"The Infinite Retina" Book Launch Virtual Roundtable

This is the virtual roundtable of the event. The new technology How Spatial Computing will Help Reboot us. And it's also serving as a book launch for the Infinite Retina, a book by myself and Robert Stobel published by Pact and currently available on Amazon just very recently became completely available. The book is on spatial computing. That's all the technologies that a person, virtual being or robot would need to move through a three dimensional world. And these technologies include artificial intelligence, computer vision, augmented reality, virtual reality, sensor technology and automated vehicles. The book focused on seven industry verticals that will be greatly affected by spatial transportation technology, media and telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, finance and education. The participants in this roundtable include Sebastian's Run of Kitty Hawk and Udacity, Denny Unger of Cloud Head Games, Matt Miesniks of Niantic, and until recently 60.8 AI Alex Goldberg and Peter Newell, both of REI, and of course Robert Scoble from Infant Retina and myself. So the way this is, it's a one hour long roundtable with half hour for questions that people can text in and I will read them and indicate when you text them in who you want them, who it's for the question. So I'd like to start with this. Could everyone on the roundtable introduce themselves a little better than me less briefly and talk about what they do? Let's start with Sebastian.

Sebastian is muted.

Maybe you need to unmute him. Irina.

Hmm, hold on a second. I had him unmuted. Okay, while I'm working on that, let's start with Danny. Danny Unger.

You're putting me on the spot. Hi, I'm Danny. I'm the CEO and creative director at Cloudhead Games. We most recently released the game called Pistol Whip that's doing really well on Oculus, Quest and other markets. Cloudhead might be better known for some of the early innovations we did in VR, Blink, teleportation, Snap Turns. We did a bunch of work early on with Locomotion in virtual reality that later on became kind of best practice standards for the industry. Released a couple games very early on when things first launched. Call of the Starseed, Heart of the Emberstone, and we continue to do a bunch of kind of experimental and fun work just in VR design. And that's pretty much it.

Okay, great. Next up, Matt. Matt Miesniks?

Yeah. Hi, I'm Matt. Up until a few weeks ago, I was the founder and CEO of a company called 6D AI. We really were a startup that I guess defined this concept of the AR cloud, which was the Idea that for AR and spatial computing to kind of fulfill its potential, all of this virtual content needed to be aware and understand the physical world. So you really needed a 3D digital twin of the physical world to be built. And I guess our belief was that to capture that, you needed to be able to capture it on just regular phones that people had. You shouldn't need any special equipment. And so that was a technology innovation that we achieved. We spun out of Oxford University and then as of 6, 7 weeks ago now, we were acquired by Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go. And we're really excited, I guess, to look at a lot of the, or take a lot of the assets that Niantic has in terms of a highly engaged user base of people that are actually moving around the real world and doing this sort of stuff and helping them build out that platform for all sorts of experiences.

Wonderful. Okay, let's go back to Sebastian.

Hey, now I'm unmuted. Thank you so much.

Yes.

I love the book. The book is amazing. Congratulations. My name is Sebastian Pedigree, Stanford professor. Started self in Cast 2005, Winnie the Dark and Grand Challenge, a robot race. Then moved over to Google, worked with John Hanke from Yantec on Google Maps, built Google Street View and then Google Maps data, a very large spatial 3D database and then founded Google X. You might remember Google Glass was my project project now known as Waymo. Whole bunch of interesting projects in the intersection of physics and the real world. Iris was a contact lens, the primary glucose level A built at Google's drone system and also Google's balloon system and then shifted to start Udacity education company that trains people worldwide in tech skills. And finally Kitty Hawk with my friend Larry Page, we built what people call flying cars. And we are super enthusiastic of bringing 3D structure, the spatial structure and geometric structure to the space above your house.

Excellent. Okay, great. Alex Goldberg.

Hi. So happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I would say that I'm passionate about creating thought provoking and effective XR experiences. My background's in the game industry were I started way back in the late 90s as a teenager as a game tester while going to art school in San Francisco. From that point I went on to produce a number of iOS and Android games for various companies. My first glimpse of AR was around 2008 or 2009 I think it was a Mini Cooper tech demo that they used a marker based AR from a webcam on a computer before even mobile. And at that point I was completely fascinated with the technology and have been obsessed with different kinds of implementations that we can offer customers as well as enterprise experiences. At rei, we built a number of AR projects and have experimented with just about Every platform in SDK ranging from desktop model viewers, Arkits and ARCore. Build projects in Sumerian, Amazon's thing that I don't even know if it's still around. Maybe somebody else does on this call. Build things in Adobe, Aero, Reality, Composer, Unity, all kinds of euphoria implementations. We're really excited about leveraging spatial computing for internally at the Co op to enable communication between HQ and our stores to optimize our distribution centers, and then lots of amazing experiences for our members. Besides looking at products in ar, I firmly believe that in the future, or hopefully soon, we will have digital concierge that you could go out into nature with and have an assistant that can help you go out there and explore with.

Right. Okay, next up is Peter Newell.

Hi, guys. So I previously ran a startup called Metaversatility from 2006 to 2010, building online 3D social spaces and platforms for a bunch of awesome, awesome company. And I've always been in sort of the custom software space. Most recently I switched over to rei. I've been here about five years leading our emerging technology and innovation program. I run a quarterly hackathon internally and through there. Found a lot of different ways to apply spatial computing and AI and all sorts of different fun toys to the betterment of our experiences outside. And I just see so much potential for these technologies as we progress to connect people, connect people more authentically to nature and always trying to find those ways that we can use this tech to better our outdoor experience rather than just by default having it be a selfie machine that puts people in precarious situations.

Okay, great. So, like to start out with talking about one or two particular spatial computing case studies that Roundtable people have worked on. Let's start with Sebastian. So it could be either with Kitty Hawk or Udacity, but it has to be spatial computing related.

Muted again.

Sebastian. Okay, hold on a second. This is lovely. This is. Okay. Sebastian, can you hear me? Okay, hold on a second.

Now. Now. It worked. I think Irene Zoom wants both of us to hit the unmute button. So obviously there's something that Zoom can improve.

Yeah, I know I'm unmuted now.

Repeat the question just before you get in there.

Irina, there's a lot of people who are writing me on social media saying they can't get in the call. There was only 100 that were let in.

Yeah, there's an issue also with that. So I'm trying to run the meeting.

I was telling. To catch the recording.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm going to do. All right, so, Sebastian, tell us about case study in particular that has to do with computing.

Yes.

So spatial computing has been my bread and butter for my pretty much entire life. It started itself out in cars, which obviously have to have a very profound notion of where things are and where things are moving. And it's now manifest in the third dimension. We're building these vehicles so we believe they revolutionize traffic with not just spatial reasoning, but these are technical. People call them EVTOLs. These are vehicles that take off and land vertically. That's what's called the evtol. They're electrically powered. The fly is super quiet, almost like a helicopter or like a helicopter with a wing. And on a single battery charge, they can get you roughly 100 miles plus reserves. I'm super enthusiastic because it's technology that is groundbreaking, that doesn't exist today, that if you do a good job, can replace the car and get you around not just much, much safer than cars today, but also much faster than five to ten times as fast. We have prototypes. You can watch videos on our website. If you know we're testing, you can sneak in and see us testing. It's a lot of fun. We are far away from products because to make this stuff safe in the sky, it takes a lot of effort. But yeah. So I think the book. The book has a lot of cool stuff. It has a beautiful history of devices in that space and techniques. It's a really nicely researched compendium, including something that I got Robert one of his favorite showery experiences in his life because was running the thing I was building before that called Google Glass. He's not writing anymore. None of us are. I wish it was more of a success, but I think that word is so ripe for innovation, for new ideas, for new thoughts. Thanks for inviting us.

Oh, absolutely. Are you kidding? You have a special place in the book that talks specifically about EVtols and flying cars. Just want to make an announcement. Robert, I was able to fix the issue with the amount of people that are able to. Can you do me a favor and let them know that they should try to get on now?

Yep.

Okay, thank you. So there's a number of people that we're trying. So. All right, excellent. So could you explain Sebastian a little more about. Just a little tickler about the future, let's say the next two Years where you think it's going to go with Kitty Hawk and spaceship Kitty Hawk?

I think we are at the point where we have kind of working prototypes. You can look at this and it flies, it flies fast, like 200 miles per hour. It flies far, like 100 miles. And that's with full payload. We built this thing called Heaviside that does that. But you have to take with a leap of faith that you're going to use as everyday yourself to get to work when you're there. We can get you from Berkeley to San Francisco in two minutes. We can get you from Silicon Valley to Half Moon Bay in eight minutes. And couldn't do this reliably. And to get there, I think the missing pieces are really regulatory. We're working with the FAA a lot on making sure stuff is actually really, really safe. And then there's an airspace management piece, it's a spatial reasoning piece. Right now if you look at the sky, you might see one or two aircraft. I envision a future when looking at the sky and you see 100 aircraft zipping by. But there's no system today that could manage that volume of air traffic today. So there's a whole bunch of startup companies working on this, including Uber and Google Wing. I think in the next five years we're going to see our selected cities. That electrically powered aircraft that can land in front of your house and deliver you in front of your office. We see those routinely in certain cities in the world.

Great. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to getting the organization for flying cars up. And that's a lot different types of organization from, you know, you need city hall for that, you need all kinds of things. So I know you're extremely aware of that. Very, very much looking forward to it.

Okay, can I jump in everyone with the quick question?

Yeah.

When we talked, Sebastian, we talked a lot about the commonalities between augmented reality glasses and self driving cars and the technology you're building into planes. Can you just go briefly into what you're seeing there and why you think cameras are so important going forward?

I think this is the time when the virtual and the real kind of melts and it'll melt in surprising ways. I would say even zoom. What we're doing right now and this video conferencing is already a melting of different real worlds. But what's missing is the augmented world, the stuff that magic leap gives you where you can handle objects into your computer information other people experiences, they can go on vacation together. I believe that the physical and the Virtual, which are seamlessly melt. Physical needs won't go away. We're still going to get around it. Maybe not this month because of shelter at home, but in normal times we do want to go somewhere. But with the fusion of the virtual, we can make these steps to other locations so much better. And if you don't believe it, just see what's happening to you right now. You're sitting in front of a computer screen and you're watching Robert's living room. How cool is that? I mean, how amazing is it that we are the first generation ever that can participate in this experience, that if you kind of explain it to people 50 years ago they would have declared, you're a complete liar?

Yes, it's a kind of two years out to 50 year vision. I just hope that it's a sooner vision than later and I think that it will be. There's a lot of technological happenings now because of COVID so I hope this is one of them that gets expedited as we go along. Okay, so let's talk to Denny. I'm putting you on the spot again. Tell me a little bit about a project that actually you had told us a week ago about that could be helpful for spatial computing.

Yeah, I mean, obviously everybody's probably thinking similar things using video tools like Zoom and kind of seeing the holes in that form of communication. And it's less about the fact that I can talk to you and it's more about everything else you lose through that filter. So my prior business, I worked from home for 10 years, so I was steeped in kind of the pitfalls of working at home with a group of people. And I think a big chunk of the world population still doesn't understand that. Yeah, it's all well and good for a few months. When you start getting into the years of working at home, you start seeing where the armor starts falling off. And that really comes down to sort of basic inherent ways, subtle ways that we communicate as humans. And so everything that I've been thinking about recently has been about, okay, well Zoom does this and it gets us this far. But what, what does virtual reality or these other types of technologies enable to get us the rest of the way? And it's not about being in VR all the time. I don't think that's the right approach. In fact, I see many companies trying to do that. And I think it's, it's, it's the wrong, it's a wrong headed approach to the problem because the hardware still isn't at A place where, you know, you can realistically sit in it all day. And what I'm thinking more of is an all day application where, yes, you can use VR, where it makes sense, where the utility of that technology makes sense, but you don't want to force people in VR all day. But at the same time, this is, this is kind of the perfect catalyst for the metaverse. This is everything that has just happened recently. It is the exact situation that brings upon ready Player 1 type scenarios. When the Oasis works is when the Oasis has utility and actually makes sense to work. And so without saying what I'm doing exactly, I can say that I'm thinking very much that way. What is it that my company can do that with? The things that we've learned over the last seven years to enable people to have some real useful utility in an all day long application that really involves a lot of spatial computing in a lot of different ways, but does it in a way that makes sense and kind of onboards people in a way that makes sense? Because just throwing them into VR doesn't make sense.

You had mentioned that there's something in house that you're working on that is an organizational tool. Could you talk a little bit more on that?

Yeah.

And again, this is just for. This is really is to enable our studio to be more efficient at what we do and to maintain all those subtle socialization cues, our culture, how we function together as a team. So it's a lot like what happened with Slack. They built a tool that the team needed. We're doing the same thing, but we're using our particular expertise in VR. So it's an all day long tool that makes us feel present together in some very unique ways, which I'm not talking about yet, but I'm excited to start showing that stuff as we move through the process a little bit more. But it's a way really to enable the sense of presence that you get around being around other people. And the spontaneity of conversation and the spontaneity of being able to walk to somebody's door, desk and just saying, hey, I had this idea, or overhearing a conversation in the distance. And picking up on that cue, there's a bunch of things, you know, walking up to the lunchroom or to the water cooler or, you know, any number of sort of casual interactions that occur in an office setting that generate ideas and conversations. So those are the things that we're kind of picking out and trying to amplify in an all day system.

Yeah. So it would be great if your system makes it out of your particular organization. But let's see. I mean, it certainly has value. I can tell you. I know a few more details about, so. And it definitely has to do with spatial computing.

Yes. Slack came out of that kind developer teams.

Right.

That a lot of developer teams that Stuart was dealing with was using chat behind the scenes, right?

Yeah, yeah. And I'm obviously a huge advocate of VR Evangelist, came from it, from a very pure kind of basement hacker, VR garage hacker place. Right. So, yes, I wear the stuff all day. I do a lot of work in VR all day, but I also recognize the realities of where the tech is at right now. And wearing it all day for most consumers or people trying to do a job just is not practical. So I think there's some real value in being able to enter into VR when it makes sense.

One of the things Irene and I talked about with a lot of you was about the limitations of hardware. What's the next 24 months look like to you? And maybe Matt can chime in here as well because he's seen some of the stuff that's coming. Does that excite you about the future of VR more? Do you think some of these real problems of weight and of screen resolution and all that get fixed, or is it going to be even longer?

Yeah, I think the timeline for that will be compressed probably a lot faster than most people would, would recognize, I think. Yeah, the form factor, everything about, you know, those friction points of comfort are going to be addressed pretty rapidly, I think. So, you know, over the next five years, certainly I think you're going to come to a place where that hardware is very comfortable to wear for very long periods of time and where resolution actually is. You know, at that point you're getting close to, you know, retinal values. Where using screens and VR makes sense, or working actively programming in VR and creating that kind of work structure makes sense. I also think there's a really interesting thing that will likely happen with VR where you'll get a lot more inside out. AR compatibility. I think as the external cameras on VR headsets improve, you're going to get that very interesting threshold will be crossed where suddenly the information coming in from the external world is going to overlay in VR in a very realistic and very compelling way. So it's almost an inverse AR scenari. Instead of trying to project images onto glass or whatever, we're just taking imagery directly into the headset. I think that will actually precede really good AR solutions. I think you'll see really good sort of pass through VR AR solutions come before that.

I really like the explanation of VR as full screen ar. I think I see that in what you're saying, like a slider. And how much of the real world do I want to look let in?

Yeah, because you get around so many kind of fundamental problems with current AR tech. I've talked to you before, Robert, about, you know, obviously there are things people are working on that will satisfy and solve some of these issues. How soon? It's an interesting race to me right now because I see some really hard challenges still in the AR space. You know, just a simple one, like getting pure blacks out of, out of a projection or field of view is a prominent issue. There's kind of like really interesting shortcuts you can do in VR to get around all of those issues. So in some ways I see that maybe initially leading that charge, but then what's cool about that is that eventually, you know, over the five to ten year mark, those two tech technology stacks are just going to kind of merge together. I think everybody agrees with that and you'll be able to, you know, actively switch one or the other off and on.

The problem is if you're a product designer at an Apple or Facebook or wherever, you have to decide are you going to build something that's really, really small and really, really lightweight or are you going to build something that's really, really immersive and has high resolution screens and this wide field of view and stuff like that? I don't see them joining for a few years.

I see. I think there's some really smart product design that can be done though where you get that kind of middle ground that some people will just be like, yeah, I don't. I mean it's different, it looks weird, but it's also maybe a bit of a fashion statement and it still makes sense. Like it's not a giant VR headset that you know, that we would used today, but it's getting somewhere in between ski goggles and sunglasses and it's like, okay, it looks cool enough that I'll wear that all day. Yeah.

In our book. And Irene, I want to jump in here for just a second.

I do want to jump in because we're almost at the halfway mark.

I know we got a lot to cover to cover in our book and we're not covering it here. On the call is some of the brain research that's gone into VR and AR that we talked to all sorts of doctors and other people and When I play your game, I hit some of those. In other words, I get stress relief and mental. And mental happiness. Is that something you were going with for when you're designing your game? Are you taking science out of the brain science fields and trying to put that into the headset?

Well, Pistol Whip was for us a big pillar for that, was just about onboarding new users to that ecosystem and not doing any kind of cognitive overload with too many systems that they have to get their head around. We wanted to engage their lizard brain. So that was a very willful kind of activity of like, what experience can we give to users? That really is just driving instinctual responses. So when you get into a game like Pistol Whip, you know what's going on in about 30 seconds because you're just reacting. I think that's an important kind of onboarding tool to get people into the tech, to get them to understand, oh, this is kind of reaching me at a very different level than I would get from playing a game on a flat screen.

Yeah, go ahead, Hybrina. Thanks, Robert. All right, so let's talk to Matt, Matt Miesniks about spatial computing. As you know, he was the CEO of six and now as an advisor at Niantic. So I know you know a lot, so what you can tell us would be great.

So I can't.

I can't give really specifics about, you know, Niantic's product plans, what's coming up, but I can, I can definitely talk a little bit about what we were working on at 6D, like specific case studies, and what excited us about Niantic over, you know, other exit opportunities that we have, like other companies that we could have gone to. So one of the things about spatial computing that matters is the space itself. And one thing that we learned that was quite fascinating was partnering with Airbnb and giving really, then the ability for a host to wave their phone around and get a 3D model of that home captured very simply. And we thought that what mattered was like a matterport style, you know, asset, you know, 3D asset that they could use to market your home, like here, preview the house you're going to come and visit. But we realized, you know, that, well, they taught us that that actually was the priority 10. It just didn't matter to them at all. What really mattered was the ability to understand that space, to be able to derive some semantic understanding from that model. And that was everything from, you know, getting an accurate floor plan automatically. Very interested in ensuring completeness of the home. So if someone said it's a three bedroom house, but the scan only shows two bedrooms, you know, they can verify that there was nothing missing, you know, that they forgot to scan a room or something, they could check for like, you know, disability and disabled access to the property. Are there stairs? Are the doorways wide enough? But then they wanted to be able to run like inventories, you know, has it got all the facilities? Is there a dishwasher, is there a washing machine, that sort of thing? And that just sort of list went right on. And then they started thinking, well, how can we then offer like home improvement type suggestions and give you a preview, give the host the preview of, oh, a new kitchen and then you could bump your price up by 50 bucks a night. And so what we realized from that was we thought things like, oh, occlusion and 3D AR and all this sort of physics interaction between the vertical real world was going to be, you know, the wow. But it was much simpler than that. It was just, how can, you know, what, what extra awareness or what extra knowledge does a 3D understanding of the space give me over just a 2D or, you know, photographic description of the space. And so that if you kind of extrapolate from that, we sort of realize that where things are going in, you know, if you look at say, you know, a game, you know, that's an outdoor game or something, you start to get into this potential for, oh, it's not just here's a, you know, here's some bit of content that, oh, when I walk behind a tree, it's hidden behind the tree. But you start to be able to give that content and awareness of the world. The content, you know, the Pokemon, whatever it is, knows that it's a tree, it knows where it is, it knows what's around it and can start to behave appropriately. And so that, you know, that, I guess, knowledge graph, knowledge layer of the world was something that we saw as really a question of scale. And was one of the questions, one of the, I guess, motivators for us to look for an exit for the company, a partner that could bring that scale to these types of breakthroughs that we made. But the other big one that two big ones that I still don't think many people have clued into yet around this is that scale by itself isn't enough. If you took 3ds technology or 6ds technology or Apple's lidar sensors and that sort of stuff, and you just plug that into Instagram, you would just get a Million photos of the same thing or a billion photos are the same. What really mattered was having people using an app and those people would actually willingly move around, go to the places in their location, their neighborhood that mattered to them. You know, it isn't someone looking at Google Maps and going, oh, there's the fountain in the middle of the park. You know, that's the important place in this town. You need it to almost be crowdsourced and for people to sort of discover and move around their own place. And that was, I guess that was an aspect of scale that really only Niantic has at a pedestrians. And so we knew that that was just such a critical piece that it's a critical advantage that Niantic could bring. It was almost an AR social graph of the real world. Where do people go and how are those places connected? And it's completely crowdsourced. And then the other thing that, you know, we, you know, we cared about and so does Niantic, is that there's an aspect of doing this spatial mapping on a phone that gets you into places that no other approach can take you. You know, Kitty Hawk can fly and capture huge swathes of the ground. You know, Waymo Tesla can capture cities everywhere from the street, but none of them are ever going to get into your living rooms. None of them are even going to get into the shopping malls and things that needs to come from the devices we already have in our pockets. And privacy really matters much more than any of those other approaches. And so the two aspects to that was we'd solved some really key pieces of that in our technology and that we uniquely could do everything on the device. We don't need to push photos of your bedroom up to the cloud to process them. But the other thing Niantic had was that around the community was just they've done all this work around building products at scale for kids, the most sensitive group of users out there, from a privacy and data protection point of view. And so there was a real sort of alignment of values and investments from a different, different direction. But that's just that care of being able to look, how do we enable people to get this data set of their private spaces and be able to really manage that in a way that no one else can manage? And so those, you know, those two aspects about that, you know, crowdsourced AR social graph with places, along with a real commitment and investment in solving the privacy problems, we thought was just. It just was a really kind of easy decision to realize that Niantic could potentially do Things that no other big platform is capable of doing.

Fantastic. I want to talk with Alex and Peter of rei, but I want to mention right after we do, we're going to touch upon how COVID 19 might possibly affect what you're doing, spatial computing. Before that, though, let's. Let's talk to Alex and Peter. So you have to decide who's going to talk first from REI to describe a little bit more what they're doing in spatial computing.

Who's going?

I'll go first.

Okay.

Yeah. All right, thanks. Hi, guys. So rei, we've been exploring a lot of things, and one use case that I've been really excited about is around this idea of bringing the outdoors in. And I think this feels more important now than ever in terms of translating those real world spaces and getting them to you, whether that's the peak of a mountain that you could never climb yourself for whatever reason, or a retail store that you can't enter because of COVID Pandemic. And I think that the. We did an example utilizing the Matterport in our Labor Day catalog where we were taking people out on site, on location with us around Lake Tahoe. So as our marketing team was out shooting for the catalog, we brought the Matterport and scanned around the same thing and then put links between the stuff that was on site to product pages and more information and just making that scene come to life and integrate our digital properties. That I think is really useful. And Matterport has done a great job of making that super easy, low hanging fruit to go and capture something at a point in time and link it to other things. So I've been really, really excited about that and seeing where that can go. And Alex, I'll let you talk to our other fun exploration we've been up to.

Use case.

Yes. You know, before I talk about that thing that I'm going to talk about, I want to briefly say that along the lines of immersive video or content from a specific place and rei's role in promoting that, one of the most powerful things of being able to transport yourself somewhere is that it sort of gives you a sense of a sense of ownership, I guess, a collective ownership. And if you are able to go and transport yourself there through like 360 video or Matterport, that's a way to get people out of the cities or out of their suburbs and see this exotic place and want to take care of this earth and make things better due to that type of an experience. So I find that to be very powerful along the lines of Those projects. So the thing that I do want to that Peter was alluding to, there's been a project that we've been working on for about a year now. And I guess this is when we're telling the world about it, since it's been a secret. It's Project Topo. That's been the working name for it. And it's a wayfinding application for rock climbing. And it is just in. We wrapped our phase one that we partnered with a studio in building. The UI is kind of gray box at this point and we learned a lot of things along the way. The most special thing about this is, as far as I know, it's the first attempt to use AR for sports and socializing your activity. Rock climbing lends itself well to that. We're looking to enable people to see routes. This is not meant to be something that you would use while rock climbing. Just to be clear about that, we came up with a process to hold a. This is still for a rectangle, a phone or a tablet. It's not for a headset yet. So you hold your device in front of you and you could see the routes on the wall that somebody else has done and then shared and socialized. On our platform, there's a lot of technical hurdles. Even though we built the that end result that I just described, there's a number of technologies that need to come into place for us to really leverage this the way that we would like to. The cloud service, that you would know where the specific spots where you would plant your global anchor at that location so the AR lines up properly is incredibly tricky. REI doesn't really have a social platform like Strava. So would we build that ourselves or are we going to partner with one of the leaders in that space? That's a huge question. A lot of other things began to surface during our research. So when you're aggregating this kind of content, there's a lot of data that we would collect that wouldn't be shared in the traditional sense of holding a paper map of the rock climbing route when you showed up at the spot. Like for instance, with our technology, we could start figuring out what kind of routes are better based upon your body type. If somebody is shorter and has shorter arms and legs, there's actually that could work to your benefit. If you're as tall as Peter, you might think that he's just going to crush it out there. You could take into that spot and have a little inside knowledge on how you can work it better than somebody else. There's a lot of things that became apparent when we're collecting data for these types of experiences. A lot of neat ideas have popped up. Like a pop up AR REI store right there at the spot. Just kind of a fun idea to play around with as well as using it as a communication platform. Like the grip on this one section that you could point at in AR is a little slippery, so be careful because the moss is wet there or. Or don't park your car in this one spot. The sheriff is a jerk. Those kinds of things. So we're really leveraging something completely new and discovering a lot of the benefits from this kind of a technology. I think rock climbing is really just a start. I'm a cyclist. I want to see ghost riders of maybe myself on my best day in front of me. And I want to outdo that. Once we make a leap to a headset, perhaps something like that would be possible. I could see the same type of thing for kayaking and trail running and hiking. And we're very interested in exploring that further and taking Project Topo to the next phase.

Thank you for choosing this event to talk about this first. That's amazing. And yeah, I could see that growing to so many different areas. It's a great platform to start.

I really like the idea of having your store on the rock face with you. That's a really interesting idea that could.

Be expanded in a lot because there's.

No other time I want to be shopping than when I'm hanging off a rock.

Hey, if you need a carabiner because you just busted one or you just dropped it down the face of El Capitan or something. Right.

In the chat, Nicole mentioned drone delivery at the pop.

Right, Right. So we've, we've had all, we've had all our nerdy pontifications about flying a drone in. And since I am spilling the beans here quite heavily and just going for it along the lines of the pop up store, I was thinking of a way to procedurally generate items that would appear inside the pop up store that would be local. Like if somebody did have a spot and if we were going to throw the pop up store at that spot where there is this AR capture of the session that we're going to be doing in ar, we could fetch data from like Wikipedia, for instance, of like local historical figures. And if you've ever been inside an REI store, we're kind of rustic and have a lot of cute knickknacks. We could start generating those procedurally. So kind of going off in the weeds. But that was something that we talked about and discovered when we were fleshing out ideas for this project. Again, we have it built for iOS and Android and it's running in what we considered phase one. We're excited to see what we can do with some of these other things that we've been talking about for the next phase.

Thank you. Great. Let's move to COVID 19. So a lot of people over the last couple of weeks have approached us, asked us, how will spatial computing change due to COVID 19? And it's not a straightforward answer. Obviously, we're finding a lot of people now have to use Zoom and you could see what Zoom's about because we're in it now. It's two dimensional, it has some quirky stuff going on. So it still needs work even further. Two dimensionality. And when we're talking about spatial computing, it going to three dimensionality, et cetera. There's a whole lot of other kinds of aspects and that's only for communications now, for other things that might be relevant for Covid, it's interesting to talk through a little bit more. So who wants to talk first about how what they're working on or will be working on is relevant to Covid?

I've already kind of said my thing, so I don't want to take time from the other speakers. We're doing something. It's a small. It's only a small piece of our team that's actually working on this just to check viability. But yeah, it's exciting though.

Yes.

I think, you know, obviously the communication potential is a big one, but I think the other aspect that, you know, I don't know if we'll be doing anything about it, but I think it's there to be explored, is around just this idea of spatial understanding and understanding your, you know, having a layer of information. And obviously a big part of this whole shelter in place is staying away from people and checking your temperature and all that sort of stuff. And definitely phones and glasses can make you far more aware of your place in the crowd. Are you actually within six feet of people? Can you look at where the wind is blowing? Can you have seen companies pitching to put little thermal sensors in glasses and things, even just to put them in storefronts to just give everyone a bit more of awareness of how crowded is that space and what are the likely. How do you reduce that chance of spreading the disease? That's another aspect, I think, of spatial computing that can help in all public health.

Yes, that's awesome. And I know so many governments now are trying to work with citizens to try to figure out what those apps should look like. And I here to stay. I think you're absolutely right. And it's not only for Covid. I mean it could be used for all kinds of information, but specifically for Covid. Yeah, there's definitely something there.

Well, there's a. I mean if we're being real, there's a global PTSD that's about to set in for.

Yeah.

This entire society and our current culture and people are not going to hastily return to the job as normal or socialization as normal. There's going to be a real weird mixed bag of people wanting to remain synthetically connected. So how we as an industry address that is going to be really fascinating over the next. Like right away, like yesterday.

Yeah, I mean I was just reading an article about how in China they're deciding and it's of course this government run, you know, pushed that automated cars are going to be totally up and running throughout China by 2025. And specifically due to Covid, they're pushing it more because obviously people don't want to enter spaces where other people might have been that are sick with diseases, viruses, et cetera. So, you know, just talking about it that way. Sebastian, what do you think about the EVTOLs being a greater possibility because of COVID like faster?

I think Covid accelerates everything in society, so I think it accelerates the use of digital. We see it in education, we see it in many different fields. In virtual reality, augmented reality, it changes the way we interact. I hate the word social distancing, because without social distancing, I want physical distancing. We are currently socially not distancing here. It's just a really bad word. And yeah, it's going to change transportation. I think the days that we all are willing to go on to a crowded packed plane full of people, we don't know where the person next to us elbow ends up in our stomach, we're going to fall asleep. I think these days are probably over and then the days do this economically. So yeah, I can see self driving cars as one solution, as a way to keep people distanced. The big question for me is going to be what's the long term effect? Short term, we're all very scared. Obviously we're sitting at home, we are all very affected. But will we find a vaccine and it was just a speed bump in the history of humanity or will it be something that has lasting changes in the way we feed to Other people. I personally hope that we're going to huddle and cuddle other people again. We're going to go to board games again and to orchestras and concerts and we're going to run marathons again. That's what I hope.

Yeah.

I would say from my standpoint, I've seen and I hope to see a lot more. Well, I would say in the distributed manufacturing space and 3D printing. I've been 3D printing some really cheap augmented reality glasses right here and distributing that and I think seeing more and more of this ability to take the digital physical or take the digital file and send it out physically and reduce that overall shipping need. I hope we see a lot more of that in the book. I love that your sort of intro forward from Wozniak. He talks about the kids and their adaptation to this. And Robert, you mentioned your kids are in VR more than you are, and mine are too. And one of the first things my kids did, we got this 3D printer right before the quarantine started. And it's been awesome because my kids are now able to go in, in VR and create something in just sort of this spatial place that they just understand because they get 3D and then they can print it out and have something like their own personal die that's got their name on it, you know, and they just get it naturally. And I'm really excited to see how these generations where they're like at home and they have to use their creativity to come up with that next thing and just having that more dedicated time to it, I think it's gonna be huge.

Yeah, you talk about the kids. You know, my son just got on Somnium space a couple days ago and within 30 minutes he had built a whole studio for Irina and I to use in this metaverse.

Right.

And it's pretty intricate and he figured it out so fast of how to manipulate things in 3D and put them down and build a building. Right. Kids take to this real fast, adults a little slower.

Yeah. My 10 year old daughter Maya, she plays with her friends since this all started. She plays with her friends in an application on the quest called Half and Half, which is just a very lighthearted, fun, social thing. Like they play a hide and seek. And for her mental health, that's meant everything during, during this crisis because she feels like she's actually physically connected with her friends every day. It's a big deal. And it's, it's that kind of stuff that's, you know, you know, getting people to take notice of what this technology actually can do.

Yeah, it's very fascinating. My son has a girlfriend. He's played with her almost every day since last summer. So before this thing happened, he doesn't know her real name and he doesn't know where she lives, but they meet in rec room every afternoon and play for hours.

Yeah.

Well, what I wanted to say is that Robert and I have been running a business off of Zoom for over two years, and even before that I was doing for three and a half years. So we very rarely have met clients in person. We've run everything for years off of Zoom. So you can just imagine if we fast forward and see what's going to happen with spatial computing in the future. I've gotten closer to people week after week in meeting with them in Zoom, as if I'm there in person. So it does work. It really.

And Irina, we wrote this book together. I mean, you live in Pasadena, I live in Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

We did all of our interviews over Zoom long before the virus came.

Right.

So we were in very normal for a long time.

Yeah.

Incredible way. We actually wrote some of the book using Otter, using an AI, with me just walking around, talking into the phone. And that was a new way of writing for me as well. Give you a little bit more conversational feel to the book and in certain places.

Yeah.

But, yeah, the tech. What, what this did for. For the world is it caught everybody up to where this panel is. Right. Because we've been playing with 2D. I mean, I had cuc me back in 90, 93, 94, something like that.

Right.

And this is cuc me just works really well.

Right.

Cuc me was an early video conferencing tool that, you know, when we had a 144 modem, we could barely get one frame a second over the Internet. Now we're getting 4K video. It's crazy.

It's only going to get better.

But what it did is get everybody in society up to where we were for the last two or three years.

I hope. I hope so. I hope it doesn't retro. I hope it doesn't go back. I don't think.

I don't think it will.

You know, Twitter today announced that they're not gonna open options back.

No, I know, I know. I hope that others follow that lead and it becomes almost like a political thing where they think, hey, this is a good idea now, because it's the herd, you know, So. I hope so. All right, so what I want to find out from each of you what you think or consider to be progress regarding spatial computing. So who wants to answer that first?

Sorry, I didn't catch the question. It was.

Yes. What do you consider to be progress.

When it crazy thought since we brought up COVID 19 at some level all of chemistry is geometry, it's physics, it's physical bodies interacting with and I want the day where we have a complete scan of every protein in the human body in 3D so that we can calculate overnight an antibody against something like COVID 19 and the next morning have a vaccine. And I believe it's going to happen. It's another version of spatial computing at a very small scale that actually is making phenomenally great progress in the world right now.

Yeah, Danny?

Oh, I wasn't going to say. What does advancement look like though?

What do you can like if you have to say a major, not just, you know, iterative thing but like that's really amazing what happens. Facial computing.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's more about, I think personally it's more about utility at this point than it is about the hardware. The hardware is there. We all know there's going to be some incremental improvements to hardware. Eventually it'll be a mixed device that does all things but we're already kind of bumping up against like a small example is Field of View, the index Valve index for example does like 1:35 and that's plenty. Like you could go further and I've tried things that are further than that. Is it necessary? Not really like there. So we're going to make these incremental improvements to hardware but that's not really where things change. Where things change are when we actually bring like a real value proposition to using the tech. And that's, that's what Covid did in a sick awful way. I don't, I don't want that to be the case but it is the catalyst and this is just one thing of many.

Catalyst.

Yeah, I mean I'll chime in on that with utility. I think up to now we've seen AR provide utility via solutions. Custom software cobbled together hardware and bits and pieces and it's worked for big companies like Boeing or DHL somewhere. But I think the next step of progress we're going to see on the AR side is going to be these solutions becoming just products. It's going to be something that any sort of medium sized business can just go out and buy 100 devices for a couple hundred bucks each and there'll be turnkey software that they don't need. A consultant to install and they'll just get some benefit from their business from that. So that I don't know whether you'd call it something like going from minicomputer, you know, word processor pools to Microsoft Word, but. Or from custom sort of sales tracking things to salesforce.com, but something like that on enterprises where, you know, it just becomes easier for companies just to get utility in the niche that they're in.

I don't want to. Yeah. To launch off that point. I don't want to say who it is, but I talked to someone in the military recently about how Covid has kind of changed their approach to training, especially disaster response training, that kind of stuff. So they're already pivoting to thinking about how to more aggressively use these consumer technologies to do that. In an era where you can't easily get a bunch of people together like I think everybody's at important levels are starting to consider how to best use the technology. And they're doing it in a much more aggressive way than they would have in any other situation.

Yeah, I mean there's a new toolbox.

Right.

People are looking to those toolboxes that could actually help. They didn't know they existed before, they now know they exist and now they have to figure out how to use them. So I'm very positive about that happening at a faster rate right now. So if we look five years into the future, so there's some things that you mentioned maybe that are not going to might happen sooner than five, some that might happen after five. So let's hit the five year point. What do you think spatial computing is going to look like in 5 years? Both hardware and software, whichever way you want to take it.

I think we'll see those enterprise products that are out there that are just easy to get hold of and provide. They might not be like general purpose, do everything. But you can. If you've got a company that needs training or you've got a hands free workforce in a particular vertical, there'll be products that are just commonplace and then, and we'll probably, you know, I believe we'll have the first, let's call it viable, commercially viable consumer eyewear. I don't know if it'll be successful. It definitely won't be like 3D spatially aware, but it'll be something that, you know, people that aren't on this call, you know, would be willing to buy like the, like the Apple Watch version 2 or something around them.

In the early day of Google Glass, we released a video where like your daily navigation of a city was completely augmented with this additional little pieces of information. And while we failed in Google Glass to get to this point, I so wish we had this, like little small things that breadcrumbs that people leave behind that help me understand the world better, navigate the world better.

Absolutely. I've been looking forward to that for a couple years.

I can't wait.

Thinking in the future. Yeah.

I have my fantasy about what five years will look like.

Yeah, tell us.

I hope that there's key improvements in three areas. The capture the cloud persistence and the playback. So we'll be able to quickly capture objects and create digital twins of them, small items and big ones. Right now, to do a tent is super tricky. To import a TV set, major retailers have to spray them to ruin their reflective properties just to capture them with the cameras properly ruining the TV in the process. Hopefully we're going to have ways to quickly capture and create digital twins. So that's going to be huge. We're already getting there. Like the LIDAR sensor on the iPad Pro is a huge step. I know Samsung had that on whatever phone you're using. Peter, you had that about a year ago. I forget which phone that was. Yes, the Note 10 and the Cloud persistence component. Once you have those models, how can themes, how can the industry adopt a single persistence layer? Like if I, for instance, threw an AR object behind my couch, push my couch back up against the wall and then 10 years later, let's just say I move my couch. I want that darn thing to still be there and I want the persistence layer tracking all of this. So I know that there's a few different people trying to crack that nut right now, like Azure, cloud services, Google, Niantic's up to some good stuff with Matt's technology. So there's a bunch of major players bringing the ball down the field. I hope to see something really special there. And then the playback devices. Will it be Mojo Vision on a contact lens? Will it be something like what Kira is talking about with a lightweight set of glasses? What's Apple working on? You know, so it's really the combination of capturing the cloud persistence and the playback. I'm excited to see how all of those are greatly improved on in five.

Years to some of your dreams. And it's the same dream I have and why I joined up with Irene and did this book. Microsoft Research yesterday released a video where they're using VR with blind people and the blind people are getting navigated around their world because they're Building the devices that they're wearing are building a slam map, basically of the world. And I have an autistic son who doesn't look across, you know, both ways when he crosses the streets and doesn't have a lot of the skills that me and you have to deal with people and deal with the world. And these kinds of devices are going to be magic devices for people like this. And that's real positive. When I first got into this field, or the earliest time I can remember, is when Peter Meyer, who was the CTO of Matteo, which Apple bought, was showing me monsters on the sides of a skyscraper or the building up in Munich, Germany. And we still don't have that. So that was almost 10 years ago. So I have similar kinds of dreams and Irene and I have similar kinds of dreams of things that help people live their lives and give us virtual screens everywhere. That's another one that I want fast.

I think there's a great point brought up in this conversation. Michael Abrash at Facebook at the last Oculus Connect. Every Oculus Connect, he does a kind of deep dive into where he sees the. That technology going over the next five to ten years kind of thing. And there's always a fixation and focus on how we digitize ourselves and bring more of us into VR because that enables all kinds of different telecommunication, digital presence and awareness. I think that you'll probably see a lot of that over the next five years, or at least things that are starting to lead up to that. And because that all leads us to these synthetic environments that start feeling a lot more social and real and organic. And again, it's more like it's utility. What is, what is the use case that is going to drive the technology further than it is right now? And that will be one of those things. The hardware, it'll continue to get smaller and lighter and maybe haptics will start showing up. But it's still such a nasty, hard problem to crack. But there's. There's some great prototypical stuff out there that, you know, you can kind of see the writing on the wall. Eventually we'll have some. Some kind of great feedback and tactile haptics for our hands or some kind of resistive force stuff. Yeah, I don't know. Five years isn't that long, but I think we'll see some pretty interesting gains just in. In terms of how much of you is there and how much comfort is there and how more. How much more real and present that whole experience feels.

It'll only get better so we're running a little over because of the hundred person issue. A lot of people weren't able to get in the first 10 minutes or so. It's now 3:06, so I'm going to push it a few more minutes and then we'll have time for questions and people can hang on for as long as they want to for the next half hour after that for questions. So my last question here for everybody is now originally it was what are you looking forward to? What would you like to avoid? So a lot of you have already mentioned what you're looking forward to. So let me just then make the question, what would you like to avoid in spatial computing?

Free to play games. Is that coming? Is F2P happening for AR? As a gamer that was just such a wah, wah, wah. I would rather pay three bucks and be left alone and really, you know, do my thing.

Like Tozaka's response on this check group Ads.

Yeah, same I. For me it's not the ads, it's the potential of these platforms to just let platforms accumulate power to influence us in ways that we're not aware of. It's going to make what Facebook did seem like child's play. When you've got this sort of sensor data that we're going to get. I hope that build out of that sort of infrastructure is somehow done in a way that's more accountable and more thoughtful than kind of happened in the social media build out.

We're totally with you, Robert and I and I know a lot of other people. There's so much more information data that's going to be collected and starting to be collected with spatial that it's beyond comprehension. It's not only these one dimensional, you know, my phone number and my email address kind of thing. It's huge. So there's potential for businesses in the future to come in and actually build apps that would help enable this information to be kept under control. There's a whole industry that will be built around that, I think. Okay, so anybody else want to chime.

In on what they want to avoid the demonization of. Sorry, go ahead.

I was thinking the addiction to isolating experiences, I guess where we, a lot of, a lot of companies have employed the science of addiction to make sure you keep coming back and keep using it. And I think I would like to avoid the isolation, isolationist view to overtaking the connected view.

Really?

Yeah. Okay. The demonization of AR&VR in the press, I still, every week there's a new VR or AR is dead article. Yeah, for us that are in the industry, that's pretty tiresome, obviously, because it doesn't align with reality at all, especially now and especially in the last year. So I'd like to see a lot less of that language. You know, seeing the press actually taking this technology seriously. I think they will, I think they are starting to. So hoping to see that because the, obviously the potential for human connection is so high and that's what needs to be the focus. And so anything that kind of goes against us trying to get to this, this eventuality of being more deeply connected and having better access to each other, that's, that's what I want to avoid.

I think that is a wonderful point on which to end the roundtable. Human communication is the absolute apex or reason why spatial computing exists. I mean, it's just at a higher level, beyond 2D and it does a whole lot more so. Absolutely. Okay, I'm going to open this up to questions. There's a whole lot of questions. I'm reading one here from Simon Gillespie. It's regarding Kitty Hawk and it says, is Kitty Hawk looking at spatial data collection? Do they have plans for AI controlled flight issues with this?

Good question. We have not yet built a elaborate spatial database, but we will. And the reason is we can't imagine that idiots like myself can safely fly over cities when there's 10,000 other vehicles in the air. We already know that in commercial aviation the computer basically beats the human pilot. There's exceptions to it, but by and large, when pilots get disoriented, automation wins. As we go to the air, I think the vision has to be the same as the VEMO vision, just do everything automated. And it's actually easier in the air than in the ground because in the ground there's bicycles and pedestrians and cats and dogs. There's very few things to hit in.

The air.

Very few things to hide.

You're saying very few things to hit. Almost like I worked on self driving cars for so long and all you do is trying not to hit stuff, right? And then you go up by 400ft in the air and all of a sudden there's really nothing to hit. It behooves me why we shouldn't all work on flying cars and still work on self driving cars.

I agree.

Do it at the same time. Okay, so let me, let's get to the questions. I have a whole bunch of them. I'm trying to get ones that are tippy top in terms of what we were just talking about. Okay, so Steven says a question To Matt, malls are already being mapped and homes by the real estate industry. Why not leverage this to realize critical mass in the AR cloud?

Yeah, that gets into a problem opportunity around ownership of data, who owns the scan? And you know, I think people have this an assumption that there's just going to be one scan of the mall and that's going to be like the authority of definitive scan and it's going to be done by the real estate company that owns them all and everyone will use that. It's not going to work like that. It's going to be far closer to the way photos are captured today. Everyone will have their own little scan of the mall. There'll be probably a scan by the real estate company, they'll probably be a scan by, you know, a game company. And every major platform will have some sort of crowdsourced scan of that space. And the app that you're using will tap into one or more of those models of the mall to give the user experience they're trying to give. And you get into this crazy, you know, that no one really knows the answer to. Like in my house, who owns the scan? Like, is it, is it the, you know, the, the building, the apartment building owner? Is it the owner of the condo? Is it the tenant who's renting the condo? Is it you who comes over as my guest wearing glasses and you happen to capture the scan of my living room? Now, you know, how do I manage privacy for that where I might just want some people, friends to get my living room but nobody gets my bedroom. There's nobody knows. Like. So I think, you know, I think what's going to happen is it's just everyone's going to end up with the potential to capture this data. It'll all just get stored in whichever app people use to do the capture. And eventually some platforms will be able to deliver a better user experience for different types of apps than others. So, yeah, it's going to be messy for quite a while yet. And my metaphor I use is kind of these, these models are going to be kind of the operating system for the space. And that in the same way that in the early days of mobile there were 10, 15 different operating systems you could have on all your different phones. And gradually over time, they kind of consolidated into a handful. And I think the same thing is going to happen with this type of spatial data in the early days.

I mean, a lot of people have brought up ownership issues, but there haven't been any room resolved ways of doing that yet. And of course It'll have to happen because these things present itself and needs to be kept track of. So exciting area for another entrepreneur to jump into. I think.

I think the whole DRM aspect which Matt is alluding to is very important. But you also have to take into account the millennials. Now they're sharing their Venmo became a social thing, like when your pains. I never thought I would see that happen. I could see everybody or I could see a lot of the younger people scanning the heck out of their homes and having all that uploaded without anybody really caring. I think we'll see a lot of that. But the DRM aspect to slam data is pretty huge. I haven't spent too much time considering it. That's a great point, Matt.

Yeah, there's a lot of cute. Cuteness that is associated like Venmo, I think is like cute. You know, you could see who paid for whom or whatever. It doesn't go very deeply. I expect this to definitely go much deeper in the future because the capability is there and I think people actually want that. Okay, so here's a question from Peter Mullen. Will the advancement edge and 5G networks enable a new class and scale of use cases for spatial computing, especially gaming?

I think so. And from my world, what that's doing is opening up more. Like I said this in line with bringing more of the connection to the outdoors. And as the connectivity improves, we're less likely to be completely untethered out on the mountain. And that alone opens up a whole new use case of suddenly you're not going out in nature to escape, to unplug, to get completely away. But it becomes a whole new class of connection application use case that wasn't there at all before. Yeah, because we didn't have any coverage at all or people didn't have the satellite phone. So as we further create. Create connectivity in the remote spaces, I mean, it's similar to Africa coming online with broadband. Right. As more and more you get, you open up wide swaths of humanity that now are more connected than ever before. And those people will have ideas that bring new innovations and new solutions to the world.

Yes. Okay, here's a question from John Daly. Do you think big tech like Google, Apple and Facebook would abide by OARC standards and of course, any other standards you want to put in there. Spatial web, or will they just continue on, possibly working together as a pictech standard? How do you think the standard thing is going to roll out Spatial?

I got a sort of unpopular opinion on that one. I saw this Play out in mobile. I used to work for a company called Open Wave. They invented wap, first invented, you know, the Internet connected phones and what, what we saw in mobile was that what drove the economics of, of applications and obviously the entire developer community was, you know, getting to that click to that buy button and anything that you could do to shave a millisecond or one extra click off of that, you know, that flow for the user made enough of an economic difference that your company, your app would be viable or be the winner. And so that ended up driving native apps because they were much more vertically and deeply integrated into the hardware. The user experience could be just a tiny bit slicker. And so you ended up with closed app store ecosystems because that was the way that developers made more money. When we get to glasses and very, very personal natural interfaces that are tuned to us, I mean I don't like lending my phone to someone to play around with like there's no way I'm going to want them wearing my glasses and AirPods and everything. And I think those drivers altogether are just going to. And the understanding of the size of the market opportunity, it can be big enough to support a closed ecosystem, can support millions of developers that we're going to just see that industry drive to. There'll be an entire Apple ecosystem, a Facebook ecosystem and others. I imagine it's going to be quite a challenge for companies that are very much invested in an open ecosystem, like Google for instance, to figure out how to get the user experience good enough on a cross platform open ecosystem for developers to be able to make more money than they can get off the closed ecosystem. So it's my prophecy of doom. I hope it doesn't work out that way, but that's my fear that it will.

Well, yeah, what you're speaking to in a lot of ways, a lot of us have been talking about there's going to be a metaverse war essentially where you get kind of three massive writs I do think and they'll kind of be worlds in and of themselves competing against one another. But these will be legitimate sort of self isolated realities where you kind of as a consumer you accept the agreement to be a part of it or you don't. A very dystopian view, but I totally see that coming.

We're already there. I mean Fox versus msnbc. I mean people.

In early my career before mobile and I worked in wireline Internet infrastructure and with routers and all that sort of stuff and we used to joke that the standards were for the losers that was generally someone would win the market and all the other second, third, fourth place vendors in the market would get ticked off and upset that someone was winning. And they'd all get together and create a standard, because they're now forced to. And so in AR and VR, we're so far away from being able to declare this company's one for everyone else to kind of put aside their hopes and dreams and settle on a standard.

Yes. Okay. Along those lines, there is a question from Deepak Patel on intellectual property. So how does intellectual property fit in? What's the future of that when it comes to spatial computing? Anything new that's happening or what do you see going on there?

I'll jump in there. There's a metaverse called somnium space, which lets you buy a plot of land in a big virtual valley. It's sort of like having a Burning man kind of thing. And you can buy your own little land and you pay for that in Bitcoin or Ethereum. And that's yours, according to the owner of the metaverse. He will never take it away from you because it's the ownership of it is locked into the blockchain that's underneath the virtual land. And he's going to allow you to build things on top of that, and you're going to own those as well. And so there's.

A message saying he's specifically interested in patents.

Patents are a government idea where you're going to get a monopoly on an idea or on a mechanism of something. So is he going to build a machine in a virtual world like this that's going to do something like something. Put out some music or something like that?

That could be.

We never filed for any patents at 6D. We didn't see any value in doing that.

We didn't patent teleportation either.

Yeah, I could see teleportation because people to accept it, it's like you want it to work, right? So, Matt, tell us why you didn't patent stuff at 60.

I mean, we were very small company with 10, 10 people were trying to. We didn't really know what the solution would be. So we could have just patented a whole bunch of just random stuff that we were like, I don't know if this is going to work in the market or not. It's technically interesting. It's from a research point of view. It was definitely novel. It was patentable, you know, in a theoretical sense, but we just didn't know if it had actually any value. And so we were much more Interested in trying to solve the the question around where is the market value for some of these technical breakthroughs? And we were throwing away stuff that we couldn't have patented, that we could have patented because we pretty quickly realized that we need to do a whole nother generation of this algorithm to make it usable. So we just didn't think it was worth the investment when we didn't know the value of the tech.

Right? No, that makes a whole lot of sense. I mean there's some houses that pretty much get set up as companies just to patent and there's that like you who like wild to get the product fine tuned and get to where you are right now, which is very, very good actually. Okay, so I think we are at the end of the roundtable. Unless any one of you wants to bring up an ending note, I want.

To put a shout out for the book. The book is actually quite the dull research, very encyclopedic collection of really great technologies and thoughts. And I just checked, it has a five star review on Amazon which is great so far as one review. So add your review and I want to congratulate both of you to writing this book.

I'm sure it's a lot of work.

But these are the moments that propel society.

Thank you so much, Sebastian. Thank you so much for everyone here on the roundtable joining us. We value your time greatly. We also are greatly appreciative of what you are working on in spatial computing. And we know that you're going to continue making some amazing things, continuing what you're doing and making new amazing things in the future. So very much looking forward to that. Okay everyone, thank you. I just want to mention that Robert and I are going to be hosting a series of five virtual roundtables in the future starting in June. We don't have the dates yet, but we'll let everybody know what the topics are, who the people are, etc. Obviously it's coming out of our book, but in general we want to continue talking more about what's going on in spatial computing. All right, thank you so much.

Good luck with the book you guys. Thank you so much for having us.

Fantastic.

Thanks everybody. Have a great day.

Bye.

Take care everybody.