Here’s my interview with Amy LaMeyer, Managing Partner of The WXR Fund and Angel Investor in VR, AR, AI space, that was conducted on Thursday, May 30, 2019 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of AWE past and present, today's episode is with Amy Lemire, which I had a conversation with her back in 2019 at Augmented World Expo. And so Amy was the managing partner of the WXR fund, that's the women in XR, and she's also an angel investor in both AR, VR, and AI. So I had a chance to talk to Amy a little about her journey in the space of virtual and augmented reality, also investing in different women-led startups with WXR Fund, and also digging into the trends in immersive music and concerts and some of the trends of whatever was happening back in 2019 with the Bose AR frames and other trends that she was seeing in the context of immersive music performances. Yeah. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Amy happened on Thursday, May 30th, 2019 at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:18.519] Amy LaMeyer: Hi, my name is Amy Lemire. I'm managing partner of WXR Fund. I've been an angel investor in the VR, AR, AI space for almost three years. Right now, we're starting a new accelerator for the fund in not only spatial computing, but we're expanding it to AI, and that'll be this fall. In addition, we're doing a lot of speaking, and I'm focusing on areas like Sound and AR, 5G and immersive content, and productivity and communications in the enterprise space.
[00:01:53.803] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could give me a little more context as to your background and your journey into immersive computing.
[00:01:58.824] Amy LaMeyer: Sure. I grew up with a company called Akamai Technologies. And what Akamai is even today is a content delivery network. So it helped to build the internet and make it more reliable, make it faster. That was back in, I started in 2000. I actually started in engineering on the technical side, trying to scale that company, moved into finance and built some profitability models, and ultimately found my home in corporate development where I was doing M&A, and I also ran an accelerator in cybersecurity in Tel Aviv.
[00:02:38.806] Kent Bye: And so how did immersive computing kind of enter the picture then?
[00:02:41.768] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah, so I was getting restless. It was really fun and rewarding to help to build the Internet because we knew we were enabling communication at a global level that didn't exist before. Right? So there felt like there was a bigger purpose. Yes, it was tech, but it really feel monumental. And so, so that was great. But over time, obviously the internet became almost a commodity. And so Akamai decided to shift into cybersecurity, which is a very important and useful technology, but I'm just not passionate about it. It felt like we kept fighting an enemy that would always exist. And that wasn't an area that was exciting or that I could be impassioned about. So January 2016, I was in Vegas at CES to do diligence on a cybersecurity company, nothing to do with CES. But that's when the rift in the vibe came out. And so I saw it happen there. I actually didn't even get... into CES to try it on, but I saw people use it. I started to understand what that could be, that it could really be the future of computing, the next wave of computing platform after mobile. And that started me thinking about where I wanted to go after Akamai. So two months later, I met someone named Joe Boyle. He gave me, even though I didn't know him at all, he was nice enough at River Ventures to take an afternoon and showed me five or six different experiences in a row And the next day I quit.
[00:04:16.535] Kent Bye: Wow. So then what, then what happened?
[00:04:19.418] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah. Um, so the week after was South by Southwest 2016. And as far as I know, I had been going to South by Southwest for music for years, but as far as I know, 2016 was the first year that virtual and augmented reality became a track. I'd have to go look up to see if that's really the case, but it's probably the case. So I started my immersion, my diving in to. immersive technology and learning about immersive technology literally the week after I tried VR. And that week after that, I started listening to your podcast.
[00:04:52.554] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think I met you in 2016 at SVVR and you had been listening for a bit. But yeah, I find as I go to these conferences, I meet a lot of people who listen to the podcast to kind of get bootstrapped into the industry. And I think I just remember you pulling me aside and just expressing your gratitude for that. Yeah. And I've sort of watched over the years how you've been a consistent figure within the industry, but not knowing exactly what you were working on. And until eventually recently, I guess you've now starting to work with this. What's it called? The Women's Fund or what's it what's the name of the fund that you're working with now? Like how you ended up there?
[00:05:28.413] Amy LaMeyer: So we call it WXR Fund. It originally stood for Women in XR. WXR is just an easier term and because we've expanded to AI, it just makes sense to have just the letters. I started as a mentor with them a year ago. I was the mentoring Sarah Hill of Helium and chosen out of, I think they had 200 people that applied to be mentors for eight companies, and I had never met any of the WXR founders. So that's Martina Welkoff, Malia Probst, and Abby Albright. But they chose me for whatever reason, and that was a life-changing event. I mentored Sarah. We kept in touch and kept speaking at different conferences. I think I was on their platform for AWE that year, and then we spoke again at VRARA. And so when Martina decided to go full time with the fund at the end of 2018, they had validated the fact that there is a huge pipeline of companies that are female led or at least have one female leader in spatial computing. And they were going to raise a larger fund. She was looking for someone else that had investing experience, particularly on the corporate side, that would be willing to do this full time. And I was starting to look for potentially a position at a startup. Anyway, starting to look for a home and not just angel investing. And so it was just the right time, right fit at the right time.
[00:06:59.673] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that talking to Nani de la Pena, and she had cited a statistic saying that of all the different startups in the Silicon Valley, there's like 5% of the funding from VCs that were going to startups that had female founders. That was pretty shocking to hear it. That's pretty big disparity of what those numbers are. And so maybe you talk a bit about the larger context of the investment spheres and why it was important to start this women in XR fund.
[00:07:30.948] Amy LaMeyer: Sure. The actual statistic is 2.4%. Wow.
[00:07:34.190] Kent Bye: So it's even worse than the 5%. Yeah.
[00:07:37.333] Amy LaMeyer: But, but to be clear, that's for female only founders. And we don't focus on that, in fact. I particularly prefer a diverse team, gender-wise. So at least one female in the founder or leadership team. Because we're at seed level, it's usually a founder. It's always been a passion for me to support women in tech. So I, even as an angel investor was already making sure that my portfolio was gender diverse. I've worked with a lot of female founders and particularly in spatial computing. I find that the way that they look at a problem just tends to be different and they work really, really hard to execute on that vision. Maybe even harder than men. The statistics show, right, that they overachieve. And so there's a great financial opportunity, but there's also, I just want to even the playing field a little bit more. And that was a nice vision match for what WXR had already stood for.
[00:08:39.025] Kent Bye: Yeah, I tend to look at issues of gender in some ways. I prefer to think about it as yang and yan because I feel like each individual has masculine and feminine components. But there definitely tends to be a rough correlation to the yang in Chinese philosophy to masculine and the yan to feminine. I like the sort of more neutral Yang and Yan because embedded within Chinese philosophy is this balance that we're trying to strive towards. But I find that there's a certain amount of like, just say from storytelling, there's like this Yang archetypal journey, which is like the hero's journey, which is about you going out and going on a quest. And it's very well suited to a 2D medium, but I find that there's like a new emerging Yen archetypal journey, which is much more about embodiment and presence and emotional connectivity. It's about ego disillusionment. So it's about you being connected to the larger whole. And I feel like those are all Yen qualities, but I feel like also there's, you know, just speaking from the gendered lens, I feel like women tend to have a little bit more of that relational orientation and they're thinking about things in a very embodied and emotional way as well. So I feel like in some ways, some of the most interesting work that I'm seeing in the artistic sense is that yin archetypal journey, and a lot of it is being created by women at these festivals. And so, yeah, I just wanted to sort of put that out there as a thing and a trend that I'm seeing within the ecosystem.
[00:10:02.748] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah, that makes sense. We're seeing a lot of the women-led companies be in the area of training or education or healthcare, again, leaning in those areas that suit your model, right?
[00:10:14.451] Kent Bye: Yeah, much more Yen components, yeah.
[00:10:16.432] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah. And I agree. It's a good fit, particularly for spatial computing and immersive computing, too.
[00:10:23.594] Kent Bye: Well, another one of your interests that you've taken on within the immersive space is like audio and immersive audio. So maybe you could tell me about your journey into exploring specialized audio.
[00:10:34.810] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah, so even before joining WXR, and as much as I love spatial computing and literally can't imagine a day without reading Twitter feeds or the news on whatever the latest is on spatial computing, music is truly my passion. It's truly air for me. I'm one of those people that if you asked, do you have to choose sight or sound, which would you choose? It's easy for me to say I would get rid of my sight in order to maintain sound for the rest of my life. So I'm that person. And so therefore, how sound is being developed in these immersive experiences and spatial experiences is just an area that I'm more aware of. And so I'll follow those areas. Music for sure, but that's expanded to sound itself. And so as Charlie Fink was about to write the book, Convergence, How the World Will Be Painted with Data, I said, hey, Charlie, have you thought about sound and how sound integrates with augmented reality? And he said, nope, not really. How about you? Have you? And I said, a little bit. And he said, well, would you write a chapter? And so that gave me a great opportunity to really dig in there. And particularly on the sound and AR side, obviously there's a whole nother level. And for me, I'm more aware of sound in VR as a music entity, right? And how we would integrate with music. But from an AR side, I actually think about it as sound or audio.
[00:12:03.871] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that there's a lot of sound design that happens within the game engines within the VR space. And similarly to the Yen, it can be invisible. So if you get it wrong, you know that it's wrong. So it's a bit of like, you only notice it when it doesn't work. But there's a lot of invisible emotional labor that the sound designers are doing that are adding, arguably, a huge amount to the experience. But they get a fraction of the CPU time that they need to be able to do All the different levels of second order reflections and all the ambisonic audio, all the stuff that they'd really want to have access to have, they're kind of dealing with a very limited budget just because I think culturally there's a bias against putting too much resources into it, even though I agree that it is arguably up to half the experience a lot of times of really creating that sense of presence. But audio, this past year at South by Southwest, we had the launch of the Bose AR development kits and being able to actually buy the hardware of the Quick Connect 35s as well as the Bose AR frames. And I think they just announced another noise-canceling, more advanced version here at AWE. In the previous year of 2018 at South by Southwest, they had just announced it on their place off-site. They were showing different demos. I wasn't at South by Southwest last year in 2018, go to their place and see a lot of the demos and try it out. And I'm super excited to see where this goes with the Bose AR platform, especially when you have it connected to the phone to be able to get GPS, but then to be able to have where you're looking with a magnetometer, a gyrometer, and the accelerometer, you're able to get a really good sense of what cardinal direction people are looking at tied into the GPS with the sensor fusion, as well as all the different other wearables. I feel like the audio... AR cloud is going to be the first layer in which I think there's going to be this really robust fusion and connection. We're seeing some stuff with mobile phones, but I feel like that there's so much potential for what could happen there. And I'm just curious what you think about that whole trajectory.
[00:14:06.846] Amy LaMeyer: I completely agree with you. And I hope that it helps get us to that ultimate hands-free, heads-up, maybe smart glasses, maybe not, moment of augmented reality. I think it's a step in the direction from mobile phone AR to at least smart glasses AR. I would expect it'll build in the usefulness over time. To your point, because it's based on a phone, but also because as challenging as, from what I understand, the audio technology is, it still seems easier than a lot of the visual technologies I'm seeing and I'm hearing about and we're seeing on the expo floor for smart glasses. So I think that it'll be faster than some of the visuals. But what I talk about in the chapter and what I talk about when I'm talking with creators and developers is that there's two ways to think about sound with augmented reality, which is one is that sound enhances the visuals. And the other is that you can augment reality with just sound and not visuals. Right. And that's what those frames are doing today.
[00:15:12.864] Kent Bye: Have you been using the Bose airframes at all?
[00:15:15.007] Amy LaMeyer: I use them all the time. Yeah. I mean, mostly I'll be honest that I use them just because they're an over the ear wireless mechanism. Right. Because I would prefer not to have an air pod in my ear. So I like the fact that that's the case. I have tried other apps that use the accelerometer, the gyrometer, and the GPS of the phone, like Traverse. I've also used Headspace. I've also used the Bose Frames for basic applications like the David Bowie is application. So you can at least hear the spatial audio. That's the other bonus to Bose Frames is that it's actually 360 audio. And that's the other benefit to sound with augmented reality is Even if you have a very limited field of view with your mobile phone or your HoloLens or your Magic Leap, the spatial audio, 360 audio, is always all around you. If there's a sound behind you, you're going to hear it, even if you're looking forward in your 100-degree field of view.
[00:16:16.727] Kent Bye: Yeah, they're a pair of sunglasses and I don't wear contacts and I have another pair of glasses. So I would have to get specific lenses for it to actually be practical for me. So I don't tend to use it very often, but I have been able to play a number of the different demos that have been at different film festivals. So at IDFA Doc Lab, there was Pilgrim where you're walking around and it was actually using the camera on the phone to be able to geolocate me. But made me feel like I was walking down a trail, but even though I was walking down the streets of Amsterdam and feel like I was like walking next to different people. And then there's two experiences from Traverse, from Jessica Brohardt and Superbright, where you are able to walk around a space and have different aspects of spatial audio, specifically in the one that was at Tribeca, Into the Light, you are walking through different movements of a Yo-Yo Ma piece and having a center of a piece of art that has an augmented reality so you can see a visual representation of what the audio is. And then it has spatialized audio around that. So it's like combining both the visual and audio. And at Supply Southwest, it was more of like you were able to take a multi-track recording of Elvis and be able to walk around it. So I feel like it's something that for people who do wear sunglasses and do have Bluetooth headphones to be able to take phone calls, that you're able to listen to stuff and it's like shooting the audio into your ear, but you're also able to listen to what's happening in the world around you, which I think is this interesting fusion that reminds me of the dial at South by Southwest where it had bone conductance, where it was like vibrating on my jaw to be able to kind of trick my ear into think it was hearing something, but it also had a sound design on top of that, on top of allowing me to connect and talk to other people. So there's this interesting side effect of having something that's kind of directionally shooting audio into your ears, that you can start to have these social experiences with people and you're not completely cutting yourself off from the world around you. And that amazingly your brain seems to like fuse it all together.
[00:18:18.513] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah, I agree with you. So I definitely use them for taking phone calls. To your point there, right now it's just two sets of small and large size sunglasses. But you can definitely see how the speaker capability in the underlying SDK, which I think this is the first time Bose has done software, right? You can see how that would be useful in other devices. head-related devices. I don't think Bose is trying to be an eyewear company. So I think probably what they did is just come out with a couple of different versions of being able to use this so that people could actually develop to it. But ultimately, maybe a Warby Parker or some sort of snowboarding goggles or those sorts of companies, any sort of headwear company might integrate this into their products in order to be able to have augmented audio.
[00:19:10.626] Kent Bye: Well, where do you say this is going in the future now that we start to have some of these initial platforms? What's next when it comes to augmented reality and audio?
[00:19:19.417] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah, I would love augmented audio to be able to augment our world so that we don't have to look at our phones and our watches as much. From my perspective, there are probably way more, very many more uses for augmented audio than I can even imagine. But even as a first step, you can imagine how could you... You can also, we didn't say it before, but you can tap the frame and that so it gives you an interaction with the frame so that you can get music or sound or not get sound. If you turn your head and tap, you could have different messages so it could give you directions. Or again, anytime you would look at your phone and have to pull it out of your pocket, keep it in your pocket. I'd like to see that as just a first phase. But I bet there's way more things that we can do with it than that.
[00:20:05.575] Kent Bye: Well, you've also been taking a look at artificial intelligence. And so I'm just curious where your entry point into AI has been in all this.
[00:20:14.952] Amy LaMeyer: My entry point into AI was based on music. So I was the mentor for a company that was using AI to create adaptive real-time music that didn't need to be licensed. It could be used for games or videos or film. It was a company called Melodrive. They're based out of Berlin. So my original into AI was sound based. I've also worked with companies, but since then broadened my understanding and the breadth of AI, which obviously goes anything from machine learning to neural nets to computer vision to natural language processing. So as we talk about sound, I find natural language processing really interesting and companies that are in that area. Again, if we think about how we can start communicating while we leave our phone in our pocket, One of the ways that we do that is with our voice, with sound, right? So how can that improve, right? So sound becoming the new mouse to a certain extent, right? in computer vision, obviously also very interesting as we start talking about augmented reality and being able to recognize objects and things like that. So we try to focus on parts of artificial intelligence that actually integrate with spatial computing. But I also have worked with companies that have just been AI based, for example, a company that translated text into different levels of understanding. So third grade level and eighth grade level. So you imagine something like a T's and C's that you could run through her
[00:21:41.943] Kent Bye: script swap generator and it would be more understandable for a broader set of people I feel like that we're on the horizon of potentially going through an entire revolution of taking all this music and like remixing it and remastering it to be a spatial mix and that at this point we don't necessarily have like consumer grade audio mixing tools do a spatial audio mix and that If anything, you could sort of hack it together in Unity or Unreal Engine, but it wasn't necessarily a tool that was designed for sound mixers and designers to be able to really do a full, robust mix of a sound. But I'm just curious to hear your thoughts in terms of the future of music and this turn of now all of a sudden that we have the headsets with the right hardware and equipment to be able to look around and have spatialized audio. But I can imagine a time where we have like ambisonic performances that are really utilizing the full spatial affordances of having sound that you're completely immersed inside of.
[00:22:43.783] Amy LaMeyer: There are so many interesting things happening even now in that area. I mean, just talking about music and sound and spatial computing, I'm thinking about companies like MiroShot that is this music collective that does combination in real life and virtual reality experiences created from a multitude of different people. Or Topher Sykes, I think he's with Andromeda now, but he is in a couple of weeks in Houston doing virtual reality, or augmented reality, one of the two visuals for the symphony. So many exciting, you know, and then and then, honestly, even the things that are a little bit more boring, which is live concerts in VR, right? We've had a lot of different iterations of them, someone will win, right? Someone will be the next YouTube for concerts. But yeah, you know, those are exciting, too. There's a couple different companies out there working on that space.
[00:23:40.046] Kent Bye: Great. So for you, what do you personally want to experience in spatial computing?
[00:23:45.597] Amy LaMeyer: There are two things that I'm most looking forward to. One is education, a better level of education, almost a different level of education, and it's a mix of spatial computing and AI. I think that ultimately what the education system would be optimized for is to understand each person and help personalize learning for them, which is going to take a lot of data processing and a lot of gathering of information. If you could somehow tap into in second grade that someone is really good at languages and then give them a whole bunch of different languages to study. Right. But sometimes those kids wouldn't even know until they were in high school or past high school that language is a skill that they have. Right. So I would love to see both that from an AI perspective, this kind of personalization. How do you ultimately understand the child and then target education for them? But also from an immersive content perspective, I just think it's a way better way to learn. I mean, we're already seeing data that says if you're immersed, you're paying more attention, you retain it longer. It's more empathic. And for all of those reasons. So education for sure is something I'm extremely excited about it. But also, as we talked about on the music side, As I get older, I really just want to continue to see live music without having to go to a venue. And so someone's going to do that and maybe even make it right. All of the music creation, different types of music creation companies from Electronauts to, I think Within was working on one at some point. Boomy, I think is another one. So there are quite a few. And so I think those will be fun too.
[00:25:26.563] Kent Bye: Do you spend much time in the wave?
[00:25:28.905] Amy LaMeyer: I've been there quite a bit. My favorite experience in the wave was Image and Heap. Did you see that one?
[00:25:34.557] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. It was a really good performance that they had captured and yeah, kind of like a, that's what I think of in terms of like a live capture of a performance that had all these layers of kind of graphics and visualizations around it.
[00:25:45.764] Amy LaMeyer: Yeah. Yeah. It's something you could not do live in real life. Right. So it was live, but it's taking live performance to another level. Cause there was all of that CGI that was added to like, once you would talk about wind, then the wind would happen. Like it was truly unique and special.
[00:26:04.110] Kent Bye: I actually saw it, Mike Jones had a haptic floor that I saw it on. So I had a whole subwoofer experience of that. And so I feel like there's a couple of things. There's one is talking to musicians. They're like, they like the fact that when you're there and you can feel like the waves of the subwoofer and you actually feel like you're there as a presence. There's also this interesting feedback loop of your presence there changing how the musicians play. Like if the band just had two people in the room versus like a hundred or a thousand people in the room, it's going to be a different performance that there's like this interesting like feedback loop. And so. It'll be interesting to see how that gets translated. But also, I was just at this neuroscience and VR workshop that was put on by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. And there was one of the researchers who was talking about synchrony and group synchrony and how the power of moving all together at the same time in rhythm actually gives you this sense of embodied presence that... at a neuroscience level when you are moving in sync with large groups of people it actually like is a part of the huge experience as well so i feel like there's something about being co-present with people that is always going to be a little bit different than what you can do with vr but in terms of being able to replicate the social experience and the experience of the band perceiving you as an observer watching it and seeing you move And then of course the audio quality and all the haptics and everything else, like I think we'll get there eventually, but I always, I'm hesitant to think that it'll always be like the slight mismatch of what the simulation could do versus what it's going to be like actually being there.
[00:27:45.164] Amy LaMeyer: Totally agree with you, Kent. It will never replace live concerts, but just like you would watch a live music video or, you know, something like that, it'll be closer than that. And again, different because it won't just be watching a band play. You could actually be somehow, I don't know, painting with them or communicating with them or, you know, talking with them in the green room in advance of the interview. Because it isn't, particularly with virtual reality, because it isn't reality, there's so many more opportunities, I think, than just watching a live band. But I also think it's interesting that over the three years that I've been looking at music in VR, particularly concert-type music in VR, there's definitely been a movement from being a solo person watching it, it is a solo experience, to kind of a combined experience like Image and Heap was, where there were many people in the room, or Facebook has their venues, right, where there's many people in the room, and there's another company I've been talking to, I think they're still stealth, but Again, in that case, you're watching a show, but there are avatars in the room, to your point, because there's something about watching it with other people that makes it different than just watching a concert by yourself.
[00:28:59.160] Kent Bye: Great. And for you, what are some of the either biggest open questions you're trying to answer or open problems you're trying to solve?
[00:29:08.157] Amy LaMeyer: For open problems we're trying to solve is definitely supporting females in the spatial computing and AI space and making sure that their ideas and their companies are being not only financially supported, but just supported from a community and networking perspective. And that's really exciting. It's really exciting because it hits all industries.
[00:29:29.701] Kent Bye: Cool. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of spatial computing is, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:29:39.625] Amy LaMeyer: To me, spatial computing feels like it did when we were building the Internet. It feels like the way we will communicate. And so to me, the ultimate potential is connecting people at another level, at the next level than what we do right now. On an emotional level, bringing people together on a more realistic level, you know, so we could be sitting here face to face in virtual reality and it would feel like we're sitting here right now.
[00:30:10.216] Kent Bye: Great, is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:30:17.438] Amy LaMeyer: One of the best things about working in this community has been the level of support that members of the community give each other. It's so refreshing to be in an emerging tech industry that even if you're on a competitive level, you see different people trying to help each other out and help the whole industry grow. I do think part of that is due to the fact that it's emerging, but I also really honestly think that it's partly due to the type of technology that we're all working on and that this is a technology that's going to help enable this deeper human connection.
[00:30:56.060] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, I just wanted to thank you for sitting down and joining me today on the podcast. So thank you.
[00:31:01.545] Amy LaMeyer: Thanks, Kent.
[00:31:03.100] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
