Robert Scoble: Future of Virtual Reality

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Hi, Robin, thanks again for meeting us. BFASTV and SV House. How are you today?

I'm doing great.

So how are you? I've heard that you're coming back from New York.

Yeah, Alabama, New York and Canada.

What are you doing?

I'm meeting a lot of startups and speaking. I make my money in speaking, so that brings me around the world and then I interview startups while I'm in the cities.

And what are you speaking about?

The future. The augmented mixed reality future that's coming at us and a few other things because I talk about anything that's new in the world, that's my interest.

Your interest? How did you develop this interest?

My dad was an engineer and I grew up in Silicon Valley, a mile from where Apple Computers started. I got a tour of Apple when I was 13 years old and kept doing it all my life. I've interviewed thousands of executives and people who are starting new technology technologies and building new companies.

So the whole life you've been in the industry among startups, but have you started your own?

Except for I used to run a camera store, so I used to consumer electronics too. Right.

But have you started to own any businesses?

A few. I've been in four startups so far, so I'm starting another one. So yeah.

Okay. Exciting. So what would be the most exciting startup that you're working now that I've seen or no, that you helping assist?

Well, I don't want to talk about my stuff yet. I'm in stone. But let's put it this way. Magic Leap is building a new product that is going to be dramatically important, or Hololens or Apple's version of it, whatever is going to come along. Mixed reality glasses are going to radically change our world in the next five years. And so I'm building a startup in that world.

Well, it's very interesting. I think it's still the technology, like VR technology, augmented reality is not very reachable for the general public yet. And I don't know in terms of hardware, how much does it cost? Is it still in the market?

I don't care. That's the wrong way to look at this world because I remember when Steve Wiseknack showed me his dye sublimation color printer cost $45,000. And today a $70 printer does better. And he had a $45,000 RAM disk that had 400 megabytes of RAM to run Photoshop right when Photoshop was brand new and it cost $45,000. And today your phone has a hundred times more memory in it and it didn't cost $45,000. So that's absolutely the wrong way to look at a new market by thinking that it's too expensive because in a year it's not going to be too expensive.

What are the main players now? Like who are the main consumers of the technology so far?

Well, there is no, I mean, let's talk about, let's separate all this whole world, right? There's a whole bunch of new things. Virtual reality today is three levels. The high end level is the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift. In fact, we have four of them here at the hello Collective. And Those cost about $1,500 to buy PC with an Nvidia card and about $800 for the headset with the controllers. Right? And you have two boxes on the wall called lighthouses. So it's about $2,000, $2,500 to get started at the high end, which is what you want. You don't want the mid end, which is mobile phones. First of all, you have to have a Samsung. You have an iPhone, so that doesn't work. I brought my iPhone today. And then the low end is a Google Cardboard style thing which, let's be honest, great for looking around at some nice pictures or something and playing something for five minutes at a trade show, but not gonna be something you're gonna wear for hours, the way you play. I mean, last night we were playing HTC Vive in my house with my son's friends and we were in that thing for hours. Right?

But then still it's just a small part of your day and then you get tired.

No, you just don't have anything to play right now. You know, virtual reality is entertainment. You don't watch your TV right now. You know, stop thinking of limitations.

But still, again, like me, I'm not a gamer, but I know like a lot of people, they gameplays and they're.

So a lot more than games in here. There's a lot more movies. There's movie industries going to be disrupted by VR. There's education is going to be disrupted by VR and that's sort of where the Google Cardboard comes in. Because if you're going to look around at the universe, for instance, you're only going to do that for 10, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. You don't need the high end stuff and a school can't afford a high end one anyways. There's journalism, news. It's a lot better to watch a news event happen. In 360 degrees than with a 1080p camera. There's medical, many medical advances. They found that using VR is better than doing.

Like us or maybe some coders, they have a chance to get in in the industry and develop something for the real specific.

Well, there's going to be lots of jobs for VR and then AR or mixed reality is coming three, four, five years later and that's going to create millions of jobs. So yeah, this is a good time to start a company.

What's the biggest difference between the core differences between virtual reality and mixed reality? How you say that?

Mixed reality, you see through the optics to the real world. So I would see this table and then there would be Mickey Mouse standing right here, a virtual item on top of the table. So we could play a new kind of game. I could change this table into something else. I could see CNN on this wall. I could have 20 monitors up here and watch my business and be working on virtual monitors in this thing. And that's the first use. Financial traders are using mixed reality glasses so that they can have many monitors and see more information about the companies they're investing in without buying new monitors. You buy the glasses once, it's $3,000 instead of buying 20 monitors, it costs $20,000. So it's already a cost savings for somebody like that.

But then would it cause any health issues if you're wearing these glasses? No, I've never unknown.

Don't know.

Well, I know it maybe sounds very like dramatic.

If you drink enough water, it kills you. You know, I remember when they were.

Telling like, you don't have to use mobile phone that frequently because it's going to affect your brain.

I know. I'll tell you in 10 years after I use it for 10 years. We don't have the science yet to know. We don't know how it's affecting the brain. We already know that it cures pain. So it's messing with your brain about pain. So it probably is messing with your brain in other ways that we don't know yet. We need to put these on people and try them out. So.

And you're not scared of this thing?

No. Because driving a car kills 1.2 million people a year and yet we all do it. Are we scared of that?

And now like all these Pokemon Go people, like in danger, especially they go to the road.

How many have died out of hundreds of millions of people playing that game? I mean, literally, I was on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz and literally every single person is playing that Game. How many people are playing that game compared to how many people have died? More people died driving. Why do you drive? You drove here today. Why do you drive?

Just because I need to go for a long time.

You need the utility. The utility is more than the cost. And that will be true with mixed reality glasses too. I really don't care if they make my brain sick unless it does it to everybody. And it obviously doesn't do it to everybody because the first people using it are not getting sick.

What's your favorite application so far? VR applications.

The first one you'll notice is you get all the monitors you want for free. How it works exactly, you can put 30 monitors around you for free. You have virtual monitors in front of you.

What they do, then you can do.

The same thing you're doing with two monitors right there. One look. One can look at your email, one. You can look at Facebook, one could Skype, one could look at your stocks, one could look at cnn, one could look at whatever. There's a new app coming for this which helps coders. You click on a variable name and it pops up a new window or three new windows that shows you where the code is that's coming from that variable name. It's a new way of working. It's a new way of living. I mean it's going to change everything about our lives.

Well, this, I understand it and I think in this case you call this augmented reality.

Mixed reality. Let's call it mixed reality Mixed reality. Because it is going to take this table away and put something else there that's mixing the reality. Where does reality start? Where does it stop? Are you really across the table from me with these glasses on? I really don't know. I've already danced with a woman who was across the Internet somewhere else. She was being shot with an eight eye camera and I went up to her and I could not tell she was not here.

Do you think we can meet people like this?

Absolutely.

Because they've been always like buzzing. Internet will solve the problem for teens who in different locations they can meet. But still like it's very hard to maintain good relationships and work very hard. Like a situation.

Absolutely. But you need a camera or multiple cameras to do that. You need a high speed Internet link and you need glasses on everybody and you need cameras on me too. So that's a lot to happen. That's expensive today. So the expense is very high today only going to be used for very specific use cases, you know, speaking to a conference or something like that. But as the price comes down, more and more things will be done that way. Absolutely.

Speaking about some sensitive topics, for example, if somebody will develop the application or the virtual reality where you can, I don't know, practice martial arts, study from martial arts, ending with killing people or something like this can be dangerous.

My son is killing people right now. He's killing zombies, more accurately in a video game in virtual reality. So I'd rather him play that than be playing with real guns somewhere.

So any. Can you see any government involvement into this topic? They're trying to control it.

Of course. They always try to control their systems, don't they?

But I think the government is the number one users of virtual reality.

Yeah. Because if you're flying an F35 jet fighter pilot, you're using mixed reality glasses to see through the pilot, through the plane. You don't see any plane anymore. You see only the battlefield. Right. And you see all the information. If you see a plane fly back and fly by, it tells you is that a friend or a foe? And it tells you what kind of who that is and what's going on. And it even tells you how to formulate your strategy. And soon the plane's just gonna do it. It's not gonna have a human. Right. So. Yeah.

And like when do you see when people gonna be sitting on their sofas? I mean, the difference between just having the box or headset on your phone and still you understand, it's just, it's unreal to the moment when you feel the real. Like you already don't feel where is the reality and where is it?

What's happening today? You get into virtual reality today, today in a HTC Vibe and it's pretty hard to tell that you're not inside a fake thing.

Do you think people will get like cyber addictive to this?

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's fun and it's more fun than real life in a lot of people's lives. So. Absolutely.

But what about social aspect of life?

There's new social VR where you can play friends already in these vibes. You can play Frisbee with somebody else over the Internet. So I'm not too worried about it.

Well, you're not too worried because you're sitting on your sofa with your kids and you're playing with your kids like real people.

No, they're playing in VR. I'm watching them kill zombies. It's sort of fun.

Well, still, I think there is a kind of. Maybe I'm too skeptical of this because I still appreciate the real touch. You Know I can touch you sitting here next to.

In 10 years we're gonna have sex robots. So wait until that comes along because you're not gonna be able to tell something's not real. It's just not gonna. In 15 years from now, we're gonna have 24k monitors, high resolution monitors, and we're gonna have something that we can do haptics with or touch. In fact, there's a company right behind me that's making a haptic suit that when you get shot it punches you or it makes your music sound way better. And it's $300 already. So haptics are a big field coming for this new virtual space. Absolutely.

Who are the biggest?

There's a 200 million dollar DARPA grant, by the way, for sex robots. So I know in 20 years we're going to have sex robots because that's how the Internet came to us. That's how Siri came to us, that's how drones came to us.

That's what I was about to ask. Who are the biggest investors throwing money.

Into this Silicon Valley? You nailed it. The military throws a lot of money at these technologies and has been for quite some time. I mean, at sri, where Siri and the Internet was developed, I saw binoculars that put virtual things on the real world five years ago, four years ago, something like that. And that was unclassified, which means that was developed five years before. So that's already 10 years old technology today. And we're just about to get this in consumer land in the next five years. So, you know HoloLens has this technology today, right? It's $3,000. It's big and dorky. We're getting it smaller and smaller magically.

What about magic? Did they launch their product?

Not yet. They got $1.3 billion without having a product and without having a customer. They explain that to me.

That's amazing. I just seen that, the promo.

It's amazing optics they've developed over there and we'll see how that's used. But that's certainly one of the big companies we're launching in the mixed reality space that's going to change everything. It's going to be one of these companies that's going to put virtual items on top of the real world and then stuff or it's bitterness table because the, the object they developed has trillions of mirrors that get rid of light and put new light in so they can get rid of this table and put something else here.

Well, still for me it's not Clear. Like if you want to, like if you invest, let's say, and you want to be in VR.

What you should.

Look like, should you separate hardware and software?

Yeah, because hardware is going to be really hard to make money at because that's owned by now owned by the big companies. And so if you have something that's a major breakthrough, sure you're gonna get funded. Right. But you have to be 10 times better than what's already out there. And that's gonna be really hard. That's rocket science. And very few of us are good at that. I think for normal entrepreneurs, you know, content is a lot better place to be. I just think it's Facebook and Apple and Samsung are going to make the headsets and the controllers and the sensors and body monitors and all that. It's going to be hard to make money on that unless you have something that's really outstanding and really crazy. And that means you're probably an Israeli investor who has something crazy technology wise. Most entrepreneurs aren't that right. Most of them are starting a little business to do a delivery or a new kind of business. That kind of business is far easier to do in content.

Content. Do you think it will be easy to monetize this business with software?

I can see a way. And make hundreds of hundreds of billions of dollars for the content industry. I think content is going to be a big deal in this world. It is already. How much did Huffington does sell for?

But then it's hard to acquire customers, isn't it? That's your job just to be a good salesperson.

No, to come up with a product that goes Pokemon did it in one day. Right.

But still people are scared, which is.

Not true because Ingres was out there for five years and you know, and probably was under development for three years before that. So it's an eight year overnight success. But you take Ingress, a really cool location based game, you put a brand name on top of it, Pokemon, and all of a sudden every single person in the world is used on it.

Okay, industries like games, movies, cinema, Korea. What about events?

You're already seeing many, many events companies. Lynda.com plural site, Creative Live, they're in the education space. Those are events. What do you go to an event for? It's either to network with people or it's to learn something new. And you can learn something new now on the Internet. That's a content company. And they make, they're worth billions of dollars for me.

Like if you're talking about events in three, like History. I see the bigger concerts like Superstar the Rock Band.

I was just at a music festival in Alabama talking to the guys who run it and I said, you can only afford one screen right now. What if everybody has Magic Leap on now? Everybody can have millions of screens. So he was very interested in this new world. It's just early and nobody has these things yet. Magic Leap hasn't released yet and we don't have the eight eye cameras you're going to need to shoot the performers. And you don't have the ability to digitally transmit all the entertainment content that you would see at a Coachella. Right. If you go to coachella, they have 100 LED screens because they have a budget to buy those screens. Most music festivals around the world don't have that budget. They will soon.

Fascinating. I think it's amazing to just attend the event across the globe that you can attend and see personal calls.

You're going to go to a music event with a real performer in front of it, but they're going to have 100 screens, virtualized screens in your glasses and you're going to enjoy it a lot more than watching just one screen with your human eyes.

But then at some point, the stars, the celebrities, they wouldn't even need to organize all this as all they need, they command green screen behind them.

We have a green screen right next door.

Let's talk about Upload VR and Upload Collective. What are you doing guys here?

Yeah, we have a space that has 30 startups in it, people creating companies in the mixed reality or virtual reality space. We do events literally every night. Upload is also a media site so they cover the virtual reality and augmented reality spaces on their website and on Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and LinkedIn and other places. What else do they do?

What's your role?

My role is to take up spaces now. My role is to help the entrepreneurs and start a business and that's what I'm doing.

What's your next destination? Where you come going? That's how you off to?

Well, I'm going on a vacation to Yosemite and Los Angeles. We're opening a new upload collector out in Los Angeles. So that'll be fun to go meet some of the VR people down there. After that, I'm going to China because the mobile. Yeah, most people will get VR and a mobile phone. And today mobile phones have four problems. The screens aren't sharp enough. They don't have sensors so that it can figure out where in the room it is. So, you know with htc, you have to get two boxes on your wall that spray light on you so that you can move around. Right. You can do this. With the Samsung Gear VR you can only do this. You can't do this and you don't have controllers. That's the third thing. And fourth thing, the GPUs are underpowered so they get really hot. And like my Samsung Gear VR goes off after about 40 minutes because it's too hot. It's pushing the GPU too hot. So there's new GPUs coming, there's new chipsets coming and we're going to have a lot of fun. Go to China to see the latest screens and the latest Tango, Google Tango sensors and see how that's all evolving.

Which company are we talking about?

I think I'm going to see Huawei, which is, yeah, huge company around the world. Not very big company here in the United States, but every time I travel I see huge billboards from them.

So they're, they're pretty big in Europe. Well, fascinating. Thank you so much, Robert. And well, you know, maybe someone, because this is for me, what are the biggest problems that virtual reality has still overcome?

I think it's those four things. We need mobile phones to be virtual reality enabled so that most people can afford them. The Samsung Gear VR is about a hundred dollars in addition to the phone that you're going to buy. And everybody still today is going to buy a phone until it makes reality glasses come along and get good enough and cheap enough. And that's probably four, five, six years away. So for now it's the mobile phone. We need the mobile phone industry to solve these four problems before VR can really become mass market. And that's probably in the next two years.

Thanks a lot, Robert. Thank you for bringing to you. Thanks Meeting here.

Thanks.

So guys, we're done and see you next time.

Well.