Eric Romo is the founder and CEO of AltspaceVR, and he shares his story of how he got interested in the potential of social VR from way before the Oculus Kickstarter and Facebook bought Oculus VR. He talks about the surprising amount of body language that can add to a social interaction, as well as some of the challenges of running a social VR company when there’s literally zero market.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.995] Eric Romo: My name is Eric Romo. I'm the founder and CEO of AltspaceVR. We're a virtual reality communications company. So what we focus on is connecting people in shared spaces and allowing them to interact. And we say things like, feel like they're sharing a couch with anybody in the world. So that emotional connectedness is what we really strive for at Altspace.
[00:00:28.261] Kent Bye: So tell me a bit about the genesis of, you know, how did Altspace get started?
[00:00:32.847] Eric Romo: So I started getting interested in virtual reality probably about five or six years ago. Started reading a bunch about neuroscience and that led me to read some stuff that led towards virtual reality. So things like Jeremy Bailenson's book from the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. and then started doing some more research on the technical side of VR. So I'm a mechanical engineer by background, and so I got interested in the hardware part of it. And looking at things like what was going on in MTBS 3D, that virtual reality hardware was going to be commoditizable, was going to be cheap enough that lots of people could use it in the near term. So then started thinking, OK, well, what matters in VR? What's a use case that really captures people's imagination and gets them excited? And right after, I guess right after the Oculus Kickstarter, I started talking to lots of people in the product design space about product design collaboration and how you could use virtual reality to enhance that. And what became really obvious was that they were not that interested in use cases where they were visualizing their own products that they designed by themselves. But they got really excited when I said things like, well, you could not have to fly to China to meet with your manufacturing partner and you guys could get in a room together and see the model that you designed together. That really got them excited. And so this idea that people all over the world could connect and feel like they're in the same place, it became pretty clear that this was pretty powerful. And so I started thinking more about how do we pull the lens back maybe and say, is product design collaboration really the right place to go or is there a better place to start? And what's become pretty obvious now in VR is that the early adopters are certainly going to be on the consumer side. And as we play through different consumer use cases at AltSpace, it's also really clear that consumers really, really love the idea of connecting with people all over the world.
[00:02:09.098] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you know, you recently gave a speech where you're kind of giving some advice to other startups because VR is so early that nobody really knows about like the size of the market and what this is going to be. And so talk about what that process was for you to kind of like project out and kind of make up numbers or that process of trying to balance being optimistic but also really skeptical and cautious in terms of what it's going to take to survive as a VR startup.
[00:02:34.953] Eric Romo: Yeah, I think In fundraising and virtual reality, there's a mix of realism and romanticism right now. And on the realism side, there is no market for VR today. There is zero. There is zero market. And there are few products that you can say that about. If you launch an app into a mobile ecosystem, you've got a billion potential users on the day you launch. And in VR, the number is essentially zero. And so the reality is that any app that launches today or for the next few months, you're not going to generate any kind of realistic revenue anytime soon. And so you have to level set with yourself that this is the space that you're in, and that that's not really going to change all that much over the next year. Again, kind of using the mobile parallel, imagining VR has an amazing 2016, which I think everyone would agree with 10 million headsets or something would be a great 2016. That's still, you know, what, a hundredth of a decent mobile market. And so there's a very small number of people who are going to use VR in the near term. And so that means that you need to figure out how do you build a company that's going to last until the market arrives, or how do you generate revenue on very small user numbers, which is an enterprise focus might be. So on the Romanticism side, though, you're not going to get anyone to buy into investing in your company unless they're really believers that VR is going to be huge in the near term. And so that means 2017, 2018, it doesn't really matter. But they have to believe in their hearts that this is something that's going to change computing for everyone. It's going to change communication for everyone. And that belief is something that I think right now is not a concept that an entrepreneur is going to walk into a room and convince an investor of that. VR's been out in the zeitgeist for long enough that people have formed their thoughts about it. And those opinions are not going to be easily changed. So we either talk about people having religion or don't. And I think for investors to invest a substantial amount in VR, they have to already have religion.
[00:04:16.848] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the other big challenge that Altspace would have to deal with is that you're kind of dealing with a small user base in terms of people that are actively have enough capacity to use their VR headset to go and to have these social VR experiences. And so how do you design for a market that isn't there yet and rapidly iterate and continually sort of build, measure, learn in that type of environment when there isn't as much feedback or engagement that you would need to really know what the eventual target demographic is going to be?
[00:04:46.491] Eric Romo: Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with being focused on that process of build, measuring, and learning, right? And knowing the understanding that, hey, what we're not trying to do is go out and acquire 100,000 new users next week, right? That's not what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is say, how do we find interesting things for our users to do and then learn from those? And being really focused on that as our cycle that we're in, being focused on that as the use case is very important for us. It'll get easier as the numbers start to get bigger with Gear VR shipping, with the commercial launches Oculus and the Vive hardware in Q1, the numbers will go up. And so the simple statistical basis of it will get easier. But right now, we have to be really focused on finding interesting things for people to do and bringing them together in order to have that experimental learning. I think our users are understanding of that. We don't expect that they're going to come back every single day right now because the network is just so, relatively speaking, so small that the probability that there's somebody else that they want to talk to that wants to do the same thing in alt space that they want to do at exactly the same time is diminishingly small at this point. And that's going to change as more users come on them.
[00:05:45.337] Kent Bye: And I think there's also people that may want to go check out a social event, but maybe not participate, or maybe not talk, and maybe just observe. And so how do you foresee allowing people to come in and just be a lurker versus people who are actually engaging and participating in the conversations?
[00:06:02.614] Eric Romo: Yeah, I actually think that's a really powerful and great use case, is the, I want to be surrounded by people and feel like I'm a part of something. I mean, this is the emotional uplift that you get when you go to a sports bar, or you go to a sporting event, or you go to a concert, or you go to a play, or, you know, any live event where you are, generally speaking, not interacting with the people around you, but because there's an energy in the room, and it's just an enthusiasm that goes about being at this event, we think that same emotional impact happens in VR. So when you're in a room with 20, 30, 40 people all watching a movie, or all watching a talk, or some subset of those people are playing a game, but you happen to be there and laughing and enjoying it yourselves, we think it's a great use for Altspace. And so it's something that we want to find out a way to make sure that those people who are, as you call lurkers, but I just call non-active participants, we want to make sure that their experience is great as well.
[00:06:52.429] Kent Bye: And do you foresee, as well, with Altspace's integration with the JavaScript SDK to be able to really have this solid integration between WebVR, are you trying to leverage the web development community to be able to create immersive content that perhaps they're not Unity developers are no object-oriented languages, but maybe they know some scripting languages and can throw together some stuff really quick and use their skills that they already have and be able to participate in creating worlds within AltSpace.
[00:07:23.479] Eric Romo: Yeah, absolutely. We really see our SDK as a way to open up virtual reality development to a broad audience of people who are not necessarily Unity or games programmers. I think if you looked at the numbers, there's probably, you know, dramatically more people who are familiar with HTML and JavaScript than there are people who are familiar with, you know, C-sharp scripting in Unity, which is not to say that the community of Unity isn't gigantic. It is, but it's just the web is a little bit bigger. I'll tell you a funny anecdote on the ability to kind of quickly turn around an idea and prototype it and have it in alt space. A few weeks ago, I guess there were a few people in Japan found Altspace and were excited about it. And so they started tweeting from inside Altspace and we have this functionality. I don't know if you've seen where you can take a picture of what's going on in Altspace and you can then with one click tweet it out and so your followers see it and then you know, retweets and that sort of thing happened. And these were people who, for whatever reason, were really plugged into the Japanese VR Twitter community, okay? So all of a sudden, our Twitter feed exploded, and there's all these tweets in Japanese. And so I'm going through them on a Monday morning. This happened over a weekend, and I'm like, gosh, what were these people doing? Because all of a sudden, there were, like, 200 people from Japan who were in AltSpace. What were they doing in there the whole time? You know, what was interesting for them? What were the use cases for them? And so I'm going back through the discussion thread on Twitter, and I guess someone was talking about fried chicken, okay? And so then all of a sudden, there's just somebody saying something about what they're eating. They're eating fried chicken. And then there's another picture of them watching a YouTube video of someone cooking fried chicken. And then somebody putting another picture of their favorite fried chicken place on the screen, another picture of that. And then a few tweets down, all of a sudden, there's a piece of fried chicken floating in alt space. And we realized that someone found the SDK and said, OK, well, I want to have fried chicken, 3D objects of fried chicken in AltSpace. And so I hacked together a really quick app and found some OBJ file of a piece of fried chicken and brought it in. And then they were seeing the fried chicken in 3D in front of them while they're having a conversation about it, which is a totally goofy example. But the point is that this is somebody who didn't even know what AltSpace was probably like six hours before that. And then six hours later was putting together a quick HTML web app that had fried chicken floating in space in front of them. It was a lot of fun for us to see people using it in the way we intended, which is, hey, really quick, rapid prototyping. How do I make things happen in a virtual space?
[00:09:31.967] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it's also interesting the whole phenomena of emojis came out of Japan and Japanese culture. But I noticed that Altspace has also started to do a little bit more passive communication of emotion through emojis. And so maybe talk a bit about the inspiration for that and where you hope to see that go.
[00:09:47.895] Eric Romo: Yeah, it's an interesting topic, I think, because we went back and forth on it. We're really focused on natural communication. So you're hearing my voice, you're seeing my body language, you're seeing me talk with my hands and express myself. How do we communicate when we're together in real life is really our big focus. And so when the topic of Emoji came up, we thought, OK, well, that's not really how, you know, I don't talk to you right now. I'm standing in front of you with Emoji. But what we realized is that there's a loss of emotional context of our conversation in alt space because of the inability to track facial expressions. And this is something that I know a lot of people are working on technology for this, but it's just not really close yet to accurate enough to really realistically portray the emotions that I'm representing. You can get a camera that'll track my macro face movements, but when it comes down to it, and when you want to look at a happy, sad, and different emotions that you're trying to express, the accuracy is just not there to display them with the certainty that you'd want if you really want to have an emotional conversation with somebody. And so we thought, OK, well, why don't we experiment with it and tried it out internally for a while? And what we found, luckily, is that they're delightful. I mean, they're just something that's really clear. Hey, I'm enjoying this conversation. I'm going to put up a smiley face. And even though I'm talking to you verbally, now I'm reinforcing the fact that I'm enjoying this conversation by putting a smiley face. Or, hey, we're playing a game and something silly just happened, and so I'll put up the face with the tongue sticking out or whatever. And so it turned out that it really flowed very easily into the natural form of communication that we had. And so we thought, OK, well, let's throw it in there and see what happens. And so we've got an experiment up with, I think, six emoji right now. There's no reason that couldn't be 60 tomorrow. But we started with that and got that into the product. And Japanese users love it, of course. And I think we've enjoyed it internally, and we've seen our last couple events, it was really useful to have. I think this was another place, talking about large group gatherings and where there's a person who's presenting, we found happening over and over again was the presenter would get through their conversation, you know, people would clap, but of course, you know, if you've got a microphone in front of your face, it doesn't necessarily pick up hands very well, hearing claps, so the clapping wasn't quite loud enough. And then the presenter would say, are there any questions? And when you have a group of 30, 40 people who are listening to a conversation, a presentation in AltSpace, it's not really clear how those people should signal to the presenter that they have questions, because they don't have hands some of the time. They don't have a connector, they don't have a leap motion, they don't have hands. And so we have a hand raised emoji, it was one of the six that made it in there, and it was super effective for this. Very easily signaling, hey, I have a question, come to me. And once the signal is made, then it's really clear, okay, that person's talking, that's the person I'm gonna zone in on. Everybody looks at them, it's really natural from there.
[00:12:15.602] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it's interesting to look at different social media, like Twitter, they have a favorite, Facebook has a like, and Reddit has an upvote or downvote, so there's actually a way to give negative feedback, whereas the other social media have avoided doing sort of negative cues of like, oh, I don't like this. Emoji seems to be a little bit more neutral, like if there's a sad post on Facebook, do you like it, just to promote it for the Facebook algorithm, so people see it, but do you really like the fact that something really horrible has happened? Emoji seems like a good path towards that for reactions, like on Slack, for example. But I would imagine that would create some interesting social dynamics if you include a lot of negative emotions within a social dynamic, whereas they may be more likely to give a negative emotion feedback in a virtual reality space, whereas they wouldn't in real life, just because. So I'm just curious if you've included in those, or what kind of discussions you've had about that dynamic.
[00:13:11.465] Eric Romo: No, I mean it is a really good point because it is definitely a sliding scale. You know, I'm considerably less likely to yell at you than I am to write in something in all caps on Reddit, you know. And it's just because when we're together and we're face-to-face, we're much more civil, I think, generally speaking. And what we found is that behavior in alt space, and I think this is true of any social interaction in VR, tends to be more like being with someone. You know, if I've got a headset on and I see your micro movements of your head and I know that you're a human behind there and I feel that I'm looking you in the eyes it's really hard for me to be you know a griefer or whatever to you. Emoji are a little different obviously because the barrier to that is a little bit easier. It's a little easier for me to just click a button that has an emoji that comes up. And so it's something that we're definitely going to look at and see, you know, is this taking the conversation dynamic in a negative way? So far, so good, but it's something that from the start we've been monitoring kind of the interactions, you know, not monitoring programmatically, but, you know, in there and hanging out and talking to people just to see where are the areas where we have to make sure that it needs to be comfortable, you know, it needs to be civil, it needs to be a place where people feel safe. And, you know, if it ever goes in a direction that's not that, we have to change what we're doing.
[00:14:15.418] Kent Bye: And have there been any experiences in Old Space that you've seen or heard about that you kind of share in terms of like this being a really surprising or perfect example of the potential of what you can do in social VR?
[00:14:27.143] Eric Romo: Yeah, I mean, I think very early on, I don't think any of us suspected how much human expression would come through from just the head tracking. It was something that, you know, back in the day when we only had DK1s, you know, we're dating ourselves about how long we've been doing this, right? You know, you only had rotational head tracking. And then the simple addition of positional, and when we went from some kind of, you know, when people do games, they tend to do, you know, idle animations and things where your character is animating, and we said, okay, we're not gonna do any of that, let's just drive the movement just on the head. The day that that went in there, and the first day that we realized that your head's just moving just a little bit, right, every time that we're talking to each other. that adds such a personal touch, it kind of blew us away. And then when we saw, you know, our French users doing the two-cheek kiss for the first time in alt space, and then when somebody came over and did that to me and I realized that that feels like somebody's trying to kiss me on the cheek, that just really, really opened our eyes. You know, and it's been continued experiences like that where the closeness, how much it really does feel as if I'm there with a person, has always exceeded my expectations of how I expected to feel. You know, another one is personal space. It's another obvious one. So, you know, feeling like you're close to somebody in a good way or a negative way has that same feeling like as if I were too close to you right now. Depending on a relationship, that might be a good thing or a bad thing, but it has that same, exactly same emotional response that it has when you're in in real life together. So I think that underlying core emotional experience is something that I've always been positively surprised by. And so now it's really about how do we find things that are encouraged by that emotional connection. You know, use cases and things for people to do that really use that emotional connection and draw it out to its maximum effect.
[00:16:04.487] Kent Bye: And being the social space, it's obviously going to be one of the biggest, in my opinion, applications of VR is just the ability to have socially present with another person, that sense of telepresence. And being that Facebook bought Oculus, obviously there's going to be a big social play there with Facebook. And yet there's a lot of skepticism or concern about Facebook's term of service, their privacy history. What does privacy even mean in virtual reality when everything has to be put over the internet? I can imagine a time where it actually might be interesting or helpful to record things and go back and look at them. But yet, there's going to be that other side of what if you want to not do that and be private. So how has Altspace been approaching your terms of service and how are you going to deal with privacy?
[00:16:49.115] Eric Romo: Yeah, I mean, I guess the way we tend to think about it, and we need to get probably a little bit more structured about this than we have been so far. But we tend to think about it like real life. So in real life, when I'm out on the street, and we're having a conversation, you know, there's an expectation that that's a public place. And that means that number one, the privacy that I have is diminished as compared to what it would be in my house, right? People can take pictures of you and they can overhear your conversation, but also the expectation of how you act is different than it would be in my house, right? So there's an expectation that most places I'm wearing clothes, but you know that I'm being civil and that I'm not violating anybody's rights and that sort of thing. I think there's an expectation of how people act in public and we think that in public virtual reality spaces that those types of rules should apply as well. Now where this gets really complicated is whose rules are we talking about? Are we talking about, you know, State of California's rules? Are we talking about the, you know, Paris's rules? Are we talking about the rules in Russia? And so I think it will probably in the near term just practically fall upon the company who is, you know, hosting that virtual public space to define those rules. I think it would be challenging to fall back on you know, any one jurisdiction or something because someone will always have a problem with whichever one you pick. At the same time, though, we do think that there's a real need for privacy in virtual reality for there to be places where I can conduct myself as I would and feel as I would when I'm in my house. You know, there's a certain expectation that I'm going to be able to have a conversation that's not recorded or pictures aren't going to be taken of me, an expectation that I'm not going to be overheard by some random stranger. And we think that this is important because, you know, people, again, it comes back to that emotional connection that people can have. and I think people are going to want to feel like they can be themselves. I think it's not a stretch to say that basically everybody acts differently when the blinds are drawn and their doors are closed than when they're walking down the street. There's something that they do differently, some language that they use differently, some way they conduct themselves, their posture is different, whatever it is. And it's because you just feel more relaxed and secure and safe at home. And so we want to find the right way to have that. You know, that's the pragmatic view of this. I think where the rubber sort of hits the road is on issues around, okay, data and tracking and how much of what you did did I record? And this is where I think, for me, I think that's where stuff gets a little bit scary. you know, using the data of how you act in virtual reality to sell you things and promote different ads to you and it's just going to be nasty in VR. And so I think you'll see us tread extraordinarily lightly on things like that. You know, there's one side of the coin is, hey, I want to figure out what you did last week, Kent, so I can make my experience even better for you and I can, you know, make sure that you see the things that I think you're going to really enjoy and that sort of thing. But the other side of that coin is, Now I want to sell you ads and put tracking data in your face. And I think that that is the way that most of the American consumer internet runs, which is sort of terrifies me a little bit. And so we're going to have to find the right way to balance those things. And I don't know that we have the best, we're the best stewards of that yet, but it's definitely something we're concerned about.
[00:19:43.175] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:19:49.706] Eric Romo: You know, I think I was thinking about the other day, one of the things that got me working on this, and my last job, I was traveling a lot. And I once took a flight to Santiago, Chile for a 90-minute meeting. And so that is the second longest flight you can take from the continent of the U.S., is from Atlanta to Santiago. And I was literally 24 hours door-to-door each way of travel, so 48 hours of travel for a 90-minute meeting. And so I think there are a lot of people in a lot of different walks of life, on the consumer side, on the business side, that incur a lot of pain to be there with someone else. And I think if you can start to talk about diminishing that pain of, hey, my loved ones are across the country, you know, my family's 2,500 miles away all the time. If I can go hang out with my dad and feel like I'm actually there together with him, that's just an amazing emotional experience. And so I think that connectedness is really what we see as the upside of VR.
[00:20:42.457] Kent Bye: Great, well, thank you.
[00:20:43.479] Eric Romo: Thanks, Ken.
[00:20:44.642] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
