Neville Spiteri is the founder and CEO of WEVR (formerly Wemo Labs). It was originally started to create immersive experiences before the Oculus Rift Kickstarter. They had created an immersive underwater experience called The Blue, and then they ported it to virtual reality in 2013. They also started developing a mobile version in 2014 after getting a sneak peak of a Gear VR prototype. On March 1st, they rebranded to WEVR to show the world that they’re now 100% focused on virtual reality, and they announced their partnership with Valve in creating the TheBluVR: Encounter VR experience For the HTC Vive.
Neville says that experiencing The Room Demo in 2014 was one of the most profound experiences of his life, and that it was really moving to experience the sense of true presence in VR for the first time. After meeting with Valve to experience the Vive for the first time, they then spent six weeks building “ThebluVR: Encounter,” which is a room-scale VR experience that was shown as a part of Valve’s GDC demo reel. They wanted to create an introductory experience for room-scale VR where you could have a soft-landing and not be bothered by figuring out the controllers, but rather focus on exploring a space by moving around.
There’s a quantum leap from mobile rotational systems to desktop positional systems, and then another quantum leap to design a VR experience for room-scale. He says that it engages more of your physicality, which allows more part of your body that can react to the VR environment. They also learned that if there’s a large object coming towards a visitor and they are having a sense of presence, then they’ll move out of the way as if it were real. They also included various interactive elements including having school of fish react and being able to create currents by your hand movements to help increase the sense of presence. He also talks about the importance of establishing the sense of place, and giving you a sense of human-scale reference to give you an idea for how big of a space that you’re in when creating a room-scale VR experience.
WEVR has been creating experiences for the three tiers of mobile, desktop and room-scale VR in order to discover the strengths and constraints for each tier. They suggest starting with the audience that you’re trying to reach first with your VR experience, and then which VR platform is going to best express and reach that audience.
They created The Blue experience for all three VR platform tiers, and Neville says that a lot of the assets and interactions need to be specifically designed for each platform.
WEVR has also been exploring the medium of cinematic & 360-degree VR experiences. Overall, they’re focusing on non-game, storytelling creative experiences.
They also creating a VR Playback system, which is currently in private beta in order to help experiences play on all of the VR platforms. They’re hoping that it’ll help solve the problem of distributing your VR experience as well as to help build an audience for your work.
WEVR is more of a studio/publisher rather than a work-for-hire development shop, and they’re focusing on the underlying distribution platform. But since it’s still early days in the VR world, they’re also investing a lot in creating different VR experiences in order to better understand all of the different facets of this new medium. He also alluded to the fact that they’re working on a number of different launch titles for the Vive and and Oculus Rift desktop & Gear VR.
WEVR has also been doing some experiments in interactive storytelling and cinematic VR. They’ve been collaborating with different filmmakers including Roger Avary, who is an Academy Award winner who co-wrote Pulp Fiction. They’ve also been spending just as much time with game designers in order to get their insights into storytelling in an open world. WEVR also announced at SXSW that they’ve created a million dollar Virtual Reality grant program for immersive storytellers.
Finally, he talks about some of WEVR’s other VR experiences including the Space Shuttle Endeavour and Above & Beyond At Madison Square Garden. He sees that we’re moving beyond being able to share moments to being able to share full experiences with each other. Neville sees that VR has the potential to be more efficient in communicating and learning, and more entertained, and he’s excited to be a being a part of the mainstream resurgence of virtual reality.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.274] Neville Spiteri: I'm Neville Spiteri, co-founder and CEO of Weaver, also pronounced as WeVR, recently changed our name, formerly known as WeMoLab. So I'm a software maker specifically interested in creating software for immersive entertainment and very excited to be heading up a team very much focused and interested in exploring content creation for virtual reality headsets and kind of really empowering what we see as a new wave of storytellers and content creators to develop experiences for this new exciting medium.
[00:00:53.420] Kent Bye: Nice. And if I understand correctly, you used to be called WeMo Lab, as you said. And you've been around for a while before this whole VR resurgence. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about this pivot of moving more into virtual reality and kind of what you were doing before and now what your mix of doing VR and non-VR stuff is.
[00:01:13.737] Neville Spiteri: Absolutely. So we're 100% focused on VR at this point. And to set some context, I'll sort of provide a brief history of sort of my background. So I read my first book on virtual reality in 1991. And I was super, super interested in kind of the early days of some of the first VR explorations right around when the MIT Media Lab was doing some really interesting research in the space. And pretty much over the last sort of 20, 25 years, my whole career has been in Essentially, software, specifically software for the entertainment industry, worked in films and helped in the early days of the computer graphics wave of the 90s, working on movies such as Apollo 13 and Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, and then spent a bunch of time at Electronic Arts in the gaming space. I've always really been interested in where technology meets entertainment and the possibilities of creating new consumer experiences. When I first started WeMoLab, it was actually, to your point, before the Palmer Luckey Oculus Kickstarter project was announced. And initially, our goal with WeMoLab was to create immersive experiences, immersive entertainment. But we were very much thinking about immersive experiences that are shared and projected across flat screens of different sizes, phones and tablets and screens in your living room. And we created our first experience was called the blue, which was an underwater experience, which was a sort of a three dimensional world. And it was a first person experience. It was very exploratory. And from the very get go, we were sort of envisioning what kinds of design principles you want to bring to bear in order to create an immersive experience where the audience is engaging in a new way. When we first heard about the Kickstarter project, we were super excited, and we got a DK1 very early on. And we ported the Blue to the DK1 and got it up and running. And as a company, we immediately felt that this is it. This is sort of the medium for us to explore immersive entertainment. And the Blue was sort of a perfect fit, in a sense, for VR, because it is first person. There is no HUD. It's mostly passive, but you have some element of interactivity. And it was really a great fit. So as early as 2013, we were very much all bought in on VR. Then coming into 2014, back in over a year ago, we had our first exposure, met with VP Chanwoo Park over at Samsung, who was heading up the wearables group, and got a first glimpse at a very early prototype of the Samsung gear. And it was very clear then that, you know, I could really see how sort of VR was not only is it here and now, but very much an opportunity for creating virtual reality experience that go way beyond gaming and can be applicable to a broader audience in a more accessible way, largely driven by the mobile platform. And so, you know, we started turning the corner to being a hundred percent VR company over a year ago, but coming into this year, we felt like it was important for us to sort of rebrand and come out with a clear message to the world that, you know, this is who we are and this is what we're doing. And we announced our new name on Sunday, March 1st, which coincided with the announcement of our partnership with Valve and HTC and the development we're doing for that platform.
[00:04:53.106] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so maybe you could talk a bit more about that process of getting involved with Valve and SteamVR and developing an experience that a lot of people that got a chance to try out the demos at GDC, there actually weren't a lot of people who got to try it out, but the few lucky that did get to try it out got to experience sort of a altered version of the blue, or I guess it's the encounter. But yeah, maybe you could talk a bit about that process and how that came about, and then what it was like to kind of be working with this cutting-edge technology.
[00:05:22.791] Neville Spiteri: Yes, so, you know, we've been friends of Valve for many years and know a lot of the core team at Valve, Doug Church and Chet Falchuk. And very soon after the Steam days of January last year, 2014, I had the good fortune of heading up to Seattle and I experienced the room demo. And for me personally, and literally in my life, I feel that was a very defining moment where I experienced true presence for the first time. And me and my co-founder Scott Yarrow, you know, sort of both came away from that experience, you know, really deeply moved as humans, sort of regardless of VR as a medium and our company and the business, we just very personally were very moved by the experience and continued to build our relationship with Valve. And after the Oculus Connect conference, which was another super exciting, defining moment for us, experiencing the Crescent Bay, after that I was in conversations with the Valve team and they said, well, come up and take a look and see what we're up to. We feel very fortunate to have been given the opportunity to be a developer, an early stage developer for the Vive system. And so starting in November of last year, we had access to a dev kit and it was actually only january of this year that we really sort of kicked off the encounter project and it was sort of a furious six week very intense development cycle team was super super jazzed about putting together the encounter experience and it was a very collaborative. and very exciting time for us to learn about room scale and working with the Valve team and the HTC team to kind of really understand the best way to use the technology and the platform and the benefits of having a 15 by 15 space you can move around in and the benefits of having an input system and the controllers. And we worked very closely and thoughtfully about, you know, how do we perhaps produce a piece that's more of an introductory piece that perhaps a first time experiencer of you know room scale vr can have a bit of a soft landing where you don't have to out the gates understand how all of the control schemes work and get involved in a very highly interactive experience but perhaps more of an intro where. You get to really feel the space and explore it by moving around. And so we kind of very much tailored the encounter experience towards that, which was really a great fit for what the blue is about. It's about exploring and having kind of this intimate opportunity to encounter these beautiful creatures in the ocean.
[00:08:06.638] Kent Bye: And what were some of the lessons that you learned in the process of doing room scale VR then?
[00:08:12.858] Neville Spiteri: several lessons, and we're constantly learning new ones. On some level, one of the big leaps, obviously, one of the big differentiators is, I think, between just mobile rotational systems, such as the Gear VR or Cardboard, and positional systems, such as Crescent Bay, DK2, and obviously the HDC Valve Vive system. And so there's a quantum leap there once you introduce positional. for all of the reasons which we know the fact that you're tracking in space and you can move closer to objects or move further away and that's where really the sense of scale really kicks in. Once you're at room scale, kind of the next sort of quantum leap going from sort of what I refer to as desktop VR experience to a room scale experience is The fact that you can now move all of your body and engage that much more of your physicality into the experience, there's that many more triggers happening at a neural level and inputs from the fact that you're kneeling down or crouching or moving away to one corner and then turning back and stepping aside and moving to another part of the room. So as a result of engaging more of your physicality, there is that much more engagement and responsiveness that's triggered in the physical body that all sort of contributes to the sense of presence and the sense of reality in the virtual space. So one of the learnings is the fact that you can present the, we don't use the term player, we tend to use the term visitor, because you're not just a viewer, you're not necessarily a player of a game, so we've come up with the term visitor to describe your role as a participator in the experience. And one of the things we learned is that the experience can be real enough that if you have a large object coming at you, Well, the visitor is going to move out of the way, even knowing full well that that's not a real object that's coming towards them. And we found that even when the visitor then acknowledges, oh, that's silly of me. I know I didn't have to move out of the way. Sure enough, the next time this object comes back around, the visitor is walking around it and avoiding it as if it was a real object in the space. So that, to me, was one of those key moments where it was very clear that there is now a possibility to deliver that sense of reality. There's a very long list that follows on around that. But yes, several lessons learned, and we continue to learn every day.
[00:10:46.688] Kent Bye: And just reading through the playthrough account, it sounded like there's a little bit of interactivity as well, that if you were to move your hands around, that it would actually kind of impact the fish and the environment around you. Maybe you could talk a bit about what type of interactions that you have within the encounter then.
[00:11:03.411] Neville Spiteri: Yes. So first of all, your head and your hands effectively are being tracked as a result of holding the controllers and your head. And so as you're moving around the space and walking around, as you move close towards schools of fish, they'll react to you. They'll swim around your head. Or if you move your hand into a school of fish, they'll, as you would expect, they'll respond to your movement and avoid it and react and respond. And there's also little particulates in the water that stare up as a result of you waving your hand and causing a little current in the ocean. And that was sort of just a little hint that we wanted to provide to again give you feedback and give the visitor sort of an element of response. So there's kind of building on the degree of presence that is possible kind of through responsive systems.
[00:11:58.457] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious, in the process of having people try it out and demo it as you're kind of testing on users, what type of feedback you got from people as they were going through it, and what type of things you had to adapt or change while you were making it?
[00:12:14.321] Neville Spiteri: First and foremost, we responded to the first set of feedback, which was the importance of establishing a sense of place. And as we worked through that, initially, we had you sort of standing on the side of a cliff. And, you know, we quickly realized that actually giving you a sense of scale and place, you know, our director, Jake Rowell, came up with the brilliant idea of having you stand on the deck of a sunken ship. And that was a learning that came from us seeing that the importance of immediately providing you with a human scale reference that immediately gives you some sense of how big the space is that you are in. And there were some natural boundaries that the front of the ship deck provided. So that as you're moving around the space, you have some familiarity with where the bounds are. So you can literally walk up to the front of the bow of the ship and look over and you look down into the depths of the ocean, and you can look up and clearly see that you're on a ship that's sunken several feet below the surface. So that insight, which was terrific, came as a result of feedback. And there's several examples of that, where we sort of continue to ratchet up the experience as a result of people. experiencing but of course we didn't have that many people who are actually giving us feedback because we had a very limited handful of people involved due to the non-disclosure aspect of the development.
[00:13:45.613] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess one of the things that it made me realize when this new system that came out, this really fully room scale 15 by 15, being able to explore having two handed interactions, to me is a seems like a quantum leap in terms of designing a VR experience from a sit down with maybe a Xbox controller and you may have positional tracking. And then that in itself is also different than doing just a mobile experience, which may be Gear VR, which only has, you know, no positional tracking and Since you've kind of created experiences in each of these now, with both a Gear VR experience, a DK2 and Oculus Rift experience, and now with this HTC Vive experience, I'm curious, you know, when you're sitting down to design experiences, are you targeting it to be just on one platform, or are you trying to make it so that it can actually span and go across all three of those tiers?
[00:14:39.296] Neville Spiteri: So yes, we do spend a lot of time thinking about that. And as a company, we're really in the service of the VR content creators who want to kind of build their own experiences and build their own audiences for those experiences. And we think there is a lot of value, tremendous value to all three tiers. mobile, desktop, and room scale. So as a company, our focus is let's learn, let's actually make some great VR ourselves on all three tiers so that we can understand the constraints and the benefits and pros and cons of each scale of experience, and then really embrace the creatives out there who want to create their own experience and provide them with the support, the tools, the capability that they need in order to create and fulfill their own, to launch their products and bring them to market. Weaver really is, so we're not sort of saying, oh, RoomScale's better than mobile, because actually, the accessibility that mobile provides, even with a cardboard, which is very often dismissed as a platform because of the low quality of experience, and yet, it's probably how the majority of people get their first taste of a 360 experience, because it's that much more available and it's that much more easy to sort of told it into so lot of value to each of the tears. we are understanding the constraints. So as we work with individual indie directors or writers, or whether we're working with the major studios that are presenting us with opportunities for IP development in VR, we try to think about how that specific project or IP is best served in order for ultimately for that audience to be able to consume it. So we really try to connect the dots between who's the audience you're trying to reach, And when and why? And then how is this IP or how is this project best expressed? And in some cases, yes, you have an opportunity to have around the same, like the blue, there's a reason why we started with the blue and we wanted to make sure we have an expression of the blue on room scale and on mobile and on desktop. And it's not exactly the same experience. In fact, a lot of the assets and the interactions have to be designed specifically for the target platform. And yet there's a lot of opportunity to sort of have multiple versions, if you will, of the same experience. And that's how we're sort of the technology, which we're building is very much in support of that.
[00:17:21.816] Kent Bye: Yeah. And being based in LA, that's sort of the epicenter of Hollywood on all these films. But a lot of these first experiences that you've been creating are using sort of the digital technologies to be able to create these virtual experiences. Are you also starting to do like more cinematic virtual reality with live action cameras and audio? And, you know, have you been having to kind of create your own systems to do that?
[00:17:47.652] Neville Spiteri: Yes, absolutely. And if you visit us on weaver.com, we do talk a little bit about some of the projects that are underway, and we specifically state that we're in production on 360 video experiences as well as real time computer generated experiences and on the 360 video side. You know there's a lot of experimentation we're doing with multiple configurations of cameras and you know our basic belief is that. You want different camera configurations for different purposes, and there isn't a one-size-fits-all. There's a number of camera solutions out there. We're also experimenting with some custom ones. But ultimately, I believe directors will gravitate to the configuration that works best for them. And, you know, we're focused more on how do we ensure that this 360 video experience can be played back on cardboard and can be played back on a Vive system, if you want to. And our focus very much is around non-game experiences. I think if you're building a game, and you know how to build a game, and you're a game company or a group of game developers, there's a lot you can do out the gate with wonderful tools like the Unity and the Unreal Engine. And we use both of them. I think outside of that, if you're a storyteller that wants to create sort of a narrative, a 360 video interactive experience that maybe has some CG and real-time components to it, We think that that's hard. There's a lot of work and there's a lot of infrastructure and tooling capability that needs to be provided. And we're building that out and providing that to non-game storytelling VR creatives.
[00:19:31.668] Kent Bye: Yeah. And part of when your marketing manager, Ricky reached out, he had mentioned that you are also working on a universal platform for content creators to publish their content to, and maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what you're doing there.
[00:19:47.127] Neville Spiteri: Yes, so we're currently in private beta on a playback system that essentially will allow you as a VR content creator to, you know, will sort of help you guarantee that once you've created this experience that it will play back really well on all VR platforms and headsets. and that you'll be able to build an audience around that experience that you've created. And so we're also thinking through, what is the most effective way to distribute your VR experience? How do you make it available in the stores? How do you make it available on the open web? And what are the various supporting layers of infrastructure that are required to do that? And we have a number of projects that are up and running on the platform today, but it's sort of all private beta at the moment. And over the next, you know, weeks and months, we'll be sort of rolling out and making more announcements as we include more of the community and share more as the tools and the community becomes available.
[00:20:54.802] Kent Bye: Yeah, and looking at your team size that you have, I would say it's probably fair to say that you're one of the largest, if not the largest, sort of content creation shops that sounds exclusively dedicated to creating virtual reality content. I'm curious about what type of clients that you are taking, considering that there's no consumer version of VR that's out there yet. How are you able to create something that's sustainable at this phase and going this big of production studio that you have?
[00:21:27.765] Neville Spiteri: So we're looking at this as ultimately we're more of a studio slash publisher versus a developer. So in other words, it'll become clearer over time that we're not a work for hire shop per se, where if you need some VR done, and it needs to be produced. I think there's going to be an increasing number of teams that we're actually partnering with that will be in a work-for-hire mode. Our focus and our investment is really in this underlying platform capability and technology. But the reality is, because it's so early, to your point, it's early days, we need to also showcase and learn and become craftsmen and women of VR ourselves in order to really understand what the medium can support. So we're investing in content and we are investing and funding projects in order to explore the medium. And that, we believe, is going to be beneficial not just for us as a company, but kind of for the whole VR ecosystem. As we learn more and share, and in the same way with The Blue, our plan is to start to roll out a whole series of assets and making of series that explain how it's all done. because we're investing in the ecosystem and we're investing in the community that we'd like to grow. That said, there's a lot of inbound interest in whether it's studios or brands that are looking at producing VR content that would become available at launch for some of these premier mobile and room-scale systems. And as we know, the HDC Valve is launching at the end of this year i don't believe there's been an official announcement when the oculus rift is going to be released but let's assume for this discussion that it's around the same time frame that you know there are projects to be built and if you want to be a launch title you're you know you're starting on that stuff now
[00:23:34.281] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you know, Oculus VR has also had their own Oculus Story Studio, which is their kind of incubator and think tank to really explore this new language of cinematic virtual reality and trying to really figure out the components of interactive storytelling that come along with it. And so I'm curious about what Weaver or WeVR is doing in terms of trying to explore and experiment with the language of cinematic virtual reality storytelling.
[00:24:03.765] Neville Spiteri: Great. So we have a lot of respect for the work happening up there. I think those guys are great. Sashka Ansel's Lost piece is amazing. And I think that if you look at the blue encounter, it has elements of cinematic VR, which is mostly passive with a little bit of interactivity and branching. But it's more about being engaged in a story and a narrative. So we're very influenced by that. And again, it's not because We VR is just about that. It's because the creatives that are coming to us and we're reaching out to are interested in creating story and narrative based experiences. So some of our early partners, I'll mention a couple, you know, Roger Avery, who was the Academy Award winning screenplay writer on Pulp Fiction and directed many feature films. And he's in love with VR. And we're working with him and collaborating and experimenting. And he's very focused on What does it mean? What is this new language? And what works and what doesn't? And what happens as a result of now that you've broken the frame, your sense of composition is completely different and how you think about drawing the audience's attention is very different. all aspects of mise-en-scene and sort of taking language and learnings from film, which he's deeply, deeply, deeply thoughtful about, and sort of taking a Kubrickian approach to how you think about setting up a scene so that it's self-lit and all of this. So we're deeply engaged in those conversations and figuring that out. And some of the projects which we'll be announcing, you know, will reflect a lot of that thinking. And so we're just really jazzed to continue to work with these sort of independent storytellers and creatives and really kind of enabling them bringing their visions to the medium.
[00:25:53.739] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's going to be kind of an interesting line, I think, in terms of the line between a cinematic VR and a full open world virtual reality game where you can basically do anything. Yeah, I'm just curious of some of the early lessons that you found in terms of like finding that line between really driving the story forward versus kind of having the player be able to do anything at all.
[00:26:17.698] Neville Spiteri: Yeah, I think, you know, you look at the last 10, 15 years of game development, and there's a lot of mastery that's been achieved, figuring that out in the gaming world, you know, whether it's, you know, sort of, you know, in character story driven games or open world games. So a lot of the lessons from that world apply here. So I think there's a lot of learning that comes, we very much have, you know, sort of, if you just kind of look at the sort of the DNA and the mix of people that we talk to, we, we spend as much time with game designers as we do with filmmakers because there's as much learning from design and affordance and how you design systems to allow you as a player to move around within certain bounds and then have enough of a story backdrop that kind of leads you to the next point. And there's a lot of finesse there that has been really learned and developed in the gaming industry.
[00:27:10.372] Kent Bye: And maybe you could talk a little bit more about your other experiences that you've released, including the Space Shuttle Endeavor and the Above and Beyond at Madison Square Garden.
[00:27:19.765] Neville Spiteri: Yeah, so the Shuttle Endeavor project was wonderful. Our colleague Ted Chilowicz over at Fox referred that opportunity to us and we showed up and we shot it. And what was really remarkable is that our design intent was absolutely achieved and nailed. Our goal was, we want you as a visitor of the Endeavor in VR to have a better experience than visiting the real world museum. And we tested that with multiple people, and unanimously, everyone said, oh my gosh, it was so much better on the gear and the VR headset, because I was able to see from the top and felt like I was there. And it was better than just watching a regular camera on a dolly and on a crane going through that same move, because I still had some agency in looking around. And so for us, that was a really fun, short experiment that we acted on a hunch and it totally paid off. And it was, again, for us, sort of another demonstration of kind of virtual reality as a medium for presence and for allowing people to visit places, to visit characters and experiences that arguably will rival the real world.
[00:28:32.576] Kent Bye: Yeah. And your other experience?
[00:28:34.437] Neville Spiteri: Yeah, Above and Beyond was awesome, super fun, and exciting for a number of reasons. One of the things which we learned there was that people who went to the actual Above and Beyond show at Madison Square Garden, who then re-experienced it in VR, all came away with, oh my gosh, that was the most intense reenactment or memory activation of the actual experience. Like they had seen YouTube videos of the show, they had seen photos, they had shared tweets with their friends about the show after the fact. But re-experiencing it VR, it just got them all high and excited again. And so for us, that was also an experiment which we did in order to say, you know, there's promise here that eventually in the same way, you know, and I've heard folks from Facebook and even Zuckerberg alluded to this, that, you know, we're moving towards a world where you're going beyond sharing moments. to sharing experiences. And that is very real. The possibility to now share a deeper representation of something you've lived through is very possible. And it doesn't have to be a live broadcast. So this was a very powerful experience, even though we experienced it after the fact. Or perhaps you weren't able to make it to the show, and you can watch it and experience it a little while later.
[00:29:58.331] Kent Bye: And what are some of the experiences that you personally want to have in virtual reality then?
[00:30:06.625] Neville Spiteri: For me personally, that's a big question to answer. I have been, like I said, read my first book on VR in 91 and have been sort of wired this way for a long time. And there are too many worlds that I would love to explore in VR to possibly break down and explain on this call. My personal passion really kind of spans a very broad array of delivering intimate, real world, powerful experiences that are very relevant, you know, socially and culturally, in other words, very much tied to what's going on in the world today, all the way through to representations of nature and allowing us to explore the natural world in a way that is more sustainable and a little bit more thoughtful in terms of our impact in the environment, all the way through to completely imagined multi-dimensional worlds and holodeck experiences where we're all communicating together in VR. My personal interests are very broad, and I figured that the best way to express that is to build a platform and a company that's going to enable everyone to, or as many people as possible, to create their visions in VR. And I'm sure my personal wishes will be fulfilled through that.
[00:31:31.542] Kent Bye: And what do you think the ultimate potential of VR is then?
[00:31:36.153] Neville Spiteri: ultimate potential of VR. The potential, I think, is really for us to be able to become a lot more efficient in terms of communication and learning and, of course, also super entertained as a result of the medium. And so I think ultimately, it really is a medium that can serve humanity in very positive ways. So I don't know if there's an ultimate, but I think that learning, entertainment, and communication are vectors which are very, very profound implications.
[00:32:11.699] Kent Bye: Great. Yeah. And I guess, you know, for me, this year of 2015 seems to be the year of VR with all these announcements of things going to consumer level, at least the Vive from Valve and all the engines that are available for people to really start to create these experiences. I think there's no better time for independent content creators to be able to dive in and start creating whatever they want to imagine and to bring into the world.
[00:32:38.345] Neville Spiteri: Yes, absolutely. We also say that. So my co-founders, Anthony Batt, and Scott Yara, and our CTO, Marcel Samek, and the whole team, we often say that. We often say, you know, we'll look back at 2015 as the year of VR, as the year where sort of VR really kind of got stamped in the world. So our whole team is super jazzed about that.
[00:33:01.112] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:33:06.313] Neville Spiteri: Well, I think, as always, it really is a team effort. So a lot of the work that we're doing is really a result of the passionate, talented team that we have at Weaver. And I just appreciate the opportunity to share with you what we're doing and look forward to this being an ongoing conversation.
[00:33:22.441] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:33:27.863] Neville Spiteri: Thanks, Kent. Appreciate it.
