#41: A look at the Merge cube (augmented reality for education)

This little cube from Merge is changing education. We're going to hear about how it's how you use a augmented reality with this cube to improve education. And away we go. Who are you?

Hey, I'm Andrew Trickett. I'm one of the co founders of, formerly of the company is Merge Labs Inc. But our brand name in education is merged.

Yeah, well, I love my cube. I, I use it all the time with an iPad and I can augment this thing and, and get all sorts of augmented things around it, A, a solar system or all sorts of stuff. So yeah, what, what? It's been a while. You know, I saw you guys, I don't know, 10 years ago at south by Southwest where I first saw the idea for the cube.

And yeah, it's been, it's been an interesting ride. You know, Robert, as you know, we were, first of all, you know, how it works, you know, for your audience is that you're holding the Merge cube and you're running apps on compatible devices and the cube serves as a multi target, you know, marker for the augmented reality to create this effect that you're holding, having a handheld experience, right. With the content which is, you know, as far as we know, you're very unique in spatial computing. You know, because I always. VR is great. There's a lot of things that are pretty awesome. But one of the missing elements, I think in spatial computing is just a satisfying sense of holding something right. Something. And this is how we solve it. It's pretty unique. But when we started out, as you well know, we were kind of focused on what I would call edutainment, you know, selling it to consumers with lots of different sort of fun things, you know, educational, you know, at a minimum, always appropriate for kids. That's something we always kind of had going for some. Then we kind of shifted over to a focus on the education market. So with that technical platform, we added a bunch of merge created content for educational purposes, primarily for science and STEM subjects. That's how it's used now. And yeah, where we're today, I'm not sure exactly what the latest news we gave you, but we sold over a million cubes. So people ask me how many schools you're in is like I don't know, but probably all of them.

A lot of them at the better schools with better teachers.

Well, you know, even you'd be surprised. A lot of Title 1 schools are even buying now the subscription licenses from us to, you know, kind of teach science and stem. It's a lot of library programs. After school programs and now we've sold licenses into 40 some countries around the world. So it's been a pretty wild ride since, you know, our earliest days.

Yeah, this, it's a unique controller because as you turn it, you know, you could have a dissected frog here or a solar system or. Tell me about some of the cool stuff you've seen teachers do with this, man, it's fantastic.

You know, at this point we have now created, I'm going to separate out into like the merge created content and the user created content because I think you're going to be really psyched about that. And that's also where we're focused. But as far as the merge created content, it's over a thousand pieces of content. Just some of the examples. Yeah, you can hold a frog and dissect and explode out the parts. Hold some of my favorite ones. You're holding the solar system in your hand, you can kind of zoom in and out of planet. Another one I really like for middle schoolers is you're holding the cube and bugs are crawling all over it. And you pick two, you hit the breed button, they kind of come together, give a very family friendly, appropriate kiss and their offspring walks away. So you learn about inheritance of traits in a really kind of fun way. Another really popular one is that for the older kids we have very photorealistic anatomy and so but it's not just kind of zooming in on the different body systems, but when you go into say the circulatory system, press on the heart, it will explode out. You're holding a beating heart in your hand. And you know, in addition, just the, the novelty value of it, you know, Robert, is, you know, how the teachers use it and what it kind of brings to the table that's unique is that you can really explore the spatial relationships right between all the different parts of the heart. And there's just things that you notice that you don't notice if you're just kind of scrolling around, you know, on a screen. And you know, your brain operates in a different way when you're holding it, you know, because you have a, your brain goes into inspection mode. And actually the woman who cuts, cuts my hair told me this one's, I'm going to use that. And sales cycles that you have a re, you have a sense of ownership over something you're holding in your hand. Right. It's not kind of a passive visual experience, but it's now multi sensory and you know, the more senses you involved in educational experience, the More impactful and memorable it is, but, but you know, the other side of. So there's all the content that we created, but it's used like after school STEM programs, teaching science, even, you know, somewhat for literacy. Libraries like it, you know, for, for literacy. But the other element, and this is where we're kind of focused right now because it's been a little while since we talked, is enabling more and more of the visualization of your own content that you've created on this platform. So for example, you know, your audience probably knows Minecraft. There's a dish called Minecraft Edu and that works really well, you know, for visualizing your creation. Hey, what do I think? Because again, you just notice things you don't notice when you're able to grab it and look at it, you know, from all angles. Another really matter of fact, the more dominant tool that we've seen and say at least us, K to 12 is something called Tinkercad. I think it's made by, is it Autodesk, you know, one of the high end, you know, CAD systems. They have this free tool called tinkercad. Really fun to play with. And I like it because it has both a very flat learning curve to just get in there and create something basic, but you can do more complicated things. You want to learn it, but because it's free, it's really popular in K12 and they've actually built in an integration where whatever you create in Tinkercad can go straight to your Merge Edu account without even needing to download it and then re upload it in our system. But you know, for some of the other tools, you know, we're fairly agnostic, you know, as far as what you use to create it. You know, we've seen blender, we've seen SolidWorks, we've seen what's the other Fusion360 or just going and grabbing something off of, you know, some of the stores that are out there. But we've been kind of doing more and more of that and where we're focused right now is, you know, you can already upload things and add your own labels, you know, to it, which is really cool. And in the release that's coming out like any day now is where those can be multimedia labels, you know, not just text labels, so video files, audio files, you know, picture files. So, you know, that's where we're at right now or you know, about to be another one that is already out there. If you have an iOS device, a reasonably modern iOS device, is a photogrammetry tool. It's an app called Merge Scanner and anyone you know can go out there and use it. And we've gotten really good feedback as far as it being, you know, first of all, it's very low cost, but it works really well that you can, you know, scan a real world object photogrammetry and it uploads, you know, the 3D digital model that again in our platform you can hold in your hand. And we've seen where in education, you know, how, how are they using all of that? I would say two things. One is creating your own virtual museum of say, hey, these are objects in my house or object in my classroom. Because you can also add like this little pedestal effect which is really cool for a virtual museum. The other one is just your classic project based learning in STEM programs where they're really, it facilitates the whole engineering and design process because the better you can visualize it, you just kind of catch things and you can just run through more cycles because it's a virtual object. So if you think about the stages of where the teammates are collaborating on what do we want to create, sending it to the teacher to get feedback, like that's not at all what I told you to build. Or you know, if it's going to a 3D printer. And it's really. This is really popular in 3D printing programs because yeah, want to get something down tight before you send it to the printer, right? Because even something like the size of a whistle takes the entire class period to print. So you want to get it right so the teacher can give you feedback. Like here's the classic one is they're creating a little human, but the arm sticking out way too far and it's going to fall off during the print. And she'll say, hey, you need to shorten that or put a support underneath the wrist or something. Then you can actually take these final outputs and share them with anyone in the world. We have a free version of the app that you would visualize it with right now. It's called Merge Object Viewer. It's going to be called Merge Creator. Actually you would create in Creator and then still view it in Object Viewer. So you can send it out to anyone in the world to view it, which is really cool because everything has unique object code.

And yeah, you have a whole community of people sharing these kinds of things with each other. That, that's one reason that teachers like it. There's a lot of things to download that other people have created for their classrooms. And, and you can upload. If some, some of your students do something really cool with it, you can upload that to the community, right? Yeah.

And what's really interesting, yeah, I mean as a company we're focused, you know on 10 to 12 specifically education. But where we've seen others use it because this is really cool is in higher ed for is it. It's one of the Harvard Smithsonian, you know, affiliated group and every year they do annual presentations of their galaxy cluster models and they give people cubes. You can visualize it because again it really helps explore the spatial relationships of you know, intergalactic structures. Another really cool case study was want to make sure I get. I think it's University of California San Francisco Medical School. Yeah. There's another team that built some really sophisticated anatomy models and they did a side by side test of the traditional method of preparing for an anatomy exam, which is cadavers. And not to be gruesome but you know, you can't take the cadavers home, you know, to study versus you know, with emerge cubes.

And not every school has a cadaver. I actually worked on a cadaver in college. Right. They're, they're everyday things that you have, you have to store them properly. You have to have a room for that. You have to have formaldehyde on it. Right. And so it's not something that every kid has access to. But hey, you can download one, you.

Can take that home. You know we enable take home, you know, taking things home to study. We've seen also in the in subs higher and also it's a little gross.

You know, a lot of kids get squeamish around the cadaver.

Want to take the cadaver home. Even if you're allowed, I don't think.

You would want to first of all, probably £100.

What else has been really cool is we've had corporate, you know, in government kind of use it for adult learning and other purposes like you know, they're secretive about, I'm not allowed to say who, but one of the major medical device companies uses it as a visualization tool for prototypes that they can take out into the field and get feedback, you know, from physicians and surgeons. They also use it during the product development process internally. And we've had a couple of fun situations where they use it for, I'm going to call it swag, you know, PR marketing tools. Like there was a high end watch watchmaker that used it to kind of visualize and take out in the field. You know, you could hold like these really expensive watches, you know, people could take them home, you know, sort of thing to visualize, see what they wanted to buy. So it's got a lot of different use cases that we've seen it for. Even though we're focused on K to 12 and we kind of, you know.

See that, you know, your company is a, a smart one. I mean, when, when I first met you guys, I don't know, 12 years was a long time ago. You know, we were talking about a world where everybody would have a pair of glasses on. Right. Well, that, that world hasn't arrived yet. And you found a market for doing augmented reality with, with educators with a very low cost cube. And it's real well designed by the way. It's soft, you can throw it at a kid, not hurt it.

You heard them, they're very durable too, which is important. Really?

Oh yeah, I keep it on my desk and play with it a lot, you know, squeeze it.

You know, Robert, since you mentioned that, you know, the other thing that, you know, not surpr in education is it wasn't really until like all the COVID stimulus money, until there were even one to one device programs, you know, in the schools. And you know, they usually buy Chromebooks, you know, because they're, you know, cheaper. But you know, we see some iPads, we see some Windows, but the point being we're a very, very long ways away from the time when, you know, VR headsets or you know, Mr. Headsets are affordable enough that you might actually buy one for every kid in the school. And so until then we've got something that's working on the devices that they already own, you know, whether it's the iPad, as far as we know, it's the only augmented reality that runs on Chromebooks. So that's really cool. And that's, that's the dominant device, you know.

Oh yeah, my kids high school is all Chromebook. Right.

You know, and it tends to be the older the kid, the more likely it's going to be that it's a Chromebook. But we still see a lot of iPads out there, you know, Windows laptops to some degree. But being able to run on those devices, it makes it more affordable versus asking them to buy a specialized device just to do this and maybe a couple of other things. As much as I look forward to that world, to be clear and on.

Chromebooks, it's a good example of why you need something like this. Because you can't touch the screen on most of those Chromebooks, you can't spin Something around or zoom it in with your fingers and you can't engage the kids. Right. You know, getting the kids excited about, you know, studying the solar system or a chemical molecule or, or, you know, physics problem is really hard. You give them this and you give them augmented reality on, on the screen. All of a sudden they're a lot more engaged, right?

Yeah. And, you know, it's been really interesting. We've done some case studies, you know, recently, over the last couple years that. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's usually the number one word that they use is engaged. And the teachers love it too, by the way. And beyond the intellectual, we've heard some really heartwarming stories on the emotional side that they'll say, hey, kids that were withdrawn and kept to themselves kind of blossom and become leaders. And I don't want to say, hey, you know, this was a miracle device. I don't want to paint it that way. But, you know, during the experience, it really kind of draws them out as this wow factor that they enjoy. And they come into the classroom saying, hey, do we get to work with the merge cube today? Right. They really jump in and enjoy the learning, you know, not just do it because they're required to do it, you know, by their teacher. And that. That's really satisfying.

I like that it teaches them computer vision too, because each side of the cube has a unique pattern on it. Right. And the camera can see that unique pattern and augment it and put. Put virtuality on it. It's really cool, even. I mean, I dream about the world where we do all have vision pro kind of things. Probably a lightweight pair of glasses. I mean, I. That world is still three to ten years away. Really.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Before glasses get small enough and capable enough, because the. The waveguides today that, that make the new glasses are just. Right now, the ones on the market in the lightweight style are green and black displays are not really engaging for a kid. And like you said, they're way too expensive to put on a child.

Yeah, I agree with you on the time frame of like, when they might become widely used. Widely, yeah.

But We've been waiting 12 years already.

We thought this was going to come.

A lot faster than it has.

Yeah, exactly. What I would say is I agree with your time frame for the consumer market, what you might buy for yourself, but in terms like what would a school buy for their kids, it's even further away. Right. Because the price point has to be, you know, even lower and there has.

To be A hundred dollars like a Chromebook. And even then, glasses are very personalized to people. Right. I have to have corrective lenses to use glasses where I can pick up any kid's Chromebook and go to town. Right. Because I already have the corrective lenses. You have corrective lenses on your eyes too. Right. And so it's a tough, it's a tough road for education to get to the glasses world. I agree with you. Even if they became small and capable and cheap, and that's still, you know, 10 years away, I would say it.

Would need to be under $50 per unit because, you know, Chromebook can do so much versus, you know, the glasses. You know, it's got a more limited set of, you know, what it would be used for. So, you know, it's tough enough for the district to kind of keep up with the chromebooks. At about 200 per kid, I think they, the glasses would need to be like under 50.

Yeah, that's a long time away. But anyway, even in the glasses world, you know, having the Vision Pro has six cameras on the front of it, so it can see this just fine. Right. So when that world does arrive, you guys are going to be ready with a, a new kind of channel change area. You know, go from CNN to Fox cnn. And that's the world I dream about. You know, I keep looking at this cube going, man, someday this thing is going to be just so useful for the consumer, for a business person to do all sorts of new things, control. Last night I saw a guy do a new kind of business visualization system for the Vision Pro. Right. And it was all 3D. And you really want to spin the chart around. Yep, that's what this is for. Right.

And like I said, you just involve that extra dimension where it's the haptic sense, not just the visual sense. Right. It just becomes more memorable for that reason.

Yeah, well, it's a, it's a fun world, you know. Have you started thinking about how AI is going to change this world? Because if I have a Chromebook and it's looking at the cube and it's doing something, having a large language model in, you know, sort of virtualized inside the cube. So I could talk to the cube and say, hey, give me, give me all the planets, give me all the galaxies, give me all the stars. Right. And, and having it understand your voice and be. Change what's on here.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we kind of think about the, you know, a little bit longer term roadmap, you know, when we, you know, get Past, you know, Merge, the Merge creator app, you know, being released. That. Exactly. And I kind of think about it in two ways. Or one is using AI to create the content and then, you know, upload and visualize on our platform even further to those creations. You're having a dialogue and a relationship and interaction. Right. With content that, that, that would almost certainly done. Be done.

I got to hook you up with the founder of Luma Labs. He makes a really amazing photo to video model. Right. And you put in a photo and it makes you a whole video out of it things. He's building a 3D environment, probably coming next year.

Love it.

That would be great to have in the Merge cube to have to talk to it and have it create a 3D scene that you spin or a 3D object that you spin all from that AI. In other words, this has a future.

Oh, oh, absolutely. Remember, the way that we kind of visualize it or think about it is that if you think about the things that have been digitized, you know, it started off with text, then audio, then video, and now it's 3D content. Right. And this becomes more and more realistic. And again, not just something that you're looking at and then we're adding on the haptic element, but now when we start having like a relationship, an ongoing dialogue, you know, sort of interaction with it that yeah, we're excited not only with what we do, what, you know, what others might build on top.

Well, that's why I wanted to check in with you because I know there's like five separate holodecks being built which are 3D environments around you that you can talk to, that can create things. Hey, put a purple tree over there. I can do that kind of thing. And we're starting to see tastes of that evolving in the community right now. I mean, the picture to video models are getting pretty good. Next step is video to 3D environments. That, that's great for a high end person. Are you guys always going to be focused on education or as this market evolves over the next few years, are you going to start broadening out again? Because this is such a great controller for somebody who has a pair of glasses on or is working in a 3D environment, right?

Yeah, absolutely. In terms of like which direction, you know, remains to be seen. I think some of it will be, you know, hey, who's showing interest in us? Right? But if you think about some of different dimensions, it would, you know, might be, you know, could be consumer and kind of general, you know, platforms, you know, Metaverse, holodeck, you know, sort of interaction. I think it's maybe more likely that something that still involves an educational element like adult training. You know, what a lot of people have told us is, you know, with a handheld element, it's like maybe you aren't going to have like these super sophisticated dissection sort of models, but being able to explode it out and really explore it. For basic training, you know, kind of the front end training, we've probably had every branch of the military approach us. And it's not like you're going to train someone how to fly an F35 necessarily, but more like if you're going to be a mechanic, that learning, hey, what does a, what does a landing assembly look like? What does the cockpit. Cockpit, you know, assembly look like? You know, that just being able to explore that on the front of the training has a lot of value. And what is also maybe not notice on, you know, with adult training, you start. It's very much a pipeline of like, people kind of start out at the front end and who you end up with actually being aircraft mechanics. You know, it's. There's a lot of pipeline that you have to manage through. It's a pretty low ratio. You know, who ends up on the other end of that pipeline. So the value that in a low cost, you know, but still impactful platform. So I could see us heading in that direction. We've had quite a few museums approach us. And not only because it's handheld, which is cool, but what I didn't know until we started talking with it, that most museums, what you see out in front, you know, As a visitor, 90% of the stuff is in the back rooms.

Yeah.

Never see. Right. And this makes it available, you know, as a virtual museum. But again, things you can kind of explore and have a different experience than a museum is going to let you do. Right. With the real world, physical objects.

No, that's a big deal. I went to the National Archives and yeah, up front they have the most important documents in the United States. Right. A Bill of Rights or Declaration of Independence. But behind that is a huge warehouse with 6 million photos. Most people never get in there, don't even know it exists. And so if there's ways to bring that kind of thing back out to you, it's really good. Even if you go to the Air and Space Museum, which is cool, cool place to go. Right. They have two of them. There's a second one if you're in downtown Washington, D.C. which was where most of the people that most of the visitors go. There's a second one a few miles away that's even bigger and has a spatial. And it has an SR71 Blackbird from Lockheed. Right. It's a really cool museum. Another museum, you know. But how do you give a visitor a little taste of that other place or that other kind of thing?

Right. And how often are you going to go there in your lifetimes versus if it's available to you at home? Right.

Not many. I mean, most people can only travel there, you know, once or twice a year a lifetime. Really. Right. You know, most people don't get to travel that much.

Absolutely. Particularly, you know, disadvantaged. You know, communities like this might be the only way that they might ever see these wonderful things.

I think this is, you know, Chat GPT. I was walking around the Smithsonian, which Air in Space is a Smithsonian place too. It's. You take a picture of anything in that Air and Space museum and send it to Chat GPT or any large language model based system that's multimodal. Chat GPT was the one I chose. It knows everything in the museum. Everything like the tractor in the back of the hall. It knew that the jet engines, that Air and Space Museum and knew that I went to, you know, I. And it does this for every museum.

Yeah.

Right. And so now you start thinking about having an AI in this thing and you can say, hey, show me a John Deere tractor. Boom. And it can appear on the cube. You're spinning around a John Deere tractor. Right.

You can ask questions about it and get answers back. Yeah.

Bingo. I think, I think, I think you guys are going to use AI in some unique way in the next few years to really make this thing, a thing that you can talk to, touch, move. By the way, it can tell distances from the camera. Right?

Yeah. I mean the, the sensation that we've created that you're holding a hologram, if you will, in your hand. I mean, when you rotate it, you know, for instance. You know what, you know what may be deceptive, looks like a very simple object because there's no moving parts, there's no electronics in it.

Yeah.

But it's actually millimeter level precision because the key to having that illusion of holding the contents, for instance, when you rotate it, that it's smooth, it's not juddering on you. When you push it away, it gets smaller. When you bring it towards you, it's larger. Because if you were actually holding a hologram in your hand, that's how it would operate. Right. That's what the experience would be like. So yeah, where I was going with.

This is because it can tell distance from the camera. I mean you can see that on the camera. This is close, this is far. Right. You can actually slice through something, right. And like a cadaver, right. And, and show a slice, you know, slicing through a cadaver or, or spin it. Right.

Or floating things out, you know, that's another, you know, kind of effect that we've created.

It's. It's a really interesting. I mean it still is a, a fascinating business idea to make a cube like this with augmented reality, with cameras, you know, to join it all together to make something really, really beautiful and, and useful, you know.

Yeah.

What's that?

I said I'll give you another idea and involve AI but doesn't always have to is E commerce, right. This could be a way that you could explore a product that you're considering buying.

I gave these group of products, right?

Yeah. A group of product like watch. Yeah, exactly. Kind of, hey, here's some different watches, here's some different shoes, you know, here's some different, you know, electronic, you know, products, things like that. And just be able to kind of explore it. Say is this what I want? And we've been surprised like that luxury watchmaker, how fine the detail was on it. Being able to explore like you could really get a sense like what would this actually look like if I bought this and explore from a lot of different angles. So it's pretty cool. So that could be another direction that we head in.

Yeah, it's, you know, you start thinking of where our cameras and where our cameras coming, you know, last, last year at the display week show I these new light field TVs which have a camera, they actually look for your eyes, you know and they reorient the 3D on your eyes. It's pretty cool stuff. And, and they're 16K. They're beautiful. Those are probably coming in 2027, 2028. You know, if you could get access to the camera. Now you have a channel changer, you know, right in front of your tv. But that's off there in a way in the future. You know, this is a really great idea. What, what else is going on in terms of the business. And you know, this is probably, you know, now you have school teachers using them and people are getting on board and it's probably selling pretty well.

Yeah, I mean look at this point we're in with the cubes themselves. We're probably in every school district, you know, in the United States. If not literally every one of them, anyone that has a population of more than 500 kids, you know, probably has these. And what's also been really interesting to see is that just the inbound interest from outside the the usa, you know.

By the way, you can buy these at retail stores for like 20 bucks or something.

They're on Amazon. Yep. For 30 bucks now. 30 bucks. You also get a three month trial subscription. You know, all the, all the goodness and the merch created goodness with that. But yeah, what we're also seeing is the homeschooler market, you know, starting to pick up and you know, with, I'll just say the changes that are occurring recently that, you know, more and more dollars are probably going to go to that the families kind of running things from home or going to different schools. So we're also kind of exploring, you know, how do we, from a sale marketing sales standpoint, how do we, you know, get out to those folks? Because if you kind of really look at what we've done and what's in it for a homeschooler. And by the way, one of our largest customers is a charter school family where nearly all the kids are learning from home. And what we make available that would otherwise not be available is teaching aids. You know, like when, you know, when I was a kid, you know, we had like the plasticized anatomy kits and the solar system kits and the DNA, you know, models and things like that is, you know, if you look at what we've done is we've digitized by Google over a thousand of those. And even for a public school district, we went, we went shopping for everything that we digitized. If you bought the physical version, we stopped counting at $10,000. Right. So if you think about even a public school district trying to buy one of those for every student, financially inconceivable for homeschoolers. Like how are you going to do that? You're not going to go buy $10,000 worth of kids forget their most families could, but we enable that, you know, with the digital version. And also you're able to just have interactions that are not possible with a physical version. Right, because our, like our dinosaurs are animated. So you can take the T. Rex and place them in your front yard, make them 40ft high, you know, next to the stegosaurus.

Everybody needs a T. Rex in their frame yard. I have one in the backyard.

Scare off the burglars. Right.

I don't know about that, but it's entertaining for the kids to go out with a, with an iPad and go look at it, you know, so, yeah.

You know, so kind of doing more and more of that with, you know, just making it aware, you know, to the homeschoolers that this is available for your kids, something that otherwise would not be available to them at all. So, you know, that's been really gratifying. And like I said, seeing some of these other market segments that we're not pursuing coming into us as they learn.

I didn't think about reducing the cost for the classroom in terms of buying all these visual aids that teachers used to have to buy. They used to have to buy a lot more films and stuff like that than they do today. It's really an interesting idea. You know, who knew Jedi a little cube could do so much?

You know, it's like anything else when you, when you invent something bringing out to market, it's not only what do we do it, but what we've seen others do with it is just blows our minds. I'll give you one of my favorite examples is even though we focus on science and stem, there's this very innovative teacher at a private school in Cairo, Egypt. And what she does, she's a English language arts teacher. It's an international school. So, you know, the older kids, you know, might read a fairy tale. The older kids, you know, sorry, younger kids, fairy tale. Older kids, it's Shakespearean novel. When she has them do. She's a huge fan of this that after you've read that piece of literature use. I'm trying to remember the tool might be Tinkercad, might be something else to recreate your favorite scene and you know, visualize it for yourself and then share that creation with the other students. So it's a way of kind of like really turning what would otherwise just, you know, be a, a brand, a reading, you know, experience into now a multi sensory experience that you can share with others. Yeah, so you gotta, we gotta hook.

You up with Luma because they're. They're able to prompt, you know, a Shakespeare Macbeth scene to the prompt and it builds it for you as a video. Right now a video isn't a 3D thing, but they're coming out 3D over the next year. So having a ability to talk to the cube and have it be able to generate a 3D Shakespeare scene or a Bible scene or whatever would be really interesting on this.

Absolutely. And Robert, you may not know this, but we very recently announced we were bringing out, we call it the megamerge cube. So it's this guy only 17 inches on each side, and we had it. It's being made by one of the top, you know, suppliers to, like, school libraries, furniture. And I think it's rated for £300. And what's awesome about it, it's not just a giant cube, but what we're seeing is people, you know, have a collaboration with it because everyone can have their own experience with that same cube, but it's ginormous, and they're all sharing the same experience, you know, so it's really, really cool. And it's proved very popular for community engagement events, you know, the PGA events or, you know, the family nights and things like that, which is just great, you know, so the parents kind of say, hey, what are the kids experiencing? And I was kind of say that.

You know, great for museums, too, like you said.

Yeah, absolutely.

Have a few places, sit down, and then name a camera.

Boom, you got a new thing rated for flexible seating is what the schools call it. So that's a really fun one that we brought out as well.

How much does that cost?

More than just a novelty, Right? It just kind of serves these. These extra types of interactions and experiences with it.

How much does that cost?

It's right now $500 each, you know, inclusive shipping in the continental U.S. i.

Should get one for my little studio here. Amazon chairs. Yeah.

You know, it's a cool, funky pattern, too, right?

Yeah, yeah. And it can augment. Anything with a camera can augment it. Right. We're talking on a camera right now, so it's. It's awesome. It's great talking with you, you know, and seeing what's going on in the classroom and seeing what's going on with augmented reality and computer vision, you know, the future is still out there for us, but, you know, it's.

Yeah, I want.

I want a full holodeck. I don't know about you, but I. You know, that's why I have this Vision Pro. I'm dreaming of that world of getting people into a full 3D environment that you talk to with AI, and that's. That's still way a little bit out there.

So I think. Yeah, I think it's a way out there and just kind of, you know, you know, future tech.

We're stuck on Chromebooks. We're stuck on Chromebooks.

Here's the other thing that I'll say, Robert, is that within, you know, of the things that are already out there right now, if you think about controllers and beyond visual inputs into, like, haptic inputs, I think controllers are absolutely fantastic for Swinging motions, you know, like Fruit Ninja and, you know, things like that. Beat saber, the. I think they're pretty good, you know, at pointing, but where we're still not as a satisfying sense of holding and touching an object. And that's what this does. Now, I think haptic gloves, you know, may be the ultimate, you know, solution to that, but I think that's even further out. Let's say affordable haptic gloves that work really, really well, I think are even further out. But, you know, until then, there's a very affordable way of kind of providing that experience.

And, and they're probably a little bit delicate. You know, if you're taking them into an education environment that they have put up with a lot of abus.

People throwing them around, abuse, I'll say.

Yeah, yeah. People sitting on them, spilling drinks on them, stuff like that. Right.

Hands, you know, things like that.

You know, that's, that's why the future's out there for education. But this is a very powerful thing that holds something. Suzanne Borders, who runs bad VR company, which is funny name. She. She built her own controllers because she found the human touch is so important to the sense of virtuality. And here we're trying to use a cheap Chromebook to do something magical. Having a thing in your hand really does matter, right?

Absolutely.

You know, that's why I'm happy to have one and I'm happy to support you guys. Thanks so much, Robert. Check it in. I'll check in with you in a couple more years and see how the whole.

Make it a little more often than that.

I have a feeling you're gonna put a large language model in this and then be able to have the kid talk to the Chromebook and say, hey, change. To change this, you know, the solar system to just, you know, bigger planets or, or zoom it in, you know, hey, hey, merge Cube, zoom in, you know, and being able to use your voice with the Cube is going to be a big. I think it's going to be a big deal with, for you guys that we created.

But what we're really excited about is, you know, see what the, the users will create. Right?

Yeah.

For crowdsourcing the imagination of what do I even want to interact with. With, you know, education and beyond education.

Yeah. And certainly I'm gonna hook you up with Luma because I, I'm dreaming now of the world of talking to the cube, having Luma generate 3D, you know, 3D things on the cube, you know, whether it's an object or a scene, and then be able to spin the scene, you know, hey, show me Jerusalem. Because it can do stuff like that, right? Luma can, right? It just take right now it's slow and expensive, but you're gonna see the costs on that AI generation go down, down, down. So three years from now, I think you're in a different world. It'll be interesting to see, to check back in with you, you know, and.

The whole device landscape. Right. Gets better and better. As the GPUs get better, the cameras get better. Yeah, it just enables all.

Yeah, but you know, schools are going to be stuck with cheap ass Chromebooks for a while.

Well, hopefully they upgrade and so the components just get a little better. Each with these cycle universities will have.

Better machines with G, with high end Nvidia cards and stuff like that. But that's not, that's not the biggest market you're aiming at, Right. You're aiming at education, K12 education and trying to get kids excited about STEM. So that's why I love you guys. Where, where did we learn more about Merge? Merge.

MergedU.com is our home page.

Edu.com thank you so much.

Thanks Robert. Always a pleasure.

Awesome.

Cheers.