Launch Talk: The Future of Virtual & Augmented Reality

Okay, so here we go. You're going to spend an hour listening to us talk about VR. I know most of these people, so I know that they're good at this and that you are going to be well entertained and perhaps even informed. If everything goes according to plan, we'll start doing some introductions. My name is Mac. I started something called Hammer and Tusk. I started Hammer and Tusk because a long time ago. Oh, cell phone guy. Yeah, we'll have a couple of those. A long time ago, I tried VR for the first time. I was at a conference in San Francis, San Francisco. I took the headset off my head and I went into the corner of the room and I rocked back and forth for like, five minutes. And then I went to my hotel and I wrote a blog post and I said, holy Lord, everything's about to get weird. Like, weird weird. It's real. Still on that one. Okay, that's okay. That's cool. It's cool. As long as you were working towards a solution. So I did that. And the only reason I tell you this story is because the next day, Oculus got bought by Facebook for $2 billion. So I called it before Facebook. Most of you jumped on the bandwagon late. Basically, the reason I get to be the guy who hosted this is because I was here early. Hammer and Tusk started out as a community. I wrote a newsletter. We did real life events. New York, San Francisco, here in Vancouver went really well. Eventually, some friends of mine at a company called Axiom Zen got a hold of me. And Axiom Zen builds extraordinary products. Their software is used to put satellites around Jupiter, as well as silly little mobile games that hundreds of thousands or millions of people play. All sorts of things in between. They love to build things. They got ahold of me. They said, Mac, VR is the future. I said, I know. I'm that guy, right? So I know. And they said, all you do is write about it. It's bullshit. Why don't you build it? I was like, oh, that's a good pitch, except that I'm just me. So I can't build it because I'm not a developer, I'm not a designer. I don't do these things. And they said, well, we have an army of incredibly talented people. They need a little bit of pathfinding. Why don't you come work with us? And so a year and a half ago, they acquired Hammer and Tusk. I've been a gleeful employee of Axiom Zen ever since. We do VR stuff. We build experiences. We Build games. We occasionally ship them, though not often. We've made a bunch of filming stuff and we're really exploring the space. I'm going to be your host tonight. Next. Okay.

Wow.

How do I follow that up?

My name is Alan Goldman. I am. I'm a researcher and industry liaison at Emily Carr University. And my background is more as a filmmaker. I experimented a lot with 3D, and I think that kind of led me to the place that I'm in now having an interest in VR and like Mac, when I first tried or had my first VR experience, I was hooked up. So that kind of changed a lot of things. And it seemed to be a natural progression from where I was in 3D to where we were going in VR, especially with the headsets themselves. At the university, we're experimenting a lot. We're playing with a lot of different things. I think someone mentioned from the CDM that they have a vibe. We too have a vibe. And we've had a number of developer kits. Now we have a kit itself, and we have a lot of students playing in the space. We also are very much interested in the socialization between or how to create more social experiences in VR because I think that putting on a headset can be a little bit of a. Well, can be a bit of a disincentive to some. So, anyways, I'm sure we'll talk more as we go along, and I'm happy to be invited here. I feel honored. And over to Wren.

Hi, my name is Wren Handman. I work with Mac at Hammer and Tusk, and I do content creation. So I'm coming at this actually from a creative writing background, but a big part of my job is reading about VR. So I spend a couple hours every day just reading about what's going on in the space and what's new in the space and what's the most exciting in the space and then sharing it with our community through our newsletter. So I've dove deep.

Awesome. Hi, I'm Kayla. Kayla Cunningham. I was the director of VR at Roadhouse Interactive up until September 1st this year. My background is mostly game development. I did. I was 10 years at EA, did five years at Roadhouse. Different than folks here. I was actually a bit of a VR skeptic when the Oculus Wave was hitting. I was a big VR fan back in the 90s when I was a kid. Loved all that stuff, got big into it, but really have been kind of waiting for the technology to get right. And that moment for me really hit at Steam Dev Days a few years ago when that was really the come to Jesus moment where they kind of figured out the latency requirements and we were on the cusp of figuring out the input requirements. I was an early developer on Vive, participant in the room scale game jam that happened here in town. Helped my friends with fantastic contraption early in the days and really been kind of trying to show people what really great VR is and what the future benefits of it are.

Hi, my name is Eric Hein. I'm the executive producer at Parkieact in Vancouver. We specialize in VR. I spent a few years at EA so about five years doing game development over at PopCap. Did DNA for a bit which is a mobile game company that really focuses on gotcha and meta games and free to play standard mobilization. But I've been at Archicact for about almost two years now. We started with about 12 people when I joined. We're up to 70 in Vancouver right now. We've got 25 people in a studio in China and we only do VRAR related work. So I've been there for the last little while. I drive a lot of the game development, looking at business opportunities and we also do a lot of publishing as well. I'm happy to answer any questions and I'm excited to be here.

Okay, so to make this most useful for you, what I do is I inform the audience about you. So I'm going to ask you a series of questions and you are going to vote yay by putting your hand up and nay, by not putting your hand up. Have you used VR in the last 24 hours? Have you used VR in the last week? Have you ever used VR? Put your hand up. If you've never been inside VR. Okay, that is literally the first time that's ever happened. That's crazy actually. Okay, put your hand up. If you think mobile VR is going to be more important than head mounted stuff, then the Vive and the Oculus and all those things.

Now or the future.

That's good, that's good. I got what I need. I got what I need. Okay. So welcome, welcome. I've done quite a few of these panels. They can be really similar and really boring, like, oh, what do you think is the future of VR? Blah blah. So we're going to play a little fast and loose here today. Yesterday I looked at the App Store and it was very exciting on my iOS device. If you go to the search tab of the App Store, you can see the top 10 most searched terms on the App Store. Three of them were VR related. I've never seen anything like that, especially on an iOS device. It was crazy. Today it's none. It's literally back to none. And the difference is probably Black Friday and VR headsets being sold at Best Buy and things like that. I'm guessing that's what the change is. So my first question to you is if VR fails to really grab the consumers by the shortened curlies this Black Friday, this Christmas season, are we done? Are we all going home? Start with Eric.

No. The reason being, I think behind that is although I think the consumer market is a lot tougher, I think the B2B market is really solid. There's too many applications for this stuff. Whether it comes to real estate or education or simulation, it's not going to go anywhere. And so that's, at the very least is going to continue to drive innovations in the hardware market, which is going to make it better for the consumer market. So if it doesn't take off, then we have that. I do know bringing that up, when I was out Christmas shopping this last couple days, I was surprised to see first at. Where was I? London Drugs. I saw that they had VR headsets in there, standard fancy cardboards, two variants, a pro and a standard version. And then I went to Staples the next day and I saw a different set in a, in a similar type stand where it was a pro and a standard. And then I was absolutely surprised to go to save on foods for groceries and they had a stand there with a Google Cardboard variant there with a pro and a standard. Again that blew my mind. So I suspect this Christmas we're gonna see lots of those go out. Now I don't know if that's gonna be positive because they might not actually deliver good experiences. Depends on the end phones that people have and stuff. But it's nice to see it gaining traction in North American audience.

Anybody disagree with Eric? Anybody want to add to that? So here's kind of the problem, right? You put four people on a panel who all agree about it. It would be better if somebody was here like no, you guys are all screwed. You're all going back to Yay.

To add one point to that, I think the one piece out of that that you bring up that maybe we can expand a bit more is the risk of these low quality VR experiences kind of changing the market. And I think that's most dangerous from an entertainment perspective. You're going to see a lot of families buying cardboard esque type devices. They're going to slap their phone in there. They're not going to get a great VR experience. They're going to think that's what VR is from an entertainment perspective. And that may slow the uptake in terms of that, that result. But I completely agree with you in terms of even if entertainment sector fails to take off, if Black Friday sales don't really kind of come to fruition, there's so many other sectors that are looking at VR right now that it's here to stay and it will impact our lives. It just may not have that immediate revolution in terms of entertainment products.

I think there's also danger though of overhyping everything in the industry that we're all so excited by this. It's so new and it's so different the way we talk about it. We talk about these come to Jesus moments and we talk about how this technology is revolutionizing everything and changing everything. And sometimes when you really get into it and dive deep, there's not that much there. We're like, I was so excited about the PlayStation VR and this is going to change everything. And you're reading all these reviews, this is the most amazing new thing. This is the end of other gaming devices. And I tried the PlayStation Worlds VR and every single one made me violently ill. I was like, I'm not gonna recommend this to anyone. Right. So I think there is a danger that we're maybe a little bit too excited sometimes and we over hype things.

So your story is about like literally save on foods. Crazy. That's like my moment with the App Store. This like very, oh my God, the Muggles are coming moment. It's great. Not everybody uses the word Muggles that way. This is also a very North American focused view. So you as a researcher, you as somebody who consumes a lot of information, Eric, you guys have this deep Chinese expertise. Let's talk about VR outside. I have my own hypotheses, but this actually isn't about me, despite what I want it to be. So why don't you guys tell me about your international perspectives on VR and this time we'll start on this side. This time we'll start on this side.

International perspectives. Well, I mean, it seems to me that we're getting an inquiry at the university from someone internationally, if not daily, almost weekly. A lot of companies come out of the woodwork. We have a lot of Asian interests in the research that we're doing. We've had people come to the university and want to buy the research that we're doing outright and basically want to sponsor the center because There is a huge appetite in that marketplace, especially in China. And Eric can definitely second that, I think too, by virtue of some of the projects that are going on within your company. And I think it's completely different. It's a different ball game altogether in Asia than it is here. So we have all these legacy technologies and they don't have those kind of legacies. They're adopting mobile, they're adopting these things very quickly. And there are VR theme parks, there are VR corners, there's VR in the mall. You know, it's completely different. And I think that the. We haven't even sort of hit that wave yet. And I don't know if we will in the same way, because we're much more conservative, you know, just as our population is.

There's also, I think, a really exciting thing happening, especially in China in terms of hardware development, because the patent laws there are so different. So the ability to. So the ability to innovate is just way, way beyond what we can do here, because they can build off each other and share that information in a way that people here can't or won't because they're all so proprietary with all their designs and all this.

Yeah, that's true. I have a camera company that was trying to innovate a stereo 3D rig, stereo 363D rig. And they had a client here and they said, just wait, we'll take it back to China, we'll mess with it and then we'll bring it back and it'll be finished. Like, how do you compete with that? That's crazy. Right? So that kind of innovation is not happening quickly here at all.

Yeah, they also can get the manufacturing costs down. Right. So they have so much access to manufacturing and parts and, you know, labor. So they can come in at a third of the price. You know, in Asia, we see all kinds of. There's lots of cardboard knockoffs over there. Very high quality units now with nice lenses.

And that doesn't mean they're even made out of cardboard to be.

No, no. These are full plastic shells with banding on it. They come with their own app stores. They have platforms already. We do a lot of publishing. We have relationships with lots of these companies, whether it's the Bofang Storm or whether it's Pico or any number of headsets. And we take a lot of North American content and we bring it and we publish it over there. And we'll handle the SDK, we'll do the translations and we'll put on their platform since there's lots of opportunity for that. Also a lot of all in one headset. So these are things that are either using mobile chipsets, but they're just an all in one headset. There's no cell phone to remove the guts of a cell phone. Or it might be like the Nvidia Shield. They take the Integra, they shove it in there. You've got kind of a hybrid between PC and mobile comparison. You generally end up with a problem when it comes to quality. And that can be on the app store or latency or you know, they're all just below what you're doing. Probably experience on a high quality device. But the price point is so much lower and adoption is so high over there that they can just blast those things out all the time. Right. There's certainly that volume perspective. And on the other end you don't have a lot of people with a home that can support a VR headset. And so that's where the arcade models pop up. Right? You were talking about the arcades. They're really big over there or pop up shops. So they'll pop up a shop in a space and it'll be up there for a month and you will pay and go in and go through a series of VR experiences and you'll pay, I don't know, some price between 20 US or 50 US and it could be 45 minutes long. And it's just a series of little mini demos across different headsets. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but people are paying for it with the volume of people over there. They can handle that and it's still a good business model. This is also in China. This is in China.

It's starting to pop up here as well though. There's one in Victoria of all places and there's one in Hamilton in Ontario. So we're starting to see that model being adopted in America.

Has anybody been to Richmond? No, I don't mean like Richmond as a city. I mean the VR Cafe Vrcade. You have good? Was it good?

Oh yeah.

They've got, I don't know, four going.

On eight VR stations.

$45 for an hour.

Bring your friends, everyone can watch you.

What do you want there? Does anybody have any perspective? So I specifically said international and wasn't surprised that we came to China because China is the big piece of the story here. But is there any other stories that are interesting? Has Brazil got some weird things going on? Is Lagos Lagos, Nigeria got some things going on? It does. I was Talking to a lady there.

But I would say the top ones right now are the general arcade countries. So that's Japan, South Korea, Dubai, China. They're all really big on the arcade model already. And so it makes sense that they would adopt that kind of stuff first.

But you're also seeing stuff like South Africa has decided to come together and have like a really formalized idea of what they want the VR community there to look like. So they're actively working on making sure that all the stories that are being told in VR aren't North American stories. So we're seeing some of this South Africa, which is very cool.

I think Europe has been a slower adopter actually, from what I can figure.

Out a lot of companies working out of it still.

But yeah, general adoption just seems being slow. Like we're ahead of North America. I would say we're ahead of Europe, but not. Not nearly.

I know when we look at our PlayStation sales, like from our software.

Yeah.

Europe and North America are about imperity right now. So it might bode well for the PlayStation. PlayStation, the Ark.

Sant on that.

Yeah.

So I used to work for a company called Future Town and I managed the VRK programs there. So we had, we had three launch titles for the Vibe. And so during the course after the launch we had our products being in VR arcades across five different continents, including Pakistan, London. We had a lot of Easter Europe countries. So you'll see a lot of adoption through the arcades rather than the consumer market. And every day it's like 20 queries from different people wanting to sell in Canada. Actually the most sophisticated is Control Media, based out of Ontario. They just set up operations in Edmonton. But again, it's like very sophisticated operations and very organized. But a company that's getting into it big time is Weaver that did the boot and they're setting up a whole program. It's all about VR arcades targeting malls and big operators and stuff. So I think that's where you're seeing the bigger side of it is on the VRKs.

Thank you, Kevin. Changing gears work in VR. So have any of you ever worked in VR because you wanted to be more productive? Yes, we have a. Yes, let's start there.

So one of the first things we were making a puzzle game and one of the first things we found was the iteration of design for puzzles is really challenging because I'll do something in Unity. I want to test it. So I hit play, I run over, put the headset on. I'm like, no, that's not good. Take the headset off, run back, stop, edit something in Unity and go back over there. And that whole kind of flow is really slow. And so what we did was we just spent a few days and built an NVR level editor for us, which paid for itself in terms of just my design time within just a couple weeks. There's a lot of good use cases for doing that type of stuff for experiences. I'm good friends with Timony and all of them at Unity Labs and they're looking at great ways of using NVR editing with Unity. Unreal is doing similar research as well. Well, there's some really good opportunities there for just making your workflow a lot better in VR because there's certain things that you get in VR better than you get when you look on the screen. And I think even going forward, it's going to be more interesting because It'll open up 3D content creation to people who don't necessarily want to go through the learning process of doing it on a screen based medium. So if you look at the carte blanche model that Unity's kind of shown, it's a totally different way of looking at 3D content creation in a way that would be accessible to everyone by using cards and voice input and an AI agent and being able to do all that work in VR, allowing pretty much anybody to build their own kind of universes in VR. So there's a lot of opportunities there.

What about content that doesn't involve creating 3D? Has anybody ever opened their email and their Gmail drive and worked in VR or in AR or anything like this?

I don't think the resolution is good enough yet. I did a lot of testing on these, you know, virtual desktops and things, and it's just way too hard to read text. It's not there yet.

Yeah, I think like once resolution gets higher and all that stuff, that may be an appropriate way of doing things. You just kind of place because there will never cease to be a need for 2D screen based interaction models. But right now, the standard screens that we have are hard to kind of bring into VR right now because that resolution limitation, you have to have a really big screen.

Even the Hololens is not quite there yet. We've tried to use the HoloLens as an actual virtual desktop and actually have it all up in your space. And the interaction models are still complicated and a little bit unintuitive at this stage. So there's still work to be done there.

The interesting thing with the HoloLens though, is that I can use my regular computer while I have it on my head, which is really nice. So I've done things where I've been playing with the holograms and then I've seen a Slack notification. So I've gone over my computer and checked it and then gone back to what I was doing without having to take on, take off, switch mediums. So it makes it a lot easier.

To switch between things Amido tenfold, all of this.

I'm sorry.

Here's a trick question for you. What's the most important company in augmented reality today?

I mean, what is augmented reality?

I mean, what is reality?

Is it augmented? Is it mixed? Does it merge?

Do we have any quality? No. Because I have a trick question to answer.

Is it the most talked about or is it the most important?

It's Snapchat. Anybody disagree up here?

I do.

You do?

I do very strongly. I think that they're all about hype and that it's very smart and it's gonna get it into the hands of consumers, but at the end of the day, the product is not useful and it's gonna flare out and die as soon as.

So it's popular.

It's popular.

I think we've got a local company here that's going to take off in a big way in that space, which is Finger Food Studios.

So what's Finger Food doing that you can talk about?

Well, they're having a launch on December 9th, and they're going to tell you all about it. All I can say is that they're going to have about 100 people working for that company just in that part of their division in augmented food Reality.

How many people have used Snapchat in the last three days? Okay, okay. So tell.

Obviously you think it's, like, important.

I think it's because of the, like, because of the number of times that somebody intentionally goes about and says, I want to apply AR to my world. Lens is measured in the billions on Snapchat daily, which is ludicrous.

And they're doing an incredible job of sort of. I don't know if democratizing is the right word, but bringing AR into a space where people understand it, where it's not something totally new, it's not scary in any way. It's just another thing that's part of your life. Right. You put some filters on your photos. We've been doing this for ages in a slightly different way now. It's more sophisticated, so people can kind of build with it. And if you ask most Snapchat users what augmented reality is, they probably say, I don't know. They don't realize that they're using it every day.

That's an interesting point.

Have you guys watched any of the spectacle videos? You know, Spectacles, they're glasses. They make glasses. And they said, the square screen is dead. We don't need a square screen. We're not capturing on a square screen. So the Spectacles have got two cameras, one on each side. I think there's one on each side. Maybe there's one. They capture circular video. And then with your phone, you can either look at it in portrait mode or in the middle of the video, you can turn to landscape mode. And the whole video works anyways because, in fact, the captured part is this big. They're only rendering this and gray screen. Even that small moment makes you feel like they have caught the whole world. It is a very strange sensation of. This is bigger than video. It's bigger than. And that has nothing to do with the AR even. That's just how they've brought the Spectacles into the AR space. Okay? Biggest, biggest threats to VR, outside of bad content pissing in the well and us, like, ruining grandma's first VR experience so she never comes back. Because that's the easy answer. You ask people this question, they say, we're going to make bad content and then everybody's going to try it for the first time. They're not going to love it. It's not the Wii. You know, everybody's first time playing the Wii, they were like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I'm bowling and I'm tennis and I'm going to go buy this, and it's super great. We know that VR could mess that up. Is there any other real concerns?

I think I've been reading a lot lately about the lack of research into what it's actually doing to your body in terms of health and safety. And it's something that we're starting to talk about. And as things like the PSVR become more popular and people are in VR for longer and longer, you're starting to hear more and more stories about things going wrong. And I think that if we don't figure it out and make sure that it's safe, that could be a serious detriment to the technology.

I would greatly worry about the commercialization of the actual virtual space. So I'm sure we've all read Ready Player One, or we haven't. We know that space and understand it to some degree. But what happens when we start placing Things in that space and monetizing it with advertising, that would be a killer for me. I mean, I don't. I don't want to participate in that. So that would be my.

Do you not think it's an inevitability?

It may be inevitability, but it's not something I want, you know, because he asked me a direct question.

So, yeah, that side of the panel.

Got any real fears short term? Obviously, price point and form factor are the hardest problems to solve right now. So that's kind of hurting things. I would say long term. And this is just sparked by you. That came into my head. I read the book. Snow Crash is a good book to read. And there's another one nobody talks about called Otherland, which actually has some good virtual spaces there. And I can see it, actually, if you think about real life and you can only monetize and analyze and. And measure and spy on so much details as someone like. But as we become more virtualized, you can do all that stuff. You know, there can be overarching systems that control, measure, read everything you do at every single point. So it's like the ultimate in Big Brother, if you think about it sometime down the line, whether it's 20, 30, 50 years down the line.

If you don't think we've hit the tipping point of VR yet, and if you do, I think you're crazy. But what is. Is it Apple's phone that comes out that is like super great with their headset? Is this daydreaming pixel thing gonna be enough to make this go big? What is the actual. When we historically look back and be like, that was the day that the dam broke.

We don't know what. Where VR fits in our daily lives yet. I think that's the biggest thing is we're all just kind of grasping at straws and trying to figure what that is. The iPhone, prior to the iPhone, we really didn't know where smartphones existed in our daily lives. And I think even when the iPhone first launched, we didn't really know where it fit in our daily lives until we actually get that figured out. What is the value add? The thing that the. I forget who it was. Gave a really good talk on a panel last year and it was what is the use case that would make you drive back home to get it? Because you left it at home. So, like your cell phone. So if you leave your cell phone at home, you will probably drive back home to get it if you're 15 minutes away. So what is that app on your VR glasses or headset that is so imperative to your day to day functions that you'd be willing to go back home to get it because you just cannot see yourself getting through your day without that. And I think until we solve that, we're not going to hit that tipping point. And that could be quite a ways away.

And so the big counter argument is that if we haven't solved that yet, are we not all assuming that that is solvable?

I think that goes back to the big fear of the biggest threat to VR is if we can't solve that, then this medium doesn't deserve to exist.

I think AR is probably a lot easier to visualize than VR. And there's that wonderful video hyperreality, which is a bit of a dark take on things, but they put it really into protective. Like here's a use case of someone in a daily life and how they use it and you immediately see value to it. Right. You also see a lot of negative that goes along with it, but you see a lot of value in there.

Yeah.

When you say if you would go.

Back home to take it after eating, that implies that a person would need that after eating. But what if humans know when they need it? Like they actually need it at home?

Yeah, like our televisions are arguably as important to us as our cell phones.

But you only use a few of.

The people that need it most at home. Maybe the people that are far from cities, they would need that more. But on the other hand, they don't have access to the Internet so much yet. So maybe when the Internet becomes more available to everyone in the world, VR would have a better chance.

Yeah, I kind of lean towards the augmented reality thing taking off in some big way. Not to say that VR is not huge or will continue to get bigger, but I mean, people are going to work in augmented reality and they're going to use it to communicate with each other, to make things, to talk to each other, to fix things. It will create efficiencies, it will change the way we work. And I tend to think that that might be when that tipping point is. But that's not VR, that's ar. So maybe it's mixed reality.

I have a colleague who's working on a virtual reality or VR high school, and my personal hope is that it disrupts high school altogether. So I think that's going to be, for me, that will be the massive tipping point. Because to put VR high school in VR, where you can walk in and have conversations with Nobel laureates and have Some serious interactions going on at different levels. I think that would be remote. So, you know, it's on its way. I've got to check in every now.

And again to see there's quite a few people in that space taking textbooks and making them into VR applications and trying to change the way we educate.

Does Everybody know what MOOCs are? So we all know one person who's good at those and finishes those and then we know 15 people who started one. There's some argument that the MOOCs didn't work. So for those who don't know, massive online something course open. Massive online open course mooc. That's like when MIT just gives away all of their education for free online. Super fun, super awesome. Do you think that VR could save the MOOCs? That's my favorite sentence of the day.

I think so. I mean, you can apply as close to a standard education to that as you want or as you build around it, or you can make it as far fetched in a different direction. So you can literally have, and I don't advocate this, you can literally have a classroom that you sit down in a virtual space and have a virtual teacher or a real teacher who is now instructing you on courses. Traditionally you can go much further than that and you can build a whole virtual space that is not conducive to students sitting next to each other. And you can throw curriculum at them in all kinds of unique ways, like Magic School Bus. I think that's a great example of, you know, the future of VR could be for education, the Magic School Bus. You, the students get on your magic school bus and you go on a journey through the body and you shrink down and all the wonderful things that happen to you that's exciting and entertaining can happen to a student. Right?

And there are people who are working on things like that. I did a demo from a company in New Zealand that's working on a VR education experience where you sort of walk into the forest and you can touch things around you and it pops up information about each of those organisms. You're sort of learning about biology as you go through this kind of little adventure. Way more fun than reading a textbook.

I think one of the big things that.