MWC Keynote: "The Dawn of VIVE REALITY" by Rikard Steiber President Viveport and SVP VR at HTC

We should say a big thank you to the Mobile World Congress team for putting on such a good show for us. So let's give them an applause. So when I grew up, I wanted to be a superhero. I want to put on the cape and save the world. And today I have two young daughters, Alexandra and Athena. And I can see that they also want to save the world and the animals and the rainforest. And for the first time ever, I think we all can be superheroes in this new virtual reality. So when we think about virtual reality, I think it's important that there are essentially a couple of things coming together. We have the latest in technology, we have AR and VR coupled with 5G and artificial intelligence, together with our humanity, with our ideas, our passions and our hopes to basically unleash all of our imaginations and make our dreams come true. And I strongly believe that virtual reality is going to change the world for the better for both us as individuals and us as enterprises. And last year at Mobile World Congress, we had just launched Viport. Do we have slides here maybe or not? Yeah, here we go. We just launched Viport. And when you think about Viport, it is the app store for virtual reality experiences. And it's kind of the place, it's kind of your airport where you can jump into this little egg shaped vibe pod and travel into the worlds of the universe. And there's so many places you can go to today. So already Today there's over 3,000 experiences on, on the Vive platform, which makes it by far the most comprehensive platform on the market today. But more importantly, I think just since the beginning of this year, we added 200 new apps. So there's a lot of new content coming. So when we look back at the last million downloads we did, we looked at what is consumers doing. What are you guys doing today? So you're discovering the universe. You can go to the moon with Apollo mission, you can go to iss, you can travel to Mars before Elon Musk. And then of course, many people have been wielding lightsabers in the Star wars universe recently. But you don't have to go to space. We have a beautiful planet. You can explore magical places like Stonehenge, you can go to the rainforest, you can go to great cities like Jerusalem or top of Mount Everest. I'm a scuba diver, so I'm very passionate about the sea. And one of the most popular applications is actually the blue, where you can go underwater and stay face to face to the whale. But you can do much more. You can spend times in shark week in 360, meeting sharks. But if there is one thing that people have been doing more than anything else, it's been enjoying these thousands of games where for the first time ever, you're truly immersed in room scale. You are not watching the game on the screen, you are in the game and you're hearing it, you're feeling it on a completely new level. And in addition to all the indie games, we now have a bunch of new AAA titles coming up, like Fallout, Doom, LA Noire. So there's going to be much more content coming out as we move into 2018. The other thing which is really exciting is that the Hollywood industry, any big movie, if it's Spider man or Ready Player One that's coming out next month, there will be great VR experiences for them as well. And I think for the creator, community, VR and AR is a game changer because if you're an artist, if you're an architect, if you're a designer, you've always been designing things on a 2D screen for 3D and it doesn't make any sense. So now you can really go into your creation on a completely new level. And I think perhaps where VR will have the biggest impact of all is in learning and education. So you probably heard that if you read something, that's great, the picture tested, a thousand words, if you have video, but now you can be in the experience. And when I grew up, I wasn't necessarily the best student in all subjects, but I see my daughters now. If they can go top of Mount Everest, go back to the ancient Egyptians or visit Machu Picchu, it's a much more exciting experience. They can see, they can hear it, they can touch it. And it's something that's probably the most memorable media that we have today. And this could be training not just for us as individuals or our kids. It's of course, for enterprises solving some of the biggest problems that they have in sales, marketing, training, collaboration, and of course, design. So it's really changing everything that we have. So when you think about Vibrate, Vibrate is kind of this place where we want to you to find all these experiences and more, but we also want to innovate. And if you have over 2000 experiences, very few consumers can buy them all. So we listen to our consumers. And last year we launched the world's first subscription service. So instead of buying all the apps like you do normally for software, you are kind of renting them. So for five, for $7.99 here in Europe, or $6.99. In the US, you basically have five apps that you can keep and then you can switch out on the monthly cadence or keep it as you want. So you can easily have $100 Euro value for only $7.99 per month. That's working really, really well. So, as you can see, there's a bunch of great experiences in this new Vive reality. But in order to make this happen and take it to the next step, you need to have great technology. So besides the cardboard mobile VR, we're seeing some big advancements happening, which is very, very interesting. So in the middle, of course, we actually launched the Vive here at Mobile Congress two years ago. And last year we launched the Vive Focus, which is very, very interesting because you don't need a PC or a mobile phone. You just put it on and you have 6 degrees of tracking inside our track. You can move around. So it's going to open a new segment in the market. They're still only in China. And of course here at mwc, we're also showing the Vive Pro, which has the highest resolution, the best audio, the best fit, and also wireless. So I think both the Focus and the Pro are wireless, and wireless is really, really key to have that fully immersive experiences of freedom. So in order to do that, of course we need great Networks, we need 5G, and I think we all become really dependent on the Internet. We can't really live without it. I mean, I was doing a lecture for an MBA class a couple of months ago and I asked them how many of you would choose between either Internet for life or no Internet? And they said, of course, everyone said Internet, but if you have to cut off your pinky to keep Internet, how many would cut off your pinky? And 30% raised their hand and would cut off their pinky. So we are really dependent on the Internet. What's transformational with 5G is that of course video is going to be the killer app, But AR&VR is going to require much more bandwidth, it's going to require much more low latency capacity. So I think that's why it's going to be such an important thing for AR and VR going forward. The other thing which is super interesting is that we have these hundred billion devices, a trillion sensors, that's going to tell us anything we want to know. It's going to be our cars, our cameras, our wearables, our phones. All this data is going to get up into the cloud. So we're going to have a lot more intelligence in the cloud. And that brings me to the third pillar of vive reality. You have the technology, you have the network, and then you have artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence and recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to bring forth the fourth industrial revolution. And what that means is that up until today, humanity has managed to harness power. And then we, through the electricity network, we have been giving that to machines or devices on demand. So what's going to happen now is that we're going to harness intelligence and through the Internet network, we're going to empower machines and devices and people around the world as well. So, of course, AI is today very good at specific use cases, and we're not really there with the Hollywood of the all general outsmart AI that's going to kill us all. We're not really there yet, but things are moving really fast. So I wanted to give you an example of how fast these things are moving and the direction. I loved playing chess when I grew up. And in 1985, Gary Kasparo, he was only 22 years old, he became the world champion. So he was in Hamburg for the championships. And then he played a simultaneous game versus the best chess computers at the time. 32 chess computers versus him at the same time. How many games do you think he won? One. He won all of them. He won all 32 games. So what this tells you is that no one was really surprised, because why would a computer beat a human? This picture was taken in 1997 when IBM's Big Blue beat him, and everyone thought that the world of chess was gone. What's really encouraging is that some 10 years later, in 2005, there was a freestyle chess game where humans and computers worked together. And some American amateur computers beat all all the big computers and all the great grandmasters, showing that it's not machine or humanity, it's humanity and machine working together that creates the biggest result. So today, your average chess game on your mobile phone free app, will beat the big blue. But AlphaZero, which is a new AI from Deep Blue, in four hours, it taught itself to play chess on superhuman level and beat the best chef's eye in the world in four hours. So the important thing is it's going really, really quickly. And all of you through the network are going to have this power, this intelligence in all your devices and in all our machines. So we're creating this new vive reality where we're combining AR and VR with 5G and artificial intelligence. And I think that AR and VR, the way to think about it. It's going to be your new interface to the computer. Before you had maybe the screen or your mobile phone ar. And VR is going to be the new interface to computers. So it's very important, it's very important that we use this technology for good. So that's why we started VR for Impact Initiative, which is a $10 million initiative connecting courses around the Sustainable Development Goals with creators and developers to create new experiences. One example that I love and my daughters love is how we are killing the rainforest. Every day we cut down 50,000 acres of rainforest, the major factor to global warming. So how can you tell this story? How can you raise awareness? VR is probably the best medium to create empathy and create awareness in new ways. We partnered with the developers of the tree. Imagine that you were a tree in the rainforest. The experience starts as a little seedling. You're this little seed and you're starting to see the light and you grow up. Your arms are the branches and you feel the wind. You feel the little animals on your body through haptic feedback. You feel the warm wind of the rainforest in your face. You grew up, it's beautiful. You see the animal, it's the most magical experience ever. Then suddenly you hear the machines, you feel pain in your arm, someone is cutting off your branches, someone is cutting you down. You becoming dephoretized and you die. People coming out of this experience, having this religious magical tree experience and then being killed and being deforested, have a very different perspective of what it is, being a tree and being killed. So what they do is that they take action. So hopefully in this new Vibe reality, we can all take action and change the world. Thank you very much.