We pick up where we left off, with Part 2 of Alan's interview with Kent Bye, host of the Voices of VR Podcast. In this half, the two VR podcast hosts discuss the ethics of XR, building a strong economic ecosystem for emerging technologies, the AR Cloud, and more.

Alan: Coming up next on the XR

for Business Podcast, we have part 2 of the interview with Kent Bye

from the Voices Of VR podcast, the podcast that got me started in

this industry.

I'm actually one of the founding

members of the Open Air Cloud Group and Kronos Group is is really

kind of trying to pull together these standards for 3D, as well for

e-commerce. I know there's a group right now trying to standardize 3D

objects for e-commerce and retail because right now it's a dog's

breakfast. Facebook accepts glTFs, Hololens is FBX models, VR is

usually OBJs. So you have all these different 3D file formats. None

of them really work well together and you can't-- it's not easy to

convert one to the other. And then of course, Apple came along and

created USDZ. Or in Canada, USDZed. It's crazy right now to think

that there's fifteen different 3D model types and it's kind of like

we need to settle on the JPG of 3D, whatever that happens to be,

which in my opinion is probably glTF. But I think we need to

standardize that and just pick, it so that-- can imagine trying to

send a photo to somebody and you send it in one format. And we saw

this 10 years ago on the Web, just-- it was 10 different ways to send

a photo in different formats. Your camera would take one format, and

it wouldn't work with your MacBook. I think the tolerance for

interoperability, I think the world just demands interoperability

now. And if you're not building for that, well, then you're going to

end up like Facebook and get broken apart.

Kent: Yeah. And I published a

podcast with the managing director of Open AR Cloud, and one of the

other founding members. And yeah, they were talking a lot about these

various different issues. So, yeah, it's something that you don't see

necessarily a lot of news on, until-- unless you're sort of deep into

the weeds of helping design these protocols. But I did go to the

Decentralized Web Summit last year, and one of the things that I saw

was that there's kind of like this pendulum that swings back and

forth between the centralized systems and the decentralized systems.

And I'd say that with cryptocurrency, with the containers being able

take different aspects of a server and be able to push it out to the

edge. We have it self-contained within either Kubernetes or Docker

containers. And just in general, it's kind of a movement away from

centralized systems into more decentralized architectures.

That's a interesting trend that I think

that paying attention to the rise of the decentralized web and what

that is going to afford. I feel like it's a lot more about open

protocols and collaboration and having people collaborate in

different ways. And that's something that I'd say has been a little

bit lacking within the VR and AR industry. I mean, there's been a

certain amount of not sharing of knowledge, but in terms of like real

meaningful collaboration. There's been a few things like OpenXR and

WebXR are of the big standouts, as well as probably the Chromium

browsers that a lot of different companies are working on. But in

terms of specific things to grow an ecosystem, it's been difficult

for companies to figure out what does it mean to grow community and

what it mean to grow an entire ecosystem that you may be a part of.

And I feel like the cryptocurrency world has had to deal with that a

little bit, in the sense that they're creating these open protocols,

and they have to prove that there's a buy-in to people participating

in these different protocols, and are going to be able to have these

different use cases.

And so I feel like there's this

metaphor of a blue ocean and a red oc