety of things you can do with
these hand controllers for VR. It didn’t seem like their main
efforts. They really wanted to have success in games, in VR or in
other kinds of consumer VR apps. It so happened that that was slow to
take off and they started pivoting and looking around for other
things they could do. They found medical companies that were more
interested in how precise those hand controllers could be, so they
started doing demos, like a virtual catheter insertion and other
kinds of medical training demos.
Alan: And it’s interesting that
you say that, because I actually did the Sixth Sense demo a couple
years ago, of the catheter thing. And that was with controllers. Then
this past weekend, I tried the HaptX gloves. Have you had a chance to
try those?
Dean: I’ve tried some haptics
gloves. Which ones in particular?
Alan: “HaptX.”H-A-P-T-X,
the ones that have air–
Dean: I’ve trained theirs, but I
haven’t tried that particular demo.
Alan: deprecatingOh, the one I
tried was just incredible. This was a surgical demo where I reached
out and I could touch the patient, and I could pick things up. And,
wow. Being able to physically pick things up in VR, it adds a whole
new element. It was really incredible.
Dean: Yeah. Certainly.
Alan: I did a presentation last
week and there one of the slides I put up shows the growth of the
whole XR industry, and consumer was leading the way. And then, as of
2019 — by the end of this year — they’ll kind of cross. And
consumer will keep growing, but enterprise is growing much, much
faster; 30 percent faster than consumer. Is that what you’re seeing
across the board?
Dean: Yeah, I think. I mean, it
sort of makes more sense to me that, as long as the prices for the
headsets are lingering up pretty high — like the Cosmos from HTC,
the brand new one, it’ll be an $800 purchase. And even the Oculus
Quest is at $400, and they seem to be the $200 Oculus Go. They’re not
getting good enough for the consumer price points to get traction.
And so the enthusiasts are buying a lot of these headsets now, but
there’s a limited market and limited appetite. Once you get down
towards where the consoles used to be — like a $100 or $200 prices
— and the opportunity becomes much better. And so, yeah, if we have
these $400-$1,000 prices on these headsets, who’s going to buy them,
right? Well, I guess if you look at who’s going to save money with
these headsets, then that’s a more interesting equation for all the
enterprises. If they’re going to spend… I think there’s a hospital
in Los Angeles that was spending $400,000 a year training doctors on
how to how to spot particular problems with young babies who were
having seizures, and one of the VR companies created the simulation
to do this in VR, and to train the doctors and to have things in it,
like parents who were panicking and screaming at the doctor while
they’re trying to figure out what’s going on with the kid. And it
turns out these these are very effective, and they can save that
particular — just one — hospital, hundreds of thousands of dollars
a year in training expenses, because you’re not now dedicating
veteran surgeons and doctors to do this kind of training work.
Instead, you can do so much of it in VR. And I think that was sort of
reinforced at Oculus Connect 6, when Johnson and Johnson announced
that they were going to try to roll this kind of training out to
doctors around the world.
Alan: Covering the so-called
“venture beat,” you’re also seeing investments going into
this; we’re already starting to see some early investments in AR and
VR that are… well, failing. We just saw medha and Blippar and the
most recent one, which was… well, even ODG. There’s been a number
of kind of false starts with this technology. And it seems to me that
timing is a big issue. What are your thoughts around timing of this
industry? You’ve been covering it since the very, very beginning. If
you were to put your investor hat on and put money into something,
where would you invest your money now?
Dean: I defer that question to a bit later. But I think first that is sort of talking about what’s happened. We had predictions that we were going to see a gap of disappointment for a few years. John Riccitiello — the CEO of Unity — was one of the first to point out that there was going to be this great sort of gold rush of people who were going to overhype VR and its potential, and then we’re going to see this gap of a disappointment where the early reality didn’t match up with the hype and a lot of people were going to bail on it. And that tends to happen in almost every industry; every tech industry in particular. But I guess the question is always whether the platform in question gets enough traction in order to survive that gap of disappointment, and to go on. And just as platforms had to plan for this, I think also a lot of the developers have to as well — the game developers — and the venture capital funds. There were a number of venture capital funds that came out with a specific focus on VR, and VR games in particular, and they’re pivoting elsewhere as well, because they are not seeing the returns that they had hoped for. Boost VC would be one of those, I think.
And I think that some of the companies that I’ve seen doing pivoting include Playful, founded by Paul Bettner — they made Lucky’s Tale game for the Oculus Rift. It was the flagship title that the Oculus Rift launched with, and it did well enough there, but Playful saw enough writing on the wall, where they raised a lot of money during the good times and they didn’t spend it all. They got sort of ready for–
Alan: The other writing on the
wall.
Dean: Right. Yeah. And they also
then adapted Lucky’s Tale into a game called Super Lucky’s Tale that
ran as a regular, traditional 2D screen, 3D graphics title on the
XBox One. And then they spread to other platforms, like the Nintendo
Switch is coming shortly. So so they invested all this money in
creating a new intellectual property for virtual reality, and it made
as big a splash as it could with just a few million units in the
market at the time, and if not even that. Then they repurposed that
IP and put it into things that had 50-million-installed base. That’s
generating more money for them. And it’s a smart way to invest in VR,
is when you’re not completely reliant on the VR revenues. The shadows
were adaptable to other 2D screens. That was great. And those guys
are still alive today. And they were they raised another $23-million
round.
Talk about pivoting, though; they’re
not talking anymore about doing a lot of flagship VR titles. They’re
saying those are still happening, but they are moving towards the
backburner, and they are creating more traditional titles in the
meantime, again, getting ready for a slower burn.
Alan: I think that’s a really
wise approach. But you’ve got companies like Blippar, who raised
$110-million, and their last round was something like $30-million.
And they burned through that in four months. How do you burn through
$30-million in four months? I just… I can’t even!
Dean: That’s crazy.
Alan: I think pragmatism —
being able to take the money that you raise and make it last — I
think a lot of companies, a lot of startups anyway, raise money… I
went to this talk the other day, and this guy was telling me, “oh,
we raised $10-million,” or whatever, and he goes, “we spent
half a million dollars in the first day, on furniture and stuff for
the office. Looking back at the money we burned on dumb stuff, we
could have been so much more successful if we had not.” Because
once a VC hands over the money, they’re not leaning over your
shoulder saying, “what’d you spend it on?” They’re saying,
“run your company as effectively as possible.” And I don’t
know that buying half a million dollars in furniture is the best use
of funds. But I think people need to be pragmatic with their funding,
and respect that every dollar counts, especially in emerging
technologies.
Dean: And I think more critical
are these more foundational companies, like Facebook and Valve and
HTC. Now, what are they doing? Do they still believe in it? Are they
putting their money where their mouth is still?
Alan: It seems like it.
Dean: That’s an interesting
question.
Alan: It seems like it; it seems
like they’re still investing. Facebook is still investing in Oculus,
obviously. And there’s still lots going on in that. But we’re
starting to see enterprise use cases pop up all over the place. I
know you wrote an article on PTC and GlobalFoundries using AR to
transform chip manufacturing. These enterprise use cases which are
driving real ROI — I mean, if you listen to any of the episodes on
this podcast — it really drives home the fact that things like
training are driving real ROI. Things like remote capture assistance,
and being able to use AR to overlay instructional manuals on top of
things, decreasing the time to train for people. These are real
measurable ROI components, and they’re really driving this industry
forward. If companies raise money now — the end of 2019/2020 — I
think it’s the perfect time, because we’re only just starting to see
these real ROI-driven things come out. And once that starts to catch
steam, every company in the world is going to have to have an exit
strategy. If they don’t, then they’ll just get left behind like they
did in the days of the web.
Dean: Getting back to the
platform owners, I think if you look at HTC and some of the things
that they’ve done… you know, they did an eye-tracking version of
the HTC Vive here.
Alan: The VIVE Pro Eye.
Dean: Yeah. And the question is,
why would they do that? Right? If the consumer market isn’t exactly
demanding that? That would be useful for things like advertising, to
see if the user actually looks at an advertisment that is in a VR
app. That’s very consumer-oriented. But they really did that more for
the enterprise market and training. Right? If you can confirm to the
companies that’s doing the training that the user looked at
something, saw it, and grasped it or understood it — or completely
skipped it — then you have a much better idea of whether your your
training is working. So it’s actual feedback that’s necessary for
this training. It’s an expensive technology. It makes the Pro Eye
more expensive than the other HTC offerings for sure. But they’re
doing it because they realize where the money is right now.
Alan: I think Oculus is rolling
out Oculus for Business. Or is it Oculus Enterprise? Or… it’s
Oculus for Business.
Dean: Oculus for Business, yes.
Alan: HTC’s got their enterprise
division. Hololens is all in on enterprise. And then even Magic Leap,
I’ve heard rumors that they’re going to be introducing an enterprise
division, or an enterprise something. So a lot of people got in and
said, “hey, we’re gonna make games,” and then, “maybe
we should make training simulators or something like that.” I
think there’s been this shift… you’ve seen waves of these new
technologies come and go, and become established. What, in your
opinion, is a timeline looking to have ubiquitous AR or VR, pervasive
in the world?
Dean: I think if we look back at
something like the iPhone/smartphone in general, and look at those
app stores and how they developed, we would see that games led the
way. And very fairly — six, seven years in or so — I was looking at
a lot of analytics reports and they were saying that 80 percent of
the revenue of the app store was game, and half of the usage was
games. And I think the thing that really got traction and really took
off with users with games. And that allowed the platforms to just
continually expand with new things for consumers to embrace. You
always need some kind of lead horse, you know, a lead application —
or a killer application — that’s going to take off in it. And this
case with VR, starting in 2016, everybody thought it would be games
again. And we have something like Beat Saber, which had more than a
million downloads. But it’s not quite the same way; it’s happening in
such a large sort of growth curve now that you can make that same
comparison. It’s good for VR to look for all these other different
applications. I think training will be big. I think the hazards of
enterprise include… there are some companies out there that are
really big fish, and you can spend a lot of time going for them, but
sometimes they don’t bite. And if they don’t bite, then you’ve spent
all of this time and effort customizing some kind of application for
them, and they’re not enthusiastic. You don’t hear that happening too
much. I think I hear that, when there are big efforts to come up with
a good enterprise app for training purposes, then that works well. I
think it just is a longer sales cycle.
Alan: One of the other business
use cases that I’ve seen that starting to catch traction is
interactive ad formats, where you can try on a pair of glasses, using
face filters and stuff like that to try and glasses or makeup. I know
L’Oreal purchased a company that was doing face filters for makeup so
you could try and lipsticks and eyeshadows, that sort of thing. The
ability to use the device that’s in everybody’s hand — if we take a
step back, that’s still considered AR. I think that’s one of the
killer use cases. I know if you go to Walmart.com/Lego and then click
“see it in action,” you can actually, just directly from
the website, you can project a Lego set on your table. It sounds
really awesome, and it is — it’s really fun and exciting — but what
it really gets down to it is they’ve shown the increased sales by
25-150 percent using just web-based interactive tools. They’ve
doubled and tripled sales conversions. So, mobile phone-based AR is
not to be forgotten about either. Even though we’re talking about
glasses and headsets, sometimes the lowest-hanging fruit is… there.
Dean: I think there’s also some
lessons in this. Some of the companies trying to go out too early —
castAR is a good example of that. Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson
started that over at Bell. Bell decided to go with Steam VR and VR,
instead of AR. And so they spun it out as a company called Technical
Illusions, which then became castAR. They had a pretty good
Kickstarter campaign that raised some — a lot — of money to do a
consumer AR game platform, consumer application platform. They did
that. Then the VCs came in for the next round and said, “hey,
why don’t we just totally repurpose some of this plan for the
enterprise?” And it was a pivot that represented a lot of the
good thinking that we’ve been thinking about and talking about here.
But, you know, their particular solution did not resonate as well
with others in the enterprise space. They raised $15-million. They
tried to raise more. They expanded greatly. They hired a lot of
people. They ran out of money. So then, they went bankrupt. Jeri
Ellsworth went back and, with some other employees, bought it out of
bankruptcy. And just last week, they started a new Kickstarter to
return to the technology — the AR platform — to tabletop games;
digital games and AR. And so that’s a case study, I guess, in how
things can go the opposite direction at some sort of conventional
wisdom.
Alan: When venture capital gets
involved, they can skew or sway the entrepreneur’s direction. It
sounds like Ellsworth and their team were really focused on games.
And to take a team that is really passionate about games and pivot
them to enterprise? That doesn’t seem like a recipe for success to
me.
Dean: Yeah. And you know, she
was fairly open about saying that she’s being very careful about any
particular deals that investors approach her with now, and that she
thinks it’s a good thing that she remains CEO for this venture, and
the previous venture,.
Alan: I agree. It’s interesting.
Until a company as real scale… re:Work is kind of replacing their
CEO right before the IPO and stuff. But until a company has reached a
level of maturity where they’re making recurring revenues and they’re
growing and they have a solid ecosystem and everything, I think it’s
a real disservice to the company for the venture capitalists to
either replace the CEO or try to direct the CEO in a different way.
And we see it time and time again. You see these companies… like
Jaunt, for example. Here’s a prime example. Jaunt was a content
studio and a camera maker. Then they got rid of the camera and they
said, “we’re gonna make a content platform.” Then they got
rid of the content platform. “We’re going to make volumetric
capture of people.” And recently they just got bought by
Verizon. But I mean, they raised $100-million; Verizon probably
bought them for pennies on the dollar. There’s a company that pivoted
six or seven times with investors’ money.
Dean: Exactly.
Alan: I actually wrote an essay
on why Blippar failed. And Blippar raised an enormous amount of money
on a huge valuation. But they — in my opinion, from what I read —
they were trying to boil the ocean. They were trying to be a computer
vision company, and an AR company, and a marketing agency, and a
dozen different things to a dozen different people. That’s just very
difficult when you’re dealing with huge problems like computer vision
and 3D object recognition. That one problem is very hard to solve.
They’re trying to solve that on top of another dozen things, and none
of them were making any money.
Dean: And I think the VR
companies out there are probably quite familiar with the problem that
the VCs in Silicon Valley often behave like the people on the HBO
show “Silicon Valley.” Just ridiculous outcomes.
Alan: “I need billionaire
doors. They don’t open up like billionaire doors!” [laughs] But
that show is so close to reality. It’s crazy.
Dean: Yeah.
Alan: I’ve spent a lot of time
in the valley, as you have. And you’re looking at it like, “wow,
you can actually nail the personas of the people in this show.”
It’s wild. There’s starting to be this shift away from venture
capital; for one, venture capital companies in general are not
returning anywhere near the returns that they once were 20 years ago.
And so there’s there’s that, but also, family wealth offices —
family offices who provide the capital, so endowments and family
offices that provide the capital to venture capital companies —
they’re starting to say, “you know what? Rather than pay the 5
percent management fee, why don’t we just invest ourselves?” And
so you’re starting to see family offices acting like like venture
capital funds. And then, of course, a year or two years ago, you had
this kind of crazy blockchain crypto space where everybody and their
brother was doing an ICO, and you billions of dollars being raised
from nothing. And obviously that crashed and burned. I think VC is
not the only funding source in town anymore. And that’s really
changing the landscape a bit.
Dean: I think, in the case of VR
— to go back to the funding — that comes from the platform owners,
and Facebook in particular. And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was on
stage, saying that he still believes in VR as the next computing
platform and that they’re investing in it because they feel like
they’re in the early days of the P.C., and just see how how big that
became. They think that this is going to be this big. And I think
Zuckerberg at one point said they invested $250-million in a lot of
the early applications, and they’re going to invest another
$2-million. And he announced that they recently crossed over
$100-million in sales in the Oculus store. Well, if you put
$500-million in, and you get $100-million in revenues out… that’s
not a win, right? That is an indication of just how much work there
is to do here. And while it is encouraging to see that $100-million,
a company like Facebook has to just really stay in this for the long
haul, beyond the point where it seems like the market has jumped the
shark and VCs have all left, other investors cited, “we’re going
to stay away from this.” A lot of developers, early developers,
have dropped out and have gone elsewhere. But Facebook has to stay
the course. And so far, it seems like they are spinning up these
things like Oculus for Business. And so my hat’s off to them for that
kind of investment. And if I were to compare to something like a
similar opportunity, it was back in the beginning of the XBox when
Bill Gates was looking at this. He had the gigantic operating system
business. He had a monopoly with Office. And here he was trying to
enter the video game business with the XBox back in 2000. And they
lost something like a billion dollars per year in that first four
years. They lost about $4-billion on the original XBox.
Alan: Wow.
Dean: You flash forward from
that to 19 years later, and every quarter now, they’re generating
something like a couple of billion dollars in revenue from the XBox.
Vision, right? It took someone like Bill Gates to say, “hey, you
know what? I got the billions of dollars, I’ve got a lot of cash.
And, you know, this might not turn out in the long term. I think I’m
right that I should stay the course in this investment.” And it
turns out that he had the most foresight out of anybody from those
days, that this was going to be a great thing. And now, to this day,
I think it remains Microsoft’s best pivot ever.
Alan: Have you been to the
Microsoft campus? It’s funny because you go there and there’s 50
buildings, they all at the exact same. There are three storey gray
buildings. There’s no and then you get the XBox building, and it
stands out like this totally different building. And you walk in.
It’s totally different. It’s not your drab, beige Windows building,
or Microsoft Word. And then you go into this building and it’s like
it’s just alive. And there’s games and people. It’s just neat how
they built a subculture within the Microsoft culture. And it’s almost
like they had to kind of keep them separated. And if you look at the
buildings the way they’re designed, that is a separate building. It’s
a separate entity. It’s a separate everything. And I think they
really made a long bet, but it’s obviously paid off. And I think
Facebook betting on VR is going to pay off. I don’t know about Magic
Leap yet. As long as they can keep their $4-billion raised — or
whatever they are up to now — as long as they can keep developing as
fast as possible, but keep their powder dry for the long term,
they’ll do fine.
Dean: Yeah
Alan: But companies that are
raising… like, Blippar raised $130-million or whatever it was. I
mean, it’s crazy to see how much money is being tossed into some of
these things. It blows my mind.
Dean: I think that it really
comes down to how you define your investment horizon.
Alan: Yes, exactly!
If you’re a Blippar investor — or
you’re the Blippar CEO — and you say five years: in five years, you
can get all your money back and more, right? Uh–.
Alan: Dean, I think you nailed
it here, because setting proper expectations for your investors, I
think, is essential. Now, more than ever, because there are things
that will deliver 10x, 100x value in a very short amount of time —
two, three, four years. AI is already delivering value beyond
anybody’s wildest imaginations. But certain things take time. You’ve
got to build the ecosystem. You’ve got to build the product. It’s no
longer a technology problem. We have technologies that create real
value in enterprise. It’s an adoption problem. You have to factor in
the fact that selling this stuff is hard. You go to a company and
say, “hey, you’re going to increase your training time by 50
percent.” They’re like, “yeah, we’ll try next year.”
Somebody who’s getting into this and just raising capital and going
and making promises to investors that can’t be kept. I think that’s
the key is just… and trust me, I’m guilty of it. I think everybody
who’s ever raised money is guilty of it, because every investor wants
to see that beautiful hockey stick growth. But at the end of the day,
that hockey stick comes over a 10 year period. It doesn’t come in a
year or two.
We’ve had a great conversation around
investment and we’ve had a conversation on games and the enterprise
and VR. What do you think is the next big thing around the corner?
Let’s look out five years. Do you think Apple is going to come out
with their glasses in the next five years?
Dean: Yes, I definitely think
that’s going to happen. There were some hints that they had something
ready to go with the last the press event. But for some reason, they
didn’t flip the on switch and didn’t announce it. And I think they’re
also running into the same problem that everybody else is; that you
can do a lot of good engineering here, but you can’t rush some of
these technologies that are very fundamental. Can’t rush Moore’s
Law.It proceeds on its own pace and it has to wait for actual
inventions to happen. And so while they would, I’m sure, have liked
to do it a lot sooner, I think the notion of doing lightweight
glasses that fit on your head and wirelessly connect to your phone or
cloud? I think that technology is on the cusp. It is not not quite
here yet. You know, throwing in a lot of processing power that’s
necessary on those glasses that it’s going to be a lot of work still.
And when you look at people who are sort of loading up a lot of
technology into these headsets they’re down a couple of headsets, and
they’re done. So, you think Apple Apple would do this? I think they
also see that what they have to do has to reach the mass market, and
they don’t necessarily want to start with something that’s going to
be a niche product.
Alan: I couldn’t agree more. And
I think, if watching Apple’s previous releases is an indication,
they’re going to build the ecosystem with ARKit and let people
develop on the phones. They’re going to make sure that the device
that they ship is rock-solid and ready to go. And of course, I think
it’s going to run wireless to your phones. Your phone will be the
compute power, but the glasses are there. But I also thought it was
going to be maybe 2024-25. I think the date might be 2022-23 release.
So, we’ll see.
So, what problem in the world do you
want to see solved using XR technologies.
Dean: Well I suppose everybody
answers that they want to see the Star Trek Holodeck. Right? I want
to see that happen too.
Alan: we’re getting close!
Dean: We sort of got these hints
of the technology that is going to be really good with the hand
tracking that Facebook showed at Oculus Connect 6. I tried that demo
out, but my hand kept going through all of the objects in space that
I was touching or trying to grab. And I really do want to have that
actual force feedback tell me that that’s the object; I don’t have to
move my fingers any more, or any further. I think that’s another big
hurdle for VR solve. And if they solve it, then we can move forward.
Hand tracking is a kind of universal input system. And then get rid
of the controllers and like Zuckerberg said, then we’re left with
basically just a headset. It’s no wires or straps. No things in your
hands. And that will make the technology so much more accessible to
everybody. And we can start bringing in all kinds of applications.
Alan: It’s so true. And I think
even if you look at the Hololens, they’re pioneering work in
handwriting as well. And then Ultrahaptics and Leap Motion coming
together, creating that virtual hand tracking meets virtual
manipulation of the air: ultrasonics. I think we’ve only scratched
the surface on the UX of how we communicate with the computers in the
era of spatial computing. So it’s going to be exciting.
41 min
December 18, 2019 On the XR Beat, with VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi
When you've been a journalist on the
XR technology beat for 20 years, like VentureBeat's lead writer Dean
Takahashi has, you develop a hunch or two about the direction the
industry might go. Alan picks Dean's brain for a few such scoops.
Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson, today's guest is the one and only Dean Takahashi, the lead writer for VentureBeat. He's been a tech journalist for more than 28 years, and he's covered games for a twenty one of those years. He's authored two books: Opening the XBox, and The XBox 360 Uncloaked. He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. To learn more, you can visit games beat dot com or venture beat dot com.
Dean, welcome to the show, my friend.
Dean: Thank you. And thank you
for having me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
We had the distinct opportunity to meet at AWE this year for a very
short amount of time. I think we rode the escalator down? But I've
been a big fan of yours for a long time. I read the articles that you
write, and they're very insightful. They're very factual. I'm just
very honored to have you on the show. So, thank you very much.
Dean: Thank you. Nice, and happy
to hear.
Alan: How did you start... first
of all, I guess you've been in the games world for a long time. How
did you kind of pivot over to VentureBeat, and what is VentureBeat?
Let's let's unpack what VentureBeat is, for people that may or may
not know?
Dean: Yeah, I was sort of a traditional newspaper and magazine journalist for a long time, and then, when the web came along and people started podcasting and blogging, I looked around and felt like it was less of a risk to go try something new than it was to stay at a newspaper. I was at the San Jose newspaper at the time. So about 11 years ago, I joined VentureBeat, and it had been started two years earlier by Matt Marshall, who was a venture capital writer for the Mercury News and an early blogger as well. And so, we were a tech news blog and competed at the time with likes of GIGO, and TechCrunch. They have been either... gone away, or they they've been acquired by larger companies. So we're still one of the last, larger independent tech blogs.
And then within that, when I joined about eleven years ago, we started GamesBeat as well, as sort of a subsection that focused on games. At the very beginning, we were sort of a startup and venture capital site. But now we pretty much cover the gamut of tech news and game news. And then, our particular vertical focuses are artificial intelligence on the tech side, and then the whole game sector. And then, I guess as far as getting into VR and AR, I've really followed the news. I remember seeing the Oculus guys -- Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell and Brendan (Iribe) over at one of their CES tables in the early years, well before they were acquired. I think I even tried to get an interview with John Carmack, like, the day after he did a demo at E3. The next day, he was gone. So I was on the hunt kind of early. Never quite the absolute first person to dive into VR.
Alan: But very close. You've
seen it from pre-DK1 days -- where [it was] probably a
cobbled-together a collection of flat screens, wires, and duct tape
-- and what it is today, where you have real consumer-grade virtual
reality that's not even connected to computers. You've seen a lot
over the years. You've written countless articles on virtual and
augmented reality. Is there anything that you may have written about
before that you couldn't have predicted, that has happened already?
Dean: I didn't really anticipate
that Enterprise was actually going to take off as well as it has. It
was always sort of there as something that might be a
41 min
December 16, 2019 Adding VR to a Filmmaker's Toolbox, with XR filmmaker Kevin Kunze
Listeners of the podcast already
know a great range of the kinds of businesses XR has applications
for. But one business we don't talk about a lot is the business of
making movies. Filmmaker Kevin Kunze pops in to help fill that void,
and talk about some of his adventures in XR filmmaking.
Alan: Hey, everyone, this is Alan from the XR for Business Podcast. Today's guest is Kevin Kunze, an award-winning interactive filmmaker based out of Berkeley, California. We'll be talking about making an AR video with Will.i.am, creating art with Intel, and delivering on the promise of VR and AR with the San Francisco 49ers, San Jose Sharks, YouTube, and more. All that coming up on the XR for Business Podcast.
Kevin, welcome to the show, my friend.
Kevin: Thank you very much for
having me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. I've been so excited about this. You are making some of the coolest VR experiences. You're an award-winning interactive filmmaker. I want to just give you the platform to tell us all the cool stuff that you're working on.
Kevin: Sure. So, over the past
couple years, we've done a lot of different VR work, ranging from
filming the 49ers -- Colin Kaepernick's last season with them -- to
the San Jose Sharks. Getting guys just like crunched against the
glass in VR, seeing those front row seats. It's something that's many
sports fans' wildest dreams. We're also currently working on projects
that are more in the restorative justice side of things. I'm working
on a VR series about an African-American filmmaker, Kevin Epps. He's
kind of like the Spike Lee of San Francisco, is what a lot of people
say, but he works mainly in documentary. And three years ago he got
involved in an incident that SFPD at the time said was self-defense
shooting. And now three years later, he's been re-arrested and
they're saying it's murder. And he was recently got out of bail. I
actually picked him up from the jail and drove him home. And so I've
been documenting his experience and his family's experience in VR,
because it is the empathy platform and it's the medium that many
people will see things different.
And basically, this is a series that can also be shown in standard video format. We plan to go online with it on Amazon or Netflix and present it like that, and then have it be an additional thing that maybe Netflix or Amazon has on their platform in the Oculus or HTC. And then you can see it in 3D and in full peripheral, and maybe giving people access to additional footage as well. For instance, I had the idea of making an interactive feature, where you are doing interviews with some of these high profile people. For instance, we have this great rapper, Mistah F.A.B., who we interviewed, and he's known Kevin since he's about like 18, 19 years old. And he is so eloquent with all of his language. He's like one of the most interesting people that I've ever interviewed. And so giving the access of this footage that normally you would not use in the final product, this five-part series. And normally editors would put this on DVD deleted scenes or they just put in the trash, they put it on a hard drive. And it would never see the light of day. And instead, my idea would be that you take this footage and make an interactive app, where you're in the headset and you actually have cue cards around you and can ask these questions. In a way you become the investigator; the interviewer.
Alan: Cool. So how is it
interactive? Is it just like a pop-up gaze control or...?
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, maybe it
could be gaze controlled if we want to go through like YouTube or
something like that or if it's-- you have the finger control, you can
just click on it. But the whole idea being that you have all the
questions accessible to yo
27 min
December 16, 2019 Adding VR to a Filmmaker’s Toolbox, with XR filmmaker Kevin Kunze
Listeners of the podcast already
know a great range of the kinds of businesses XR has applications
for. But one business we don’t talk about a lot is the business of
making movies. Filmmaker Kevin Kunze pops in to help fill that void,
and talk about some of his adventures in XR filmmaking.
Alan: Hey, everyone, this is Alan from the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest is Kevin Kunze, an award-winning interactive filmmaker based out of Berkeley, California. We’ll be talking about making an AR video with Will.i.am, creating art with Intel, and delivering on the promise of VR and AR with the San Francisco 49ers, San Jose Sharks, YouTube, and more. All that coming up on the XR for Business Podcast.
Kevin, welcome to the show, my friend.
Kevin: Thank you very much for
having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been so excited about this. You are making some of the coolest VR experiences. You’re an award-winning interactive filmmaker. I want to just give you the platform to tell us all the cool stuff that you’re working on.
Kevin: Sure. So, over the past
couple years, we’ve done a lot of different VR work, ranging from
filming the 49ers — Colin Kaepernick’s last season with them — to
the San Jose Sharks. Getting guys just like crunched against the
glass in VR, seeing those front row seats. It’s something that’s many
sports fans’ wildest dreams. We’re also currently working on projects
that are more in the restorative justice side of things. I’m working
on a VR series about an African-American filmmaker, Kevin Epps. He’s
kind of like the Spike Lee of San Francisco, is what a lot of people
say, but he works mainly in documentary. And three years ago he got
involved in an incident that SFPD at the time said was self-defense
shooting. And now three years later, he’s been re-arrested and
they’re saying it’s murder. And he was recently got out of bail. I
actually picked him up from the jail and drove him home. And so I’ve
been documenting his experience and his family’s experience in VR,
because it is the empathy platform and it’s the medium that many
people will see things different.
And basically, this is a series that can also be shown in standard video format. We plan to go online with it on Amazon or Netflix and present it like that, and then have it be an additional thing that maybe Netflix or Amazon has on their platform in the Oculus or HTC. And then you can see it in 3D and in full peripheral, and maybe giving people access to additional footage as well. For instance, I had the idea of making an interactive feature, where you are doing interviews with some of these high profile people. For instance, we have this great rapper, Mistah F.A.B., who we interviewed, and he’s known Kevin since he’s about like 18, 19 years old. And he is so eloquent with all of his language. He’s like one of the most interesting people that I’ve ever interviewed. And so giving the access of this footage that normally you would not use in the final product, this five-part series. And normally editors would put this on DVD deleted scenes or they just put in the trash, they put it on a hard drive. And it would never see the light of day. And instead, my idea would be that you take this footage and make an interactive app, where you’re in the headset and you actually have cue cards around you and can ask these questions. In a way you become the investigator; the interviewer.
Alan: Cool. So how is it
interactive? Is it just like a pop-up gaze control or…?
Kevin: Yeah, I mean, maybe it
could be gaze controlled if we want to go through like Yo
27 min

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